The Family Friend by C. MacDonald (love story novels in english txt) 📕

She’s gone back over their conversation and Amanda’s right, she never expressly said that Raf had asked her to follow them, but she allowed Erin to believe it. As if she was trying to provoke some kind of contretemps between her and Raf. And then all her bullshit about wanting to be on hand, in case Erin needed her, but not telling her? It’s lies and she wants to tell Raf, she wants to tell him that they need to get rid of Amanda, she needs to tell him that she’s worried about her being around them. But then the thought of the two of them, on their hands and knees together in the kitchen clearing up the mess she made, the edginess in his eyes when he looks at Erin now, now that he’s been the victim of abuse, her victim, she feels that, for the first time in their relationship, he might not take her side. But she can’t help herself.

‘She’s been putting honey in Bobby’s bottle. She tell you that?’ She expects him to turn away from the darkness outside in shock but he doesn’t. His shoulders slump and he lets out a sigh.

‘Manuka honey?’

‘She told you?’

‘No, but it’s from New Zealand, everyone in Oz uses it for coughs and colds.’

‘With babies?!’

‘Sometimes, yeh.’

‘She’s trying to turn him against me, she’s trying to turn you against me.’

‘Would you listen to yourself, Erin? Fuck!’ He kicks at one of the cardboard boxes next to the radiator. He leans forward, his arms wide like a bird of prey, and speaks into the window ledge. ‘You threw a two-hundred-degree dish at me.’

‘I know, I thought –’

‘I know what you thought and it’s not –’ he turns to her – ‘rational. What you’re saying isn’t rational. None of it is the behaviour of someone thinking rationally.’

‘No.’

‘I want you to cancel whatever Instagram things you have this week.’

‘I can’t, there’s a meeting about a –’

‘Say you’re ill. Hand, foot and mouth, from Bobby, something contagious. Do whatever it is on the phone if you have to. But you can’t go. I’ve got two projects to finish this week but I’m going to ask Amanda to take Bobby. If you refuse to go to your mum’s and have time away, I want you to rest. Here.’ He produces a blister pack of pills and throws it onto the end of the bed, keeping his distance as if she were some wounded animal. ‘These will help you sleep. Pretty hardcore antihistamines. I think you need to sleep. We all do but, shit, I don’t know, Erin. What you’ve done to me is not OK.’

‘I know.’ Her voice sounds like that of a chastened toddler. She looks down at the pills. She’s never taken any sort of medication to help her sleep before but the thought of a blissful night of oblivion feels quite seductive right now. Raf goes into the bathroom and she can hear him brushing his teeth. She’s so angry at herself. By losing it in such spectacular fashion, she’s lost her voice. She’s lost her right to think or feel anything about Amanda, about what she thinks Amanda’s doing. She pops two of the pills from the blister and, when she sees there’s nothing in the glass by her bed but the cloudy remains of limescale, swallows them dry. She turns onto her side. Turns off the lamps and listens to Raf’s mechanical brushing. What is Amanda doing? she thinks. She can’t be the troll if she doesn’t have a camera. She was following her, but she did watch Erin screaming at her baby, she has observed her struggling, nearly losing it three or four times. Maybe she was right to want to protect Bobby. Tonight Erin’s seen how violent she can be. Perhaps she’s lucky it was six-foot-three-inch Raf she attacked and not her son. The thought makes her shudder.

She hears Raf pausing at the door of the bathroom about to say something but then he sighs and leaves the room. Her phone lights up on the bedside table. A notification. She turns it over and closes her eyes.

43

Erin scrolls through the four pictures of Bobby Caz has sent her from baby sensory class in her cocoon of duvet and doubled-over pillows. Her friend has rung a couple of times in the last two days. She wants to come round and visit but Erin’s put her off. It feels like she knows that Erin’s not really ill, that she’s got a sense, perhaps from Amanda at the groups she’s seen her at, that there’s something much deeper going on than a bout of norovirus.

She’s tried to do what Raf’s asked. She’s cancelled the two events she had this week, though she has one she can’t miss for Phibe tonight, and let Amanda take Bobby while she rests, while she, Raf’s word, ‘resets’. The antihistamines worked that first night but she hasn’t taken the others Raf left for her. Both he and Amanda have been treating her like she’s mentally ill. Before he’s gone off to work for the day and as soon as he gets back, he comes up to her room, hovers by the doorway, and asks if there’s anything she needs, asks how she’s feeling, whether she’s had any thoughts about what happened the other night. His tone is clinical, like he’s trying to be her therapist. But reflecting on it, perhaps he’s always talked to her like that. He’s always approached problems in a clinical manner. She never met his dad but it must be from him. And that’s what she feels like to him now, a problem patient he needs to cure. Maybe that’s always been the appeal for someone like him.

She looks at the big group photo of everyone with their babies staring at the camera. Lorna’s there and Erin zooms in on her. Crow’s feet pinch