I didn’t tell Aaron about the email. He worried, and I could see when I came home that he already had something on his mind. When you were with someone much younger than you, money was almost unavoidable as an issue. Aaron had been working in a variety of temp jobs since quitting the bar – he wanted to spend his evenings with me, he said, and especially when the baby came he didn’t want to be out hauling barrels until 2 a.m. I knew he hated the new job he’d found in an insurance office, the petty squabbles over who’d used whose margarine, the monotony of every day being the same, having to be indoors all the time. He did it for me. He was studying bookkeeping on the side, with a view to becoming an accountant, something I couldn’t feel excited about and I didn’t think he could either.
And me, in my turn, I worried about how little money he made in the entry-level admin job, the cost of his season ticket and suits and lunches. I’d be supporting three of us soon. That gave me another stab of anxiety over the stupid email – what if I lost my job? Who would send such a thing? But I squished it firmly down, carrying on chopping the pak choi for dinner, with Minou my Persian cross twining about my legs, hoping for titbits. Aaron knew nothing about cooking when I met him, not even how to peel a potato. In the foster homes where he grew up, they taught them to make things in microwaves and with kettles. Often, that was all they had access to in the tiny bedsits and studios the kids were kicked out to at seventeen.
‘What’s up?’ I said.
He set down his man satchel, which I’d bought him for Christmas. It had the unfortunate effect of making him look like a schoolboy. ‘Oh, nothing.’ I’d learned with him that you had to ask several times to find out what he was thinking. In the homes, you didn’t last long if you were vulnerable.
‘Nothing?’
He sighed. ‘I heard back from the adoption people today.’
‘Oh?’ I slid the leaves into the wok. Stir-fry felt too easy, too lazy – I could just imagine what my mother would say – but Aaron was bowled over the first time I knocked one up. So tasty! Amazing! It broke my heart a little, the things that impressed him. Going to the theatre. Flying. Vegetables.
Aaron had been searching for his birth mother for the past year or so. It was something he’d always wanted to do but didn’t know where to start or how to even begin to feel about it. I think it was meeting me that gave him the push, the capacity to kick it off. I had researched it for him, found the right forms. We didn’t even know his mother’s name, which made it harder, or what Aaron had been called at birth. I think he felt it more urgently now our baby was coming, the need to search. ‘They’re still looking. Can’t find anything so far, maybe the records went missing or something.’
‘Oh. That’s a bit rubbish.’ Although I had helped him, I didn’t know how I felt about this whole thing. Did I really want some mother-in-law coming into my life, upending everything? My own mother was enough to handle. Aaron had turned out amazing considering his upbringing, but there were dark depths I knew nothing about, moods that sprang up out of nowhere. I needed him as stable as possible now, because who knew what would happen to me when I gave birth?
My mother’s voice told me I should have been leaning on him, now that I was so heavily pregnant, that if I didn’t fully trust him we shouldn’t be having this baby together. Since the support group, it had been joined by Nina’s voice telling me to take care of Aaron, that it was a struggle for age-gap relationships. I ignored both as best I could.
Aaron hunched by the sink, and he looked even younger when he did that, a sulky angsty teenager, so I put my hand to his back and gently straightened him out. Minou, who wasn’t his biggest fan – he had usurped her – slunk away. ‘They’ll find her, love. It just takes time. Anyway, it gives you a bit of space to adjust to it.’
His gaze snapped up, hard and blue. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Just that it might be tough, seeing her again.’
‘Why?’
‘Because . . . well, she gave you away.’
He toyed with an apple from the fruit bowl, rolling it along the counter. I wanted to ask him to stop but I struggled every day not to turn into my mother. ‘She won’t have had a choice. They’ll have made her.’ Aaron had convinced himself of this fact, that his mother had desperately tried to hold on to him. It was true he had lived at home with her until he was two, unusually old. It had made it harder for him to be adopted, which meant a life ping-ponging between children’s homes and foster care. I worried that, when she did resurface, his mum would be hard-faced, tattooed, a drunk, a drug addict, not the sweet helpless girl of his imagination.
I didn’t want to think about why my boyfriend, abandoned by his mother, was with me, so much older than him. He put the apple back, visibly pulled himself out of the mood. He came and put his arms around me from behind, and I sank into his warmth and strength. ‘Sorry, babe. How was your day?’
I should tell him about the weird email, I knew. But something stopped me – some long-ago shame, memories I didn’t want to dredge up. Fear of disturbing the calm we’d found, waiting for our baby to arrive. Nina’s unasked-for advice. ‘Oh, it was OK. Bit of a slog, you know. Sharon getting on my nerves.’
‘You’ll be out of it soon.’ He massaged my neck as I finished cooking, and I wondered why the words sent a shiver down from where his hands were. That was what I was afraid of, being out of it. What would happen to my career if I stepped aside for a year, on reduced pay? And if I wasn’t working, who was going to hold this tiny family together? Could I rely on Aaron to keep things running?
‘Go and sit down,’ I said, forcing a smile. ‘It’s almost ready.’ As he moved out of the kitchen, I turned my gaze to the apple he’d been playing with. As I’d thought, it was bruised now. Spoiled.
Alison
Monica Dunwood, the owner of the house where the death had taken place, was very, very nervous. Alison had learned over the years that this wasn’t a sign of guilt, not necessarily. She’d interviewed men about a missing wife or girlfriend who it turned out was lying murdered upstairs, and they hadn’t turned a hair. She’d seen parents who knew very well that their child was dead do begging press conferences urging their ‘abductor’ to bring them back. Equally, some people were so distressed by the very idea of the police that they went totally to pieces, babbling about every transgression from going two miles over the speed limit to once smoking a spliff in college.
‘Mrs Dunwood . . .’ The woman was at the living-room window, peering out on to the street.
‘Sorry. Sorry. Your car, I just – is it marked? You know, the neighbours, I wouldn’t want them to ask questions.’
‘You had a violent death on your property, Mrs Dunwood, I think that ship has sailed,’ said Alison crisply.
Diana Mendes, Alison’s new partner, frowned. ‘The car isn’t marked, ma’am. Why don’t you sit down? Would you like a cup of tea, perhaps?’ So she was good cop in this situation, forcing Alison into bad cop, and that suited her just fine in her current mood. During the hours that had passed since she’d eyed up that pregnancy-testing stick, her breasts had begun to ache, a sure sign her period was coming, like a squall of bad weather. She was telling herself it could also be a pregnancy sign, but didn’t even believe her own lies.