2/52

It was dark when Sonia McNabola pulled into the cul-de-sac. Her tears had long dried, stiff, stuck to her skin. She mounted the curb, pulled up the hand brake and sat, engine idling. Hands in her lap, she cursed. Her fingers shook against her thighs and it irritated her and made her breathe a bit faster. Why wouldn’t the shaking stop? She wasn’t shaking straight after she’d done it. She was calm. The shaking had come after, during the drive home, hands gripped to the wheel, no noise quite calming her. The radio seemed to shout at her, the sound of the tires on the tar mac grinding against her eardrums. Noise, loud, getting louder with each yard that passed.

She turned off the car’s interior light and closed her eyes, letting the darkness shroud her. She breathed slowly through her nose and counted to ten, then counted to ten again. It was finished. Done. Time to move on.

There was a knock at the window. Sonia opened her eyes and turned to her right, smiling. Jason.

‘Are you coming in?’ he asked, the glass stealing his voice of its clarity, ‘I watched you pull up like twenty minutes ago.’ She wound the window down an inch. ‘What have you been doing?’

‘Nothing, just checking emails. I’m coming now.’

‘OK,’ he said, turning, ‘it’s just I’ve had dinner on the table for a bit. It’s probably going cold. When you texted me saying you were en route, I got it ready. Well, not straight away – I left it for five as you left work later than usual. I expect you ran into a bit of traffic, whatever. I timed it quite well, actually –’

‘Jason –’

‘Yeah, all things considered. I heard you pull up just as I set the serving spoons down. Couldn’t have been better. But then I looked out of the window and you were just – just sat there.’

‘I’m sorry, Jason, I can warm it all through for us.’

‘It’s not the warming through that’s the problem. Really. It’s that you said you were on the way home. You said you were on the way home because I asked you to – I asked you to because I wanted to time dinner properly. Which I did. I did time dinner properly.’

‘You did, Jason, thank you.’

‘And you knew that’s why I needed to know when you were en route. So it’s confusing me – annoying me, actually – that you would sit out on the driveway for twenty minutes, knowing full well that dinner would be ready.’

‘I – I’m sorry, Jason. It didn’t cross my mind. I’m coming, now. I’ll fix whatever needs to be fixed, I’ll warm it through, it’ll be fine.’

‘You’re sorry?’

‘I said I’m sorry, yes.’

‘Right, you’re sorry. That’s alright, then.’