Helen would’ve bought him the damn car.

She headed back into the kitchen to tidy up. She turned on the radio, letting the music fill the space, and made another cup of coffee and finally some porridge for herself. Opening the notebook stashed in the kitchen drawer under the takeaway menus they rarely used, she logged her planned food for the day, making sure she kept within a miniscule calorie limit. Long gone were the days when she would survive on nothing but coffee, cigarettes and pills. These days every mouthful was planned, every indulgence recorded, new promises made to herself every morning and broken by lunchtime, with disappointment in herself weighing her down by bedtime – and the waistband grew tighter and the butt wobblier as she let herself down again and again. The pages of this notebook were filled with yet more lies. She sighed, pushed it away and stared at the uninspiring breakfast in front of her. Some days she wondered what the point of it all was.

Would any of them notice if she disappeared?

She pushed her feet into her dirty trainers by the front door, shrugged into a big coat and grabbed Clive’s lead from the back of the kitchen door.

*

Matt found he could breathe a little easier as he drove away from the house. It wasn’t her, as such. As far as stepmothers went, she was alright. She didn’t get in his face, never asked too many questions, made a good dinner.

And she was loaded, so the house was massive and he could have his own space.

But he felt unsettled there, in those walls. Like the house itself was watching him, judging him, getting under his skin, consuming him from the inside, waiting to spit him out.

The gears scraped as he pulled away and he cringed. It was now a grey day and he hoped it wouldn’t rain too hard because the windscreen wipers on this heap of shit he was driving didn’t work very well. And he had promised he would pick her up in the village on the way to college.

Maybe that’s what it was. Maybe the fact that Helen was loaded and they were living in her weird mansion of a house, and yet he still had to drive this crap car, get a job to pay for his own petrol, buy his own stuff. It seemed old-fashioned of them to expect that. Francesca, his own mother, was no help with money either. That stupid café she ran with Todd was not exactly a thriving business. And these days Todd had all of her attention, as though she’d washed her hands of him and Lydia once they’d moved in with Helen.

Still, his mother looked happy and certainly sounded happier than she had been with his dad. So that was something. Or maybe it was all the yoga she was doing.