Page 90 of Safe Hands

“Good.”

That was all. Lauren turned back to the hob and stirred the rice, and the kitchen filled with steam and the smell of plain chicken.

“There’s loads,” Lauren said a minute later, peering into the pan. “Like, a lot. I may have overestimated how much rice a dog eats.”

“You’ve made enough for a platoon.”

“So stay for dinner. I’ll do us some with actual seasoning. I’ve got peppers, and soy sauce, and an onion he’s not allowed to look at.”

Carly should have said no. She’d told Berkeley in and out. She had emails, care-home links from Samantha, and a sister who’d want the dog back by nine. She opened her mouth to say so.

“Okay,” she said instead.

They ate at the little pine table with the dog between them. Berkeley had a scoop of his old kibble with chicken and rice on top, finished it in about forty seconds, and lay down by Lauren’s chair with a groan of such contentment that they both laughed. The stir-fry was good. Carly said so, and Lauren went pink and said it was the only thing she could cook. Paige had taught her in self-defence after the third time she set off the smoke alarm making toast.

Afterwards, Lauren portioned the rest of Berkeley’s chicken into old takeaway tubs and wrote the date on each lid in marker. Carly washed up, and Lauren didn’t fight her for the sink. It was all very ordinary. Carly couldn’t remember the last time she’d had an evening like it.

When they went through to the living room, Berkeley followed them.

He checked the room like he’d checked the kitchen. Then he stopped in the doorway and looked back down the hall at the front door, ears swivelling. The room. The door. The room. He didn’t lie down.

“He keeps doing that,” Lauren said, frowning. “Checking the door.”

“He does it everywhere. At Samantha’s he paces until he’s exhausted.”

Lauren watched him. Then she got up, went to the living room door, and propped it wide open with a doorstop shaped like a hedgehog. She moved the armchair a foot to the left. From the rug by the sofa, there was now a clear line straight down the hall to the front door.

Berkeley looked at the gap. Then he walked to the rug, turned round twice and folded himself onto it with a long sigh, chin on his paws, eyes on the door, as though he’d lived there all his life.

Carly stared at him.

“How did you know to do that?”

“I didn’t.” Lauren sat down on the floor beside him, her back against the sofa. “He just looked like someone waiting for someone. I figured if I was waiting, I’d want to see the door.”

Her dad had always left the doors open. Every door in that house, wedged with a book or a shoe or a folded tea towel, so Berkeley could see down the hall from wherever he lay. Samantha shut every door in hers to keep the heat in. Carly had never thought about it until now.

She sat down on Berkeley’s other side, her back against the sofa, because standing suddenly felt like too much work.

Neither of them said anything for a while. One lamp in the corner. The radiator ticking. Berkeley’s breathing slowing until he was a dog who’d gone off duty. Lauren’s hand rested in the fur of his shoulder. Carly’s rested on his back, a few inches away.

It was the quietest she’d been in months, and not the empty quiet of her flat at eleven at night. She hadn’t known she was missing it.

“Thank you,” she said. “For tonight.”

“I didn’t do anything. I boiled a chicken.”

“You did a lot of things.”

Lauren turned her head. No grin, just tired at the end of a long day. Their faces were closer than Carly had realised, close enough to see the fringe growing out of the new cut, and the exact moment Lauren’s eyes dropped to her mouth.

Neither of them moved. Then both of them did, a fraction, the sofa cushion giving behind their shoulders, the space between them narrowing to almost nothing. Carly could feel Lauren’s breath.

Mate.

It arrived in Lauren’s voice, flat and friendly, the way it had sounded in the bar. Cheers, mate. And underneath it, older and colder: a dressing room, a bench, and a girl in the corner who’d once thought someone was looking at her like this, and had been wrong.

Carly pulled back. Not far. Just enough to put air between them.