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

to get better. Just as when she’d chosen to distance herself from her brother, who she’d spent most of her life so close to, she did it to overcome the despair she felt after every time she’d visit him and his perfect family. And when she moved to the sea, away from her dissolute friends and controlling mother, it was because starting a new simple life was the only way to cure her tempestuous mental health. And having a baby, now she thinks of it, there was a motivation for that too. She needed to remove herself from the centre of her universe, start living for something real, something tangible, a deep love, that was the only way she would ever find true happiness. But she’d never been to a doctor, she hadn’t spent months having sessions with a therapist to get to these discoveries about herself, to become empowered to enact these various radical curative life changes, no, Raf suggested she needed to do all of it. And none of it was true. Just as the threat of Craig was planted in Amanda’s head as a tool to coerce her away from everything that was there to protect her, to blind her to the fact that the only predator in her midst was the man she felt she loved, Raf had made Erin believe everyone she surrounded herself with was damaging her, and when he’d dealt with all of those competitors but she still wasn’t entirely his, he had to make her believe that she was losing her mind. All of it to disguise the fact that the only person destroying Erin’s life was her fiancé.

There’s an acrid taste in the back of her mouth and she wants to spit. She notices a mum in her forties, sitting next to a seven-year-old girl reading a book, staring at her. Erin sits down and looks out the window again. She can tell the woman’s a former follower of her Instagram. She’s texting someone. Probably one of her mates to tell them that BRAUNEoverBRAINS is sat on a train opposite her, that she looks pale, drawn and frankly terrified, and that she’s not with her beautiful baby boy. ‘As usual’ she’ll probably add.

Erin turns her attention back to the notebook and flicks through the next entries. It’s clear that marvellous ‘Donny’ never does get in touch, but, oddly, it seems Amanda is defiant. She creates various reasons why he hasn’t been in touch, she’s adamant that he will and that she just has to wait. But then the tone changes. The entries become shorter and more factual. Her assertions of confidence in the love of her life become emptier somehow. And then the entries stop.

Erin leans back in her seat, lets the cover of the book fold over onto her finger that remains on the page. She’s still half an hour from London. The train thuds into a tunnel. She bites at the side of her thumb even though the cuticle’s already bleeding. The hotel, she thinks to herself as she stares at the blocks of black flying past the window, the hotel gives her hope. He wouldn’t have booked them a hotel unless they were going early tomorrow, so as long as she can get there, she can stop it. Stop what though? What is it they’re doing? Erin’s assuming they’re planning to try and escape together with Bobby but can that really be what’s happening? It seems insane that he could be leaving her, that he could be taking their baby away, but he’s done it before, left a woman he claimed to love without a word. And in the last few hours, it feels like everything he’s ever told her about himself, every conversation they’ve ever had, has been total fiction, so why wouldn’t this be happening?

The train roars out of the tunnel. She can be at the hotel in just over an hour. She feels the judgey mum glancing at her again so Erin gives her a mania-tinged smile that makes it unambiguous that she doesn’t appreciate being stared at and that she’s in a mood you could describe as unhinged. The mum pockets her phone and puts a protective arm around her daughter.

Erin holds her shaking hands together, squeezing the fleshy part between her thumb and forefinger, the pain seeming to calm her momentarily. She glances at the little girl opposite, enwrapped in her book. A dull ache comes into her breasts. She hasn’t fed Bobby from them for weeks now and her milk is almost completely gone, but the thought of her little boy feels like it’s getting it going again. She doesn’t know what she’s going to do when she gets there. She has no idea what they’re going to do, what they’re going to say when she finds them in a hotel at Heathrow airport, but she is a mother. It’s taken her a long time to come round to it, to understand what it means to be a mother, but that’s what she is, and she needs to get her son back.

62

She stares at the pale wood of the hotel-room door. The number ‘332’ in brushed brass in the centre of it. The low light of the hallway, the carpet like blue static, identical door upon identical door. As she holds her hand up to knock, she feels like she’s in a horror film. What they’ve done isn’t explicable, it’s extreme. It’s violent in its extremity, it’s criminal. What does Erin think her intervention is going to achieve? The journal suggests that Raf pushed an old woman down the stairs when she threatened him. He’s not just going to hand Bobby over and suggest they all head home for a cup of tea and a slice of Battenberg.

Just as her hand goes to knock, the door opens. Amanda grabs her into the room and closes the door behind her.

‘Turn