Free What Remains by Tim Weaver Page A

We’d talked a few times in between, but it was bland, vacuous stuff: the house, the weather, the London property market.
    Most of the time, it didn’t bother me. I lived alone, I spent my working life the same way. But occasionally, I felt regret – even a sort of mourning – for the woman who’d lived there before. That had been Liz, the first person I’d fallen in love with after the death of my wife, and a woman I’d eventually had to let go.
    I closed the boot, its dull thud not disturbing either of them from their gardening. Even as I made my way up the drive, they didn’t turn around, and by the time I saw Andrew glance across the fence, my front door had longsince closed and I was inside the kitchen, looking out from the darkness of the house.
    Opening it up – the windows, the rear doors – I started preparing some dinner, and once it was ready, I took my plate through to the back garden and sat on the decking with a bottle of beer, watching the sky burn out until it was black.
    An hour later, the doorbell rang.
    To begin with, I thought I was hearing things. I rarely got visitors at home – an indictment of my social life, of who I’d allowed myself to become – and as I turned in my chair on the back deck, a third empty beer bottle beside me, all I could hear was birdsong and the gentle crackle of a ceramic wood burner I’d bought the previous spring. Thinking I must have misheard, I watched the logs gently shift inside the burner, fire licking at them, embers spitting up and out of the chimney.
    Then the doorbell sounded again.
    I made my way through the house, turning on the interior lights, and opened up. The security lamp bathed the driveway in a lake of stark white light, washing out to where a Yaris was parked up, a woman about to get back inside.
    ‘Can I help you?’
    She looked back at me, surprised.
    It was Gemma.
    I almost didn’t recognize her. At her daughter’s funeral three years before, she’d been dark-haired and thin, her green eyes revealing so much about her – her strength, her instinct for survival – even in the hours after Leanne’s casket had been lowered into the ground. Yet all that hadchanged. This version of her was flabby, inflated, the lines of her face hidden behind thick, black-rimmed glasses and untidy strands of brown hair. She swiped some of it away, her black roots spidering out, and took a couple of steps closer. I remembered her being three years older than Healy, which put her in her early fifties, and she now seemed to carry so much of that half-century. As I came down the front steps, she pulled her hair back from her eyes again and I saw how marbled they were, how blotchy and irritated her skin was, how recently she’d been crying.
    ‘Gemma.’
    She pushed the door of the car shut. ‘David,’ she said, her voice quiet, eyes on the house. ‘When you didn’t answer, I figured you weren’t home.’
    ‘Sorry. I was in the back garden.’
    She nodded.
    ‘Do you want to come in?’
    A black handbag was wedged between her breast and the inside of her arm, and as she looked from me to the house and then back again, she seemed to press it closer to her. ‘Yes,’ she said, nodding for a second time. ‘Thank you.’
    I led her inside, the ghost-white glare from the security lamp replaced by the semi-darkness of the hallway. ‘Would you like some tea or coffee?’
    ‘Tea would be fine.’
    I filled the kettle and set it boiling.
    For a moment, we stood opposite one another in the kitchen, awkwardly, her hovering in the doorway uncertainly, me half perched on one of the stools.
    ‘I take it you got my message?’ I asked.
    ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I did.’
    ‘I didn’t want you to have to drive all the way down here.’
    ‘It’s fine,’ she said, eyes drifting to where steam was chugging out of the kettle and into the spaces above us. ‘I wanted to …’ Her eyes narrowed, as if she was first trying to form what she needed to say in her head.