The Other Child Read Online Free Page A

sponges. Without this domestic infrastructure, the kitchen feels precarious, like a film set that could be dismantled at any moment.
    The shippers are due to call with their estimated arrival time. It will feel better once their things are here. In the end, almost all the packing and organization had fallen to her because Greg was going back and forth between London and Boston, trying to sort out the job and the house. Other than the paperwork – which was substantial – his main contribution to packing had been to bring his four sealed boxes down from the attic and stack them in the hall.
    The boxes were not labelled, but she recognized them from when he had moved in. They contained his old university things, some visa paperwork and essential documents like his birth certificate. They are wrapped in masking tape and it is clear that he does not want them opened so she got the movers to put them in crates marked ‘basement storage’. If Greg wanted to carry four sealed boxes wherever he went, that was his business.
    She slices bagels and slides them into the toaster. Then she texts Nell:
    We are here! All very odd. Huge, empty house. CICADAS. Wild foxes/coyotes/dogs. Fridge you could live in. Shouting neighbours in the night. What on earth have I done? Xx
    Alongside the kitchen there is a deck. It is painted white, peeling in places, shaded by the towering leylandii that divide their house from the neighbours’. She fiddles with the locks and hauls the French windows open. A mesh bug-screen stays in place. She drags this back too and it wobbles on its castors. The air smells of cut grass and summer holidays. It is warm and muggy, even this early in the morning. She peers through the branches into the neighbours’ backyard. It is modest for such a large house, mostly paved, with shrubs and woodchips but no flower beds.
    She can see a low wooden building at the back with floor-to-ceiling windows. She is leaning over the railings to get a better look when her eye catches a movement by the house. It takes a moment for her to understand what she is looking at.
    The woman is leaning against the wall, camouflaged by shadows. Her long hair is loose, and she is wearing a vest top and yoga pants with her arms folded, holding a mug. She is staring over, but her round face is unsmiling.
    Tess feels a tiny shiver pass across her skin and turns, walking to the furthest end of the deck, gripping the railings and looking down over the driveway at the back of the house. There is a basketball hoop.
    Maybe she should have waved or called out hello, but there was something in the woman’s stillness that suggested an almost targeted hostility. She remembers her face at the kitchen window in the middle of the night, unnaturally still, as if watching for movement in the downstairs rooms. She takes in a lungful of humid air. The neighbours’ marital problems are nothing to do with her.
    She looks at the branches of the trees. The house doesn’t feel like part of a massive suburban sprawl, with the cut-grass smells, the birdsong, the whispering leaves all around. She tries to imagine Joe playing basketball in this driveway with new friends. And then, tentatively, as if biting into a potentially unripe fruit, she imagines sitting here, on this deck, with her new baby. She can feel the weight of its dense little body, tiny fingers curled around hers, hair so soft that it seems imaginary, and that new-baby smell – of green shoots, sweet dough. But of course when this baby is born she won’t be sitting out here, because it will be January, the dead of winter. And Boston winters, Greg has warned her, are brutal.
    She feels a faint flickering in her belly and closes both hands over it. She is beginning to feel the baby, even at eighteen weeks, but perhaps it is unfair to expect Greg to connect with it. He was adamant from the start that he didn’t want to be a father. He even mentioned it the first time he told her he loved her, as if the two