The Other Woman’s House by Sophie Hannah

grinned.
    â€˜I’m not.’ Colin Sellers would have had a jokey response ready, but Sam couldn’t think of one.
    Alice closed her eyes and took a sip of her drink. ‘The right time will come,’ she said.

5
Saturday 17 July 2010
    â€˜1.2
million
pounds? Oh…
Ow!
Ouch.’ My mother has missed the five mugs lined up on the worktop and poured boiling water over her left hand instead. Deliberately, though I can’t prove it. She has burned herself, and it’s my fault for causing her more worry than she can cope with.
Again
. She wants everybody to notice and blame me. If they do, if Fran or Anton or Dad says, ‘Look what you’ve done, Con,’ Mum will stick up for me, but her defence will be a veiled attack: ‘It wasn’t Connie’s fault – I should have known better than to look away, with a kettle full of boiling water in my hand, but I was so shocked, I couldn’t help it.’
    Is this what being close to someone means – knowing their limitations, their ego-boosting delusions and self-serving grottiness, as well as you know your own? Being able to predict their reactions, their facial expressions, down to the last word and grimace, so that disappointment and a sickening sense of predictability surge up and crush the breath out of you the moment you clap eyes on them, before anyone’s uttered a word? Kit would say that was too pessimistic an analysis, but then he was never close to his parents, and now he has no relationship with them at all. He is for ever saying he envies me my membership of what he calls ‘the Monk clan’. I don’t dare tell him the truth; he would accuse me of being ungrateful. He’d probably be right.
    The truth is that I would rather be less close to my family, so that they could surprise me from time to time. So that their disapproval, when it came, wouldn’t have the capacity to burrow so deeply into me and plant seeds of self-doubt, pre-programmed to grow to the size of large oak trees. At least Kit is free.
    â€˜Come on, Benji,’ Fran whispers. ‘One more bit of broccoli and then you can have a chocolate finger. Just the curly bit at the top.
Please
.’
    â€˜Go on, Benji, mate – show Mummy and Daddy how brave you are. Like a superhero!’ Anton doesn’t bother to lower his voice. It hasn’t occurred to him that there’s anything more important going on in his parents-in-law’s kitchen today than Benji’s war on green vegetables; he feels no need to confine the broccoli negotiations to the background. Making a loudspeaker out of his hands, he puts on a booming voice and says, ‘Can one little boy defeat the broccoli monster? Is Benji brave enough to eat…his…broccoli? If he proves that he’s as brave as a superhero, his reward will be two…chocolate…fingers!’
    Am I going mad? Didn’t Anton hear any of what I said, about seeing a murdered woman lying in a pool of blood, and talking to a detective this morning? Why is no one telling him to shut up? Did nobody hear me? That none of them should have anything to say on the subject seems as impossible to me as what I saw on my laptop last night – impossible, yet real, unless I’ve lost my capacity to distinguish reality from its opposite.
    Kit thinks I have. Maybe my family do also, and that’s why they’re ignoring me.
    â€˜Don’t say two,’ Fran admonishes Anton in a sing-song voice,wearing an exaggerated smile in order, presumably, to prevent their son from wondering if the emotional carnage of a broken home might be all he has to look forward to. ‘One’s enough, isn’t it, Benji?’
    â€˜I want two chocolate fingers!’ my five-year-old nephew wails, red in the face.
    I open my mouth, then close it. Why waste my breath? I’ve done what I came here to do: told my family what they need to know. In order not to look as if I’m