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

her son will be much more than OK financially is a very, very liberating one. And the very least the boy deserves. Erin tries to dismiss the thought of what she’ll tell him about his father when he grows up. When he’s old enough, she’s decided, she wants to tell him the truth. But how truthful should she be? Should she tell him that she hit his father over the head? Knocked him out? And was it Amanda’s poison that killed him? In the months since, Erin’s often wondered whether the head wound she’d caused was as innocuous as she’d convinced herself it was at the time.

‘Here, look at the state of this,’ Caz says, smartphone in hand. She shows her a picture of Lorna. She’s had a drastic haircut, perhaps trying to emulate some of the trendier mums. It’s Barbie-pink, cut in a long bob, and looks like someone’s dropped a vat of candyfloss on her from a great height. Erin shoves the phone back towards Caz.

‘Stop it,’ she says, tone warning.

‘Come on!’

‘I mean it, we said we’d be nice to her. We said we’d be nice to everyone. And you should come off that thing as well.’ Caz looks at her with an eyebrow so raised it’s almost coming off her head. Erin laughs. ‘OK, fine, not that, do what you like, but we’ve all had shocking haircuts. And that is shocking, but write her a message telling her you love it. For me.’ Caz smirks and begins typing, then shows Erin the complimentary message to which she nods her approval. Erin owes Lorna. She came forward and told the police that she’d been walking the twins up and down Erin’s former road to avoid the wind on the front and she hadn’t seen anyone anywhere near the house around the time they suspected Raf died but that she did see him at one point through the window and told them it looked like he was drinking and in distress. With that testimony and in light of everything that Erin could tell them about what he’d done, the police felt it was a cut-and-dried case of suicide and the coroner didn’t request an inquest. Erin doesn’t know why Lorna lied, and it must have been a lie because Erin and Amanda weren’t just there the once that day. So Lorna must have been lying for her, but when Erin went to see her she simply stuck to the story she’d told the police. ‘That’s just what I saw,’ she’d said. But there was something in her eyes, a glint of complicity. Whatever her motivation, it’s allowed Erin and Bobby to be here in this garden building mud pies, so she couldn’t be more grateful.

It’s an hour later and Erin sits on the chair in Bobby’s new nursery watching her baby sleeping, hand clutched round a monkey puppet that he’s become absolutely obsessed with. Her eyes move to a shelf on the other side of his cot and the two spires of the huge rose quartz Amanda gifted her that first night they met. The stone she’d gone back into the studio to recover from next to her fiancé’s body, his dead body. Right after she’d moved the small dining table into a position that would make it conceivable that he’d hit his head on the corner of it on his trajectory to the floor.

Erin had discovered, in an idle moment on Google images a couple of months ago, that its twin spires mark it out as a soulmate stone, which makes more sense of Amanda giving it to her to put in the house, presumably to remind Raf that his true soulmate was her. Erin thought it right she put it in Bobby’s room, because he’s her soul now, the only one she’ll ever need.

She stands up and presses a button on her old smartphone, which she now uses solely as the monitor for her baby boy. She and Amanda haven’t had any contact since the photo Erin insisted she send her from the arrivals hall at Sydney airport. But at this time every day, Bobby’s nap time, Erin always checks in on the home section of the monitor app and sees that ‘iPhone 5’ is ‘online’. When she first saw that Amanda was logging into the app every day she was shocked, it seemed so creepy that she’d want to watch her baby on a live feed on her abuser’s old phone. Erin thought about getting a different monitor and cutting off Amanda’s contact with them for good. But then she remembered how she was in that hotel room, the expression on that little girl’s face in those paintings. Amanda won’t ever be able to move on from what happened to her. She’ll always be ‘married’ to that man, and Bobby, his son, is the only thing left in the world that can still connect her to him. So Erin did nothing, because Amanda deserves some happiness, whatever form it takes. She also finds it reassuring, because every day before she leaves the nursery to try and return her house to some semblance of order after her now walking bundle of joy has blazed a trail of destruction through it, Erin can go onto the app, click on the icon next to ‘iPhone 5’ and check the geotag still says ‘Sydney, Australia’, just to make sure that Amanda’s still a long way from them, on the other side of the world, as she watches her baby sleep.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To my friends and those close to me, thank you for your love and support. Without your belief, very few words would make it onto the page.

To the imperious Juliet Mushens who I’m ever grateful to have as my agent. At times, writing this book was like a heavyweight bout and having Juliet in my corner coaching me through gave me the best chance of delivering a knock-out.