Someone Else's Shoes(112)

* * *



? ? ?

Sam leaves Andrea’s, where she had ended up sleeping, and walks the short distance home through the quiet morning streets. Her head is still buzzing with the conversations she and Andrea had the previous evening, the shocked acknowledgment of what she had been harboring under her feet. It made them laugh out loud—the randomness of it—“Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes”!—but every time Sam thinks about the kind of man Nisha had been married to it makes her think of Phil. His kindness. His tenderness toward her. The insane idea that Phil would ever care so little for her that he’d have made her do something like that. She had seen this understanding dawn on Nisha’s face while everyone else had been excited about her haul—and what Sam had seen, unnoticed by anyone else, had been sad, and ugly, the final insult on an already steaming pile.

After they left, she and Andrea had sat in Andrea’s little front room until the small hours, high on adrenaline and conversation, and she had finally told Andrea about Phil leaving. Andrea had hugged her and said he would be back, of course he would. Sam checks her phone again, wondering whether to text him, but it’s early in the morning and she has no idea what to say. Or how honest to be. She wants things to be back to the way they were, when they had felt like a team. When it had felt like she was married to her best friend, before his dad got sick and he lost his job and she developed a crush on the one person who was listening to her. Was that even a reasonable thing to ask? Was it possible to resurrect a marriage when so much damage had been done?

Of course it is, Andrea had said firmly, but she was twice divorced and four glasses of wine in, and Andrea loves her enough to tell her everything will be okay because she so badly wants everything to be okay for her.

Sam turns into her street, noting how different it feels knowing she is walking home to an empty house. She wonders, dully, if this is how it will be from now on. No Phil. Cat increasingly absent until she, too, finally flies the nest completely. Even Kevin will not last for long. He is thirteen, positively geriatric in dog years. It will be just her, alone in that little house, watching the soaps and circling crappy jobs in the classified section of the local paper, being summoned twice a week to clean up for her increasingly crotchety parents.

Stop it, she tells herself firmly. She stands still and breathes—in for one, hold for four, out for seven. Was it out for seven? Or should she be holding for seven? She hasn’t done it for so long she can’t remember. She forces herself to think about her unlikely group of new friends, the warmth of Jasmine, the way even Nisha had held her like she might be someone she actually cared about. She had helped Nisha get the shoes back. She had brought an entire hotel to a shuddering halt, and changed someone’s life as a result. She was capable of something, even if it was just chaos.

She pauses in front of her house, looking up before she opens the gate, some part of her still hoping that a light might flicker on upstairs, that Phil might have decided to come home. And then she sees it: the faint glow in the upstairs landing. They never leave that light on when they go out. She walks up the pathway, suddenly full of anticipation, wrestles open the front door—and then stands blinking in disbelief at the shimmering fragments of glass, the broken chair and her smashed television on the living-room floor.





thirty-four


Cat?” Sam is shivering in the garden. She had made her way through to the kitchen, her feet crunching on the mounds of upturned cereal and legumes, the smashed crockery, and had turned and walked rapidly back outside, suddenly fearful that the intruder might still be in there. She had waited outside for ten minutes now, nothing stirring in the house, but she didn’t feel safe in there.

“Mum?” Cat’s voice is bleary, fogged with sleep.

Sam’s hand goes to her mouth. “Oh, thank God.”

“Why are you calling at . . . half past nine in the morning?”

“We’ve been burgled, love. I just—I just didn’t want you to come back here and find it.” She doesn’t tell her the truth: that she had suddenly been overwhelmed with fear that Cat might have been here after all, that this had been something so much worse than a burglary.

“What?”

“I know. It’s a—a bit of a mess. Don’t worry. We’ll sort it out. Have you got Kevin?”

“Yep. Ugh. He’s just farted. Kevin.”

She lets out another breath. She can hear Cat struggling to sit up.

“What did they take? Shall I come back?”

“I don’t know. I’ve called the police. But no. Stay there for now. I don’t—I don’t want you to see it like this.”

“Have you called Dad?”

Sam stares at the front door, still slightly open. “I—I don’t know if he’d want me to call. It’s fine. I’ll sort it out.”

“Mum—”

“I’ve got to go, sweetheart. I’ll speak to you later. Don’t come until I call, okay?”



* * *



? ? ?

In the end she sits in the camper-van. It feels less awful than being in the house. She climbs into the passenger seat and stares through the windscreen, unsure what to do next. The police said they would send round an officer—but added that they were very busy and she would probably be wise to get a locksmith in and secure the property. There was no mention of dusting for fingerprints, or even any kind of investigation. “There’s been a spate of them lately in your postcode,” the operator says, in resigned tones.