All the Little Things by Sarah Lawton (the best books to read txt) 📕

silently from me and went slowly up after them, leaving me to shut the door as quietly as I could manage.

After I left them I had no idea what to do with myself, so I walked over to the pub in the hope that Steve would be in the bar. Thankfully he was. He took one look at my face and jumped up from behind his laptop and pulled me into a hug.

‘Darling, what’s happened? You look awful.’

‘I saw Maureen at the supermarket. She just fell apart in front of me. I had to bring her home in her Rover – I don’t even know if that was legal! I was probably driving it illegally, the police will have to arrest me!’ I tried to laugh, but it burnt on the way out into a sorry squeak.

‘I’m assuming you’ve left your car at the supermarket, then?’ he asked, voice muffled by my hair as he gently rocked us from side to side. I nodded onto his warm shoulder, which was more than a little dampened by my onslaught.

‘Come on then, trouble, let’s go and get you your car back.’

‘And some food?’

‘Don’t push it, darling, you know I get all mine delivered. I can’t stand the supermarket, everyone shoving around like sheep, desperate for the last packet of Hobnobs. It’s like the apocalypse in there. Deranged.’

Steve always made me feel better and he did lift my spirits temporarily as he drove me back to the shop and, despite his protestations, came in with me while I bought some bits, talking to nearly everyone who walked past us. Steve was a village ‘lifer’ as he put it, and as the owner of the only pub, he probably knew every single person who lived in a ten-mile radius. As well as my own shopping I bought some extra milk, tea and bread – basics I thought the Beaumonts might have run out of, plus some things they could cobble an easy meal out of.

Steve noticed, sharp-eyed as ever. ‘You’re a sweetheart, you really are,’ he said, arm around my shoulders. ‘How is Vivian getting on? Is she coping? I hope this all isn’t going to set you back.’

‘What do you mean, set me back? Set me back where?’ I had never told Steve about what had happened in London.

‘Sorry, love, I don’t mean anything by it. But you were always so wound up over Viv before. You wouldn’t let her out of your sight.’ He looked embarrassed, but I knew perfectly well what he was getting at, and he had a point.

He thought I was paranoid about her safety, I was worried about mine too: I had felt a threat hanging over us for days now, but I didn’t know what it was, only that I was out of sorts and nervous.

‘I think she’s going to be okay,’ I offered, wondering again if that was actually a good thing. ‘I’m worried for Tilly, though. I can hardly bear to think about what she must be feeling.’

Steve just gave me a wan smile, and we went to the tills.

After Steve left me in the shop car park with another one of his firm hugs, I put the shopping in my boot and I drove back to the chippy. I rang the doorbell. Tilly answered, her eyes raw and red, and I silently gave her the shopping bags. She took them with another small twist of her mouth and shut the door. By the time I got home I was crying again myself. I knew what that pain felt like. I knew it would never leave them, only hide itself in small spaces of their hearts like a cancer.

I didn’t sleep that night.

When Vivian was in the hospital I had asked my doctor to prescribe me sleeping tablets because I hadn’t been able to close my eyes without seeing horrific images. I’d wandered around my empty house, devoid of my mother and Vivian, alone with my thoughts and ever increasing paranoia and fear. The pills had given me a temporary respite from it, wiping out the day and smothering me with a chemical blanket. They didn’t stop the exhaustion, but at least the intrusive, dark, night-time thoughts, the guilt and the fear, had been banished.

I hadn’t needed them for years. I’d thrown away the last few I’d had in a fit of optimism the year before. I wished now that I’d kept them. I lay in my safe bed, in my safe room, my safe home, but I wasn’t safe from myself. I wasn’t safe from the scratching, hissing torments that crawled through the gaps in my subconscious, twisting every positive thought I’d ever had. I had let Vivian get in that car. I had known that car was dangerous. Why had I never said anything about it? What if she had been in the accident? I had failed, again, as a mother. I couldn’t protect her. I knew I was feeling sorry for myself, hijacking another family’s sorrow, making it all about me. I was one of those awful, weak people who can only cope with grief by causing themselves more pain.

I drifted off as light began to creep into my room, and what little sleep I had was full of screaming brakes, wet roads, neon lights and the sound of a child, crying on a staircase.

London

The house was silent.

‘Hello?’ called Rachel, as she pushed open the door, tugging her key out of the lock and putting it back in her bag. ‘Mum?’ Everything was still, she could feel that the house was empty. She pulled out her phone, but there was no message. Not that her mum was particularly good at texting; the mobile Rachel had bought her was probably switched off and abandoned somewhere in the house like it usually was. No note in the kitchen.

The skin on the back of her neck prickled as she moved through the downstairs. No sign of Vivian’s school bag. They must have gone somewhere