Page 91 of Safe Hands

Lauren blinked. Whatever it was came and went too fast to read, and then it was tidied away and she was looking at Berkeley.

Carly needed to say something, anything, to make this ordinary again before it became a thing they’d both have to step around for weeks.

“I’ve enjoyed hanging out,” she said. “I’m glad we’re friends too. For the record.”

She’d meant it as an out, the category Lauren had been offering her all afternoon. It’s fine. I won’t make this awkward. It came out sounding like a door being shut, politely, from the inside.

Carly looked at her watch, because it was something to look at. “It’s nearly nine. Samantha will be…”

“Of course. Yeah.” Lauren was already on her feet. “I’ll get his chicken. You’ll want the tubs.”

Berkeley lifted his head when Carly stood. He looked at her, then at the open door, then at Lauren in the kitchen doorway with a carrier bag full of takeaway tubs. He didn’t get up.

“Come on,” Carly said.

He got up slowly, like he used to get up from the rug by her dad’s chair when he’d rather have stayed.

At the front door, Lauren handed her the bag and crouched to rub Berkeley’s ears. She said something to him Carly didn’t catch. Berkeley shoved his whole head into her chest, and Lauren laughed.

“Thanks for dinner,” Carly said.

“Any time.” Lauren straightened. A pause. “Drive safe, mate.”

Carly nodded and walked down the path.

She put Berkeley in the back and the tubs in the footwell and sat without starting the engine. Through the front window, she could see the lamp, the corner of the rug, the hedgehog doorstop, the armchair moved a foot to the left.

In the back seat, Berkeley had turned round and was standing with his nose pressed to the glass, looking at the house.

Not at Carly. At the house.

“Don’t,” she told him. “Don’t you dare.”

But the thought was already there. He’d settled. In an hour, after weeks of pacing Samantha’s kitchen, he’d lain down on that rug and stayed down.

If Berkeley could live somewhere like that, her dad could stop pretending he’d ever have him back. And if her dad stopped pretending, then so would everyone else. About the dog. About the house. About all of it.

Carly started the engine before she could follow that thought to the end of the road.

Berkeley stayed at the window, watching the bungalow, until they turned the corner and it was gone.

27

Lauren

Reggie had his head on Lauren’s knee and his eyes closed, and he was making the small, contented grunting noise he only made when someone was scratching the right spot behind his left ear.

“Traitor,” Paige said from the armchair. “He never does that for me.”

“You don’t know where the spot is.”

“I’ve lived with him for years.”

“And yet.” Lauren kept scratching. Reggie grunted again, louder, as if to settle the matter.

Becky was at a joint committee meeting, which Paige described as two hours of men saying the word ‘budget’ at her, and Sam was asleep in his Moses basket by the radiator, one tiny fist flung up like he was hailing a taxi. The living room smelled of baby lotion and lasagne, which Lauren had eaten two helpings of and declared adequately seasoned. A baby monitor sat pointlessly four feet from the baby.

Lauren used to have evenings like this every night in the bungalow without thinking about it. Now she had to drive across town for one.