Hostage - Clare Mackintosh Page 0,2

whatever it is, let’s talk about it.”

She hesitated, then, and I saw her look at Adam. Her eyes were angry and hurt, and I turned just in time to see him shake his head, silently giving instruction.

“What’s going on?” I looked at each of them in turn.

Adam had once joked that, in the event of a disagreement between Katya and me, he’d be forced to take the younger woman’s side. “A good au pair isn’t easily replaced,” he’d said.

“Funny.”

“Tell me you wouldn’t do the same.”

I’d given a mock grimace. “You got me.”

“Well?” I said. They had argued—that was clear—but about what? They had only Sophia in common, unless you counted the crime dramas Adam loved and I hated, the only thing that would lure Katya out of her bedroom on a Saturday evening. If I wasn’t at work, I’d go for a run instead, returning after a 10K to catch the dark, moody credits and the tail end of their critique.

But no one argued about crime dramas.

“Ask him,” Katya spat—the only time I’d ever seen her be anything but sunny. A horn beeped outside—her taxi for the airport—and she finally met my gaze. “You are nice woman. You not deserve crap like this.”

Something splintered inside me, a tiny fissure at the edge of a frozen lake. I wanted to step back, to leave the ice intact, but it was too late.

Crack.

When she’d gone, I turned to Adam. “Well?”

“Well what?” He made it a snap, as though my question—my very presence—was an irritation, a nag. As though it were my fault.

I focused on that look I’d seen pass between them, on Katya’s red-rimmed eyes and implied warning. You not deserve crap like this.

“I’m not stupid, Adam. What’s going on?”

“With what?” Again, the faint tut before he spoke, as though his mind were on other, more cerebral matters and I was dragging him back to irrelevance.

“With Katya.” I spoke the way some people speak to foreigners. I had the sense that I had stepped into someone else’s life; this wasn’t a conversation I had ever needed to have before, ever thought I’d find myself having.

As he turned away to busy himself with something that didn’t need doing, I caught the flames of guilt licking his neck. Truth slid into my mind like the answer to a crossword clue long after the paper’s been thrown away, and my mouth formed the words I didn’t want to say.

“You slept with her.”

“No! God. No! Jesus, Mina—that’s what you think?”

Every bit of me wanted to believe him. He had never before given me cause to doubt him. He loved me. I loved him. I fought to keep my voice steady. “What do you expect me to think? There’s obviously something going on between you.”

“She left Play-Doh all over the kitchen. I had a go at her. She took it personally, that’s all.”

I stared at Adam, at the red-faced bluster of his lie. “You could at least have come up with a plausible excuse.” Not meriting the effort of a cover story hurt almost as much as the lie itself. Did I mean that little to him?

Katya’s departure tore a fissure through our family. Sophia was furious, the sudden loss of her friend a bereavement expressed through smashed toys and torn-up pictures. She blamed me, for no other reason than that I was the one who told her, and it took all my moral fiber not to tell her it was Adam’s fault. He and I circled each other: me bristling and bitter, him taciturn and filled with faux resentment designed to make me doubt myself. I held fast. If Katya was the crossword puzzle, now that I had solved it, I saw that the clues had been anything but cryptic. For months, Adam had been cagey about his days off and protective enough of his phone to take it to the bathroom while he showered. I’d been a fool not to have realized sooner.

“Up the hill,” Sophia says now. “Then the church, then the—”

My hand tightens too late, Sophia’s fingers disappearing from my grasp as her feet slip from under her, and the back of her head meets the ground. Her eyes widen in shock, then narrow as she assesses how hurt she is, how scared, how embarrassed. I intercept her decision, dropping my bag and swooping her up from the pavement, bumping in my haste against a man walking in the opposite direction.

“Upsy-daisy!” I say in a nanny’s no-nonsense tone.

Sophia looks at me, lower lip