Free The Poison Tree by Erin Kelly Page A

you don’t claim benefits, no one bothers with you. And I’m a jewelry designer.” She grinned and twirled her earring with a silver-adorned hand. “It’s the ideal trade for someone living on the run. You just pack up your jewels and you go.” I thought about my own life and its lengthy paper trail. My education had been measured out in consent forms, grant applications, exam board papers, and scholarship documents. That it was possible to survive, let alone thrive, outside the state system, was a revelation. I was shocked and thrilled in equal measure. If I hadn’t seen Nina do it so carelessly and confidently, would I have had the courage to do what I did later? What she told me over a cup of coffee influenced the way I reacted when everything had happened. She taught me how easy it is to disappear. How easy it is to hide a child from the world.

    We dance a clumsy excuse-me around the bed, unsure who has claim to which side of it. Rex and I used to sleep on different sides depending on whose room we were in: he would always want to sleep next to the wall. In this room, both sides are exposed. We always slept naked—it was too hot that summer to do otherwise—and now he is staring at the folded nightclothes I have handed him.
    “Gone off me already?” he says, eyebrows disappearing under a wing of hair. The reverse is true. The weight he has put on has softened his jaw and covered his Adam’s apple and brought his arresting good looks down to a more manageable level. His hair is accidentally fashionable. Back then, it was de rigueur for men his age to wear their hair either very short or floppy and parted in the middle, and Rex always looked out of place. Now men spend money on products that tease their hair into the mess of peaks and quiffs that he always struggled to control.
    “It’s not me,” I say. “It’s Alice. She comes in in the night . . . I did tell you.”
    Alice has slept with me almost every night since she was old enough to toddle from her room to mine. I tuck her into her own bed each evening but I never wake up alone, even when we’re on holiday, or at my mother’s. At around four o’clock every morning, the corner of the duvet is tugged and a little voice says, “Can I dig in?” and she curls around me. I don’t even notice her do it anymore.
    “Oh,” he says. “You did tell me. I’d forgotten. Yeah, that might be a bit weird.”
    Rex knows that ten-year-olds don’t climb into bed with naked fathers. The years when she might have surprised him in the shower or late at night are long gone: a pocket of innocence that Rex lost out on along with diaper changes and her first steps. All families have their own codes about this sort of thing, unwritten rules about where you can and can’t be naked, that silently and organically establish themselves over the years. We, on the other hand, have been thrust into devising new codes and rules for every situation that is new to us.
    He shakes out the starched pajama bottoms in a multicolored skinny pinstripe and the crisp white T-shirt with matching trim. He regards them blankly and I know that I wasted my time and money on the designer label.
    “There’ll be lots of little things like this, won’t there?” he says, sliding into the right-hand side of the bed. “Faux pas. Things I don’t know. Stuff I get wrong.”
    “Only for a little while,” I try to reassure him.
    I change into the blue camisole and shorts that have replaced my usual flannel pajamas: a self-conscious compromise. It’s ten o’clock, and still no noise from the bedroom next door. Maybe Alice will sleep through the night after all. Rex catches me looking at the clock.
    “I was right about bedtime, though,” he says, his voice a caricature of smugness.
    “You were lucky.”
    “She’s happy to have me back, I think. Isn’t she?”
    I lie on my front, my chin resting on his chest. He sighs so deeply I sink another inch into the bed.
    “She’s elated. We both