“Seriously.” He leaned forward. “I wish I knew more. Wish I could help.”

She let out a sigh that inflated her bare cheeks. “Fuck, this is all so weird. Sorry for the language.”

“You don’t have to apologize.”

He smiled at her and she eventually smiled back through her tears, her body language softening. Chris found himself wanting to keep the conversation going, wanting to secure her as an ally, pathetic as that was. Why should her opinion matter? Yet somehow it did.

She wound a rope of hair around her fingers and glanced toward Steph and Paul’s flat. Chris finally dared to look, too, squinting at the upstairs sash windows with their heavy taupe-colored drapes. The sun flashed and he thought he saw a pale face between the curtains, the whip of a blonde ponytail, but as he caught his breath it was gone.

He took in the Harlows’ immaculate paintwork, noticeably brighter than his own, the house seeming to wither as the eye traveled down. Anger swept him, like a flare of heat. It was old resentment rolled in with something new, a kind of outrage with a ball of fear at its center. Steph and Paul had everything and they’d never appeared grateful. And they didn’t know their daughter, any more than she knew them. They’d accused him of milking them for money, when really it had been Freya who’d wanted more sessions . . . It came from her . . .

“Oh, before I forget.” Jess broke his thoughts, holding a crumple of cash toward him. He had a memory-surge of Freya doing the same: those banknotes with her mum’s little car drawings in the corners.

“What’s that?” He stared at Jess’s offering, sliding his hands beneath his thighs to flatten their trembling.

“For yesterday’s lesson. I didn’t pay you.”

He shook his head. “Don’t be silly. We didn’t really have a lesson in the end.”

She shrugged and put it away. “Thanks, Chris,” she said, and he felt an unexpected flood of affection. Perhaps a displaced feeling, perhaps a reaction to hearing his name said without hostility.

Jess leaped back as the house’s main door opened. Chris felt his own body jolt, the seat belt snapping tight around his neck.

Blue-haired Emma emerged, rather than one of the Harlows. His breath gushed out and the belt slackened. But he could see that Jess was rattled to have been caught talking to him, even by Emma. Was he already the enemy?

Jess fled without saying good-bye. Emma’s gaze lingered on him as she held the door for Jess, then got into her own car. When Chris caught movement again in the Harlows’ window, he started his engine. Freya’s frozen image watched from every tree as he accelerated away.

16.

STEPH