The Happy Family by Jackie Kabler (electric book reader txt) 📕

The food smells amazing. Big bowls of green curry, pad thai, and spicy papaya salad are all laid out, waiting to be served, but suddenly I’ve lost my appetite.

‘I’m so sorry about that,’ I say, and they both tell me to forget it, that we’re still going to have a lovely evening, but the atmosphere has changed and we all know it. Finley comes back downstairs and tells us that his sister will follow shortly. ‘She’s just washing the tears off her face,’ he says to Mum, and glowers at me.

When she eventually reappears she’s still sniffing loudly and refusing to look at me, picking at her food and giving brief, sullen answers when Mum and Liv try valiantly to draw her into the conversation. Then, when I finally send the children to bed, there’s another row when Eloise refuses point-blank to sleep in my room, insisting on squeezing in with Finley instead. She won’t kiss me goodnight either. As a result, and just to make things even worse, I come back downstairs and pour another large glass of wine – we’ve moved on from the champagne to Chardonnay – and then another, and another. At one point I suddenly decide it would be an excellent idea to tell my mother and sister about the face I saw outside the patio window on Monday night, complete with a full re-enactment which involves me running outside and squashing my face against the glass, then treading soil all over the kitchen floor when I come back in. They both laugh uneasily, clearly unsure whether I’m serious or just trying to be entertaining, and by then I’ve had so much wine I just laugh too, telling them it was probably just a dream. They look confused and so I change the subject, and thankfully they let it go and we start chatting again. I can tell they’re both making a big effort to make everything feel normal, to recapture the happiness and excitement we all felt at the beginning of the evening, but more than once I catch them exchanging glances, and by the time we call it a night I’m drunk and miserable.

I tell my mother and sister to go up while I try, ineffectually, to make the kitchen look less like a bomb’s hit it, then give up. I’m stumbling into my bedroom, feeling decidedly dizzy and a little bit sick, when Mum, passing my door on her way back from the bathroom, slips an arm around my waist.

‘Come on, love, let’s get you into bed,’ she whispers.

‘I’m so sorry, Mum,’ I slur, as she half drags, half carries me. She squeezes my waist and tells me to stop apologising.

‘It really doesn’t matter, and don’t you worry about Liv either; she’s fine,’ she says, as she lowers me onto the duvet. ‘But I’ve been thinking … Might it have been Robin who threw away that letter from the school? I mean, I didn’t touch it, and if Eloise left it where she said she did on Tuesday evening it should have still been there on Wednesday, when Robin came round to see you, and on Thursday when she came back to work. It just seems to have vanished, which is a bit odd. I’m not saying Robin did it on purpose; I’m not suggesting anything sinister, but, you know …’

She kisses my forehead and slips from the room, telling me to drink lots of water before I go to sleep and to have a lie-in tomorrow if I feel like it because she and Liv will sort the kids out. I lie back on my pillow feeling even more nauseous now, wondering if I even have the energy to get undressed and trying to focus my fuddled brain on what she’s just suggested.

Robin wouldn’t have thrown away a letter that was clearly from the school, would she? Even if she was mad at me, which she was? She wouldn’t …

I’m feeling too ill and tired to think about it anymore right now. The room is swirling around me. It’s not as if I’m going to confront Robin about it anyway, I think, as I roll off the bed. I clamber unsteadily to my feet, pull my trousers and blouse off, and leave them on the floor where they fall, finally wriggling into my pyjamas. Been there, done that, not risking it again.

My stomach lurches and I know I’m going to throw up. I make it to the bathroom just in time, crashing painfully to my knees beside the toilet. I retch into the bowl over and over again until my stomach is empty. When I finish, I crouch there on the floor for a long time, tears flowing silently down my cheeks.

How can an evening that started so well have turned into such a bloody disaster? And what will Liv think of me now? Why am I messing everything up so badly? My brain doesn’t seem to be working properly, I’m losing my friends, and even the kids and Jacob think I’m a mess. I am a mess, I am, and I don’t understand why …

Finally, I crawl into bed and dream of a cold, empty house, the sound of a little girl crying echoing around the lonely rooms. And at the window, a small white face stares in at me with eyes so dark and deep I feel like I’m drowning.

Chapter 23

I wake just after 4am, my head pounding, my lips cracked and dry, and my pyjamas damp.

Did I hear a noise out on the landing? Is someone up?

I groan and sit up slowly, pushing the duvet aside. I can feel sweat running down my back, plastering my hair to my scalp and stinging my eyes. The room feels like a furnace, so hot it’s hard to breathe, and I whimper and struggle to my feet, staggering to the window to fling it open, breathing in the cool night