Her voice was rising. I could have kicked myself for not bringing someone, anyone, even Richie, to stand guard outside the door. “And the next afternoon he’s on the computer and the kids are right there, I’m making their snack, and Pat goes, ‘Wow, Jen, listen to this! Some guy in Slovenia, he’s bred this giant mink, like the size of a dog, I wonder if one could’ve escaped and—’ And ’cause the kids were there I had to go, ‘That’s really interesting, why don’t you tell me about it later on,’ when inside I was just like, I don’t care! I don’t give a fuck! All I want is for you to shut up around the kids!”

Jenny tried to take a deep breath, but her muscles were too tense to let her. “So of course the kids figured it out—Emma did, anyway. A couple of days later we were in the car, her and me and Jack, and she was like, ‘Mum, what’s a mink?’ I went, ‘It’s an animal,’ and she went, ‘Is there one inside our wall?’

“I went, all casual, ‘Oh, I don’t think so. If there is, though, your daddy’s going to get rid of it.’ The kids seemed OK with that, but I could’ve hit Pat. I got home and told him—I was yelling, I’d sent the kids out to the garden so they wouldn’t hear—and Pat just went, ‘Oops, shit, sorry. Tell you what, though: now they know, maybe they could help. I can’t keep an eye on all these monitors at once, I keep worrying that I’m missing something. Maybe the kids could hang on to one each?’ Which was just so wrong I could hardly talk. I just went, ‘No. No. No bloody way. Don’t you ever suggest that again,’ and he didn’t, but still. And of course even though he said he had too many monitors he got nothing out of the hallway wall so he made more holes, he set up more monitors, every time I looked around there was another hole in our home!”

I made some meaningless reassuring noise. Jenny didn’t notice. “And that was all he did: watch those monitors. He got this trap—not just a mousetrap, but this massive horrible thing with teeth that he put in the attic—I mean, I guess you’ve seen it. He acted like it was some big mystery, he was all, ‘Don’t worry about it, babe, what you don’t know won’t hurt you,’ but he was totally over the moon with it, like this was a brand-new Porsche or some magic wand that was going to fix all our problems forever. He would’ve watched that trap twenty-four-seven if he could’ve. He wouldn’t play with the kids any more—I couldn’t even leave Jack with him while I took Emma to school, or I’d come home and find Jack, like, painting the kitchen floor with tomato sauce while Pat sat there, three feet away, staring at these little screens with his mouth open. I tried to get him to turn them off in front of the kids, and mostly he would, but that just meant the second the kids were in bed Pat had to sit in front of those things all evening long. A couple of times I tried making a fancy dinner, with candles and flowers and the nice silver, and dressing up—like a date night, you know?—but he just lined up the monitors in front of his plate and stared at them the whole time we were eating. He said it was important: the thing got hyper when it smelled food, he had to be ready. I mean, I thought we were important too, but no, apparently not.”