Exposed

"I learned that night that the body keeps its own accounts, and it will collect what it's owed whether or not you are ready to pay."

My hands would not work the lock. My fingers had gone numb and stupid and would not stop shaking, and the key skated off the metal again and again while I stood on my own doorstep and could not manage the one simple thing I had done ten thousand times. When it finally bit and turned and the door gave, I half fell through it into the hall.

The house was wrong. It was the only word my mind could find for it. It was my hallway, my coats on the hooks, my shoes kicked off against the skirting, and not one bit of it looked like mine any more — the light too dim, the shadows too long, all of it leaning in at me. I put a hand to the wall and kept it there and felt the cold of the plaster come up through my palm, because it was the only solid thing left, and I went along it a step at a time like something learning to walk.

At the foot of the stairs I stopped and stood with a hand on the newel post and hauled air into my lungs like I could not get enough of it. It kept coming back at me behind my eyes — the blood, the black shape of it lifting its head, the wet running down its face — and every time it hit fresh and took the breath straight back out of me.

The stairs went up in front of me like a cliff. I got a foot onto the first, then the second, and each one cost me something I was not sure I still had. By the third my legs had gone to water under me. "One more," I whispered, to myself, to nobody at all. "One more."

On the fifth my foot slid out from under me and the whole world swung sideways. I came down hard against the wall, my shoulder and the side of my head cracking into it, pain flaring white up the back of my neck. Some sound came out of me that I did not recognise, low and animal, and I had nothing left in me to do anything but slump there against the wall and hold on.

Then my stomach turned right over. It came up fast and without warning, a hot rush of it that burned the whole way, and I grabbed at my own throat as though I could stop it and could not. I was sick down the stairs in front of me, hard, my whole body folding into it, over and over until there was nothing left and my gut went on clenching on empty.

The smell of it set me off again, dry this time, my stomach heaving on air. My shirt was soaked down the front, warm and reeking and stuck to my skin, and when the retching finally let go of me I dragged the back of my hand across my mouth and looked at what I had become — half undressed on my own stairs in a mess of my own sick, shaking, wrecked. I hooked my fingers into the collar and pulled the shirt off over my head and flung it down the stairs, away from me, as if the shirt were the thing that was wrong and not all of it.

"You have to keep moving," I told myself, my voice gone to a rasp. So I moved. Every step up was a fight against a body that wanted to lie down where it stood and stop, and the few feet to the top went on and on.

At the landing my legs gave out and I went down onto my hands and knees and stayed there with my forehead pressed to the cool of the floorboards, breathing. Even then it would not stop coming — the blood, the growl through the door, that man's ruined face throwing the word at me, run — all of it clawing at the inside of my skull, wanting in, and I screwed my eyes shut against it and it made no difference at all. It was in me now. It was not going to come out.

Something in me would not lie down and stop, though. I had got out. I had got home. But getting out was not enough — it had never once been enough — because Nial was still gone, and the only thing that had ever mattered was finding him. I dragged myself back up onto my feet with everything in me protesting it.

I made it into the bedroom, and the one place left that should have felt safe felt like somewhere I had never set foot. The bed. The wardrobe. The small ordinary things on the dresser I saw every single day — all of it stood strange and stark, as though it had watched me come apart and had nothing to say about it. I could not stop shaking. It had got right down into me, a tremor running through the whole of me that would not be stilled, and I could feel the last of my hold on myself going with it.

My thoughts were coming too fast and going nowhere, breaking apart before I could close a hand on any of them. I tried to slow down, to breathe, and could not — every breath came thin and shallow, as though there were no air left in the room to be had.

I needed the rest of it off me. I clawed at the clothes still on me and got them off and let them fall where I stood, and the cold of the room came down over my bare skin and did nothing at all to touch the heat and the chaos going on underneath it.

I got into the en suite and pulled the shower door shut behind me, and the click of it landed too loud in the quiet. When the water came down over me, warm, I let out a breath I felt as though I had been holding since the cellar. It ran over me and sluiced away the sweat and the sick and the grime of that house — and it could not touch the rest of it, the part the night had left further down than water goes.

My knees went and I let them, and I sank down onto the tiles with the water still coming down and wrapped my arms around myself and held on, and that was the moment it finally broke. The crying came up out of me from somewhere deep and would not be stopped — great tearing sobs I could not have held back to save my life — and it all poured out under the water where there was no one to see. "I'm sorry," I got out, broken, barely words at all. "So sorry, Nial."

His name went through me like a hook. I could see him — his face, his voice, the shape of him that should have been here and was not. My husband is missing. The words came up plain and bare in my head, nothing left on them to soften them, and every time they came round again they went a little deeper, and the fact of him being gone got sharper with every beat of my heart.

Was he safe? Was he hurt? Was he — I could not even finish it. The not-knowing was the worst of the whole of it, worse than the house, worse than the thing in that cellar: a great black hole where an answer was meant to be, and I sat in the bottom of the shower and shook and could not fill it.

Then there was Sammy. God, Sammy. I thought of him asleep at my mother's, small and trusting the whole world, and I thought of every promise I had ever made him and had no idea now how to keep — and the shame of that came up through the grief and the fear and sat down on my chest until I could hardly breathe.

The water kept coming, hotter now against my skin, and I stayed where I was with my head bowed and let it drum on the back of my neck. The sobs wore themselves out slowly, down to a thin steady run of tears the water took from me, and the hurt was no less for it but the worst of the storm had gone through me for the moment.

I shut my eyes and held on to him — his voice, his laugh, the way his arms had always been the one place that felt like home. "I'll find you," I whispered. It came out shaking, but I meant it more than I had ever meant anything in my life. "Whatever it takes, I'll find you."

Footsteps in the bathroom brought my head up off my chest.

Soft, faint, but there — someone was in the room with me. For one mad, whole-hearted heartbeat the hope of it went through me so hard it hurt. "Nial?" The name came out of me small and cracked, half a question and half a prayer, everything I had left in the world riding on it.

Then I saw, and the hope died in my throat. It was not Nial. It was the last thing on earth I had braced for — a wrongness so total, so far from the reunion I had let myself picture for that one heartbeat, that my whole mind simply stopped. My mouth opened. I meant to speak, to call out, to demand to know what in God's name was happening — and nothing came. My voice had gone the same way my hope had, and left me there with a scream that had nowhere to go.

Paralysed, I watched in bewilderment as the silky bathrobe slunk from Serena's body and fell to the bathroom floor with a soft whisper The fabric pooled at her feet, a discarded shell that seemed to mark the boundary between normality and the surreal scenario unfolding before me.

Wild shaking wracked my entire body, an uncontrollable tremor that echoed the chaos swirling within. It was as if the cold tiles beneath me had seeped into my bones, filling me with a chill that no warmth could dispel. The glass door squeaked open, as Serena stepped into the shower. The intrusion of her presence into this last bastion of solitude shattered the fragile veneer of composure I had clung to.

Sinking to the floor beside me, Serena wrapped her arms around me. Her touch, meant to comfort, felt torturous and intrusive, a physical manifestation of the surreal turn my life had taken. "Everything will be okay," Serena whispered in my ear. They were words meant to soothe, to reassure, but their assurance landed hollow.

The panic came up over me in a wave I could not get above. My heart slammed against my ribs, too fast and too hard, each beat a blow, and my throat had closed up dry so that even if the words had come there would have been no getting them out. My head pounded, thought gone to a white roar of fear and confusion and flat disbelief, none of it making the smallest sense.

My sight went to a blur as I fought for air that would not come, every breath something I had to drag in by force, with that presence right there beside me now, filling the small wet space that a moment ago had been the last thing left in the world that was only mine. The walls of the shower stood close and clear all around me, and I could see straight through them, and it changed nothing — they held me every bit as fast as if they had been cut from stone, shutting me inside a nightmare there was no waking from.