Today's Reading
Besides, Luke won't be fearing today, won't be imagining Polly not settling or sleeping or eating. Luke is happy-go-lucky, a man who never overthinks. If asked, he would say that the baby will be fine, he's got to work anyway, so what can you do? That's life. Sometimes, Luke tries to reassure Cam by telling her she cannot control situations, and there is nothing that Cam finds less reassuring than this.
And, nevertheless, he clearly is not fearing today, is he? He's not even here. Gone to work, or wherever, without a second thought. How could he?
"Aha, Polly Deschamps," one of the nursery workers says, greeting them at the door. Reflexively, Cam holds her daughter's warm body closer to her chest. "We've been telling everyone about your first day," the woman continues. "We're going to have so much fun."
"Hope so," Cam says. She takes a breath, then lifts and passes Polly into the arms of the nursery worker—a woman whose name Cam doesn't even know or has forgotten.
Polly swivels back and reaches for Cam, just once, their hands momentarily touching for the purest of seconds before she is pulled away from her, and Cam is free, but right now she doesn't want to be.
She grabs for her phone to tell Luke all of this, to say don't worry, I've done the nursery run, something perhaps slightly passive-aggressive, but that's when she looks at his WhatsApp profile: last seen today at 05:10. Huh. She didn't notice it earlier when she was busy with Polly and cleaning up. Ten past five is so early, and not online at all since? Unlike him. So strange.
Cam walks into her agency's offices and, immediately, the aroma gets her: books. They're everywhere, and it smells like home.
In the kitchenette, having greeted a few colleagues, glad she used the Tube journey to apply too much makeup, she makes a coffee and thumbs through a historical fiction debut someone else represents. She can feel the pull of the words already.
The streets are so dark they look sooty, lit only by a single oil lamp at its end.
And just like that, she's in: Cam really could stay here, on the Victorian street, standing up in the kitchen, and read this whole thing, the way she has done her whole life—the back of cereal boxes in the mornings; Sweet Valley High books on the school bus.
She closes the cover and breathes out, thinking.
Look. This is fine. It's fine. Luke is doing something somewhere—she's forgotten what, her mind taken up with Polly, that's all. That's all. And Cam's here, with good coffee, books to delve into and to sell, and she's being paid for it. She's lucky. She's so lucky. She doesn't need to create problems.
But something is creeping up behind her. A kind of dread. That last seen. The note.
A beep.
Also.
A text from Libby. This is how she messages. Often one word at a time. This is how they message. Well, this or trading mutual insults, usually, anyway.
LIBBY: I'm baking a cake for this pissing client thing tonight. Is this unacceptable or OK?
A video of a spinning cake, one side collapsed but repaired with icing.
CAM: Definitely acceptable.
LIBBY: Thanks for lying to me.
CAM: Always.
"Cam!" her boss, Stuart, says, rounding the corner to the kitchen. "Welcome back." Tanned, strawberry blond, mid-fifties. Ostensibly benign and somewhat dithery, he has a list full of bestselling writers that hints at his regular displays of brilliance. He is the sort of person you think isn't listening in a meeting, who then makes the best suggestion of anyone there.
"Baby well? Life feeling on an even keel yet?" he asks.
"Oh yes, better," Cam says, thinking that the house is full of piles of laundry, of unopened bills. The baby doesn't sleep. This morning, Cam showered while shouting nursery rhymes to placate her. When Cam sits in the garden every night, she feels the tasks looming behind her, to-do-list specters that she doesn't have the time to deal with in the way she used to. "All good here," she adds brightly.
"Great stuff," Stuart says. "It all falls into place eventually."
"Hmm."
...
