The Family Friend, C. MacDonald [ereader for android TXT] 📗

hits her hard. He pities her because he thinks she’s gone mad. ‘I’ve been meaning to stage some sort of intervention for months now.’

‘An intervention?’ Erin stands up and walks to the corner of the room.

‘Smartphone addiction is serious. It’s just as bad as gambling, worse lots of people are saying.’

‘Which people?’ Erin turns, bites her lips. The incredulity is switching into indignation.

‘You think I don’t see what’s been happening to you?’ Raf comes towards her but Erin backs further into the corner. ‘I was worried about losing you to everyone else, everyone you were sharing our baby’s life with, but it’s worse than I ever thought. It’s warped your mind.’ Out the window a middle-aged woman looks in on them. ‘I can show you the article I read, it can make you delusional. There’s some anonymous arsehole trying to ruin your Instagram feed and you’re convinced it’s happening in real life, in our real life.’

‘They’re here. They’re in town, following me around. She knows where I am at all times. Of course it’s Amanda. It has to be Amanda.’ Raf’s over by her now. He takes her face in his palms, rubs a finger on her temple, but he’s shaking his head. He grabs her into him and holds her tight to his body. Erin’s eyes dart around the room like a stunned animal.

He doesn’t even slightly believe me, she thinks. She sees her reflection in the glass of the painting, that painting she hates, and, does she see what they’re all seeing? Caz said she looked manic all the time, Raf thinks she’s delusional. Has she been so spooked by the threat to her online persona that she’s finding real-world threats that aren’t really there?

‘I believe you,’ he says.

‘You do?’ She pulls her head away and looks at him quizzically.

‘About the man in the photo.’

‘Oh.’

‘I don’t think your head’s in any sort of place for that kind of thing.’ Erin blinks. ‘I know you’d never do something like that to me. That’s why I love you. I love you and I want us to get through this.’ His hands rest on her shoulders now. ‘We’ll ask Amanda to go. As soon as you’re yourself again, we’ll ask her to go.’

‘Tell her to go now. Maybe she’s not the troll, but she needs to go now. If you want me to get better.’ She hates herself for saying it because she doesn’t feel ill, she doesn’t feel mad. ‘She needs to go now.’

Raf breaks from her and goes over to the door. He picks up some junk mail from the console table and begins scrunching it. He seems edgy, conflicted. He’s about to speak but it just comes out as an ‘ah’ sound. But then he does.

‘I can’t trust you alone with Bobby.’ His words hit her like a backdraught, forcing Erin to grab one of the large books on the shelf behind her for ballast. ‘Every time I close my eyes,’ he says, ‘I see you shouting at him on the verge overlooking Hilda’s Bay. He’s a baby and you’re screaming at him.’ He sits on the side of the armchair, facing the door, away from Erin as if he can’t say what he has to say directly to her face. ‘I – Do you remember the thing we watched on iPlayer a couple of years ago, you wanted to watch it, about postpartum psychosis?’

‘What the fuck, no.’

‘The look on your face in those pictures. You look like you hate him, like you hate our son. And now all this, threatening crystals, curses in jars that don’t exist for Christ’s sake. You want to know something funny?’ He turns round to face her, his shoulders slacken. ‘I’ve not been able to pay the mortgage the last three months. I’ve been missing deadlines because I’m so fucking stressed with all this, all this shit. You’re off spending hundreds of pounds a month on trains, still not earned a penny from any of the “work” you’ve been doing. So, I’d love Amanda to go, if it meant you’d suddenly flip back into being the woman I fell in love with, the woman I was desperate to have a baby with, but I honestly don’t think her going will make a blind bit of difference. This,’ he waves two fingers around his forehead to indicate her mental decline, ‘was on the cards as soon as you got pregnant. I could have stopped it but I was too –’ he punches his palm with his hand – ‘I was too indulgent of your –’ he indicates to the phone – ‘your ridiculous social network crap. I can’t leave him with you. I’m sorry. Not now. It wouldn’t be responsible.’

‘I’ll give up Instagram,’ Erin blurts out, not knowing if she means it.

‘Really?’ Something clears in his expression. She knows that this is what he wants. This is what he’s always wanted. He’s never said it, he’d never set himself up to be called ‘obstructive’, but she knows he’s jealous of the people that follow her online, she knows he wants to guard what they have from the world rather than sharing it. She doesn’t want to give up Instagram but she’s scared. She realises how scared she must be of Amanda, or perhaps it’s of what’s happening to her, because for the last six months, nothing has been more important to her than social media, not even her son. And it hits her how appalling that is. ‘I’ll give it up but Amanda has to go.’

Raf looks down at the floor, then up to stare out at what’s become Amanda’s lodging. Her lair where she’s hiding a curse – Erin’s sure she’s hiding a camera too, although perhaps she’s moved it all somewhere else now she knows Erin’s been in there. She tenses her forearm, she’s lost weight in the last month and she can see the tendons vacillate as she does. Her phone buzzes on the hall table between them. Raf looks