Free Skeletons by Jane Fallon

as she could get away.
    Sean Hoskins was unloading boxes from a taxi as she left.
    ‘Escaping?’ he said as she passed, head down. She really didn’t want to talk to anyone.
    ‘Something like that. Going home, actually. I’ve got a migraine.’
    ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ he said, sounding genuinely concerned. ‘Can I do anything? I could run round to Boots …’
    She felt bad that she was including him in her lie. Touched that he would care enough to offer to help. She forced a smile. ‘No. Thank you. I’ve got stuff at home.’
    ‘Do you want my taxi? I won’t be a minute.’
    ‘Honestly, I’m fine. But thanks again.’
    He peered into one of the boxes he had stacked up on the pavement. ‘I’ve got a melamine tea set from the nineteen fifties in here, if that’s any good.’
    Jen laughed. ‘I’m OK for kitsch tableware, actually.’
    ‘Hope you feel better,’ he called after her as she walked off.
    The house always seemed to Jen like a completely different place when no one else was home, echoey and somehow shabbier. Not that it didn’t always look a little shabby around the edges. Lived in. Knackered, actually. It sounded grand,
saying they had a house in London, but in reality it was tiny. Basically a two-up, two-down with a bit
of a kitchen extension. It was in the middle of a terrace of Victorian cottages that had been built for railway workers or something similar.
Short, undernourished, nineteenth-century people, anyway. It sat in a well-kept road, and their neighbours were quiet and had plants in their little front gardens, rather than the old motorbikes and broken fridges that were the accessory du jour in the street they had lived in before. They
had a small patio out the back that was a sun trap, with room for four chairs, if you didn’t mind all sitting in a tight row, like you were at the cinema.
    Jen loved it.
    They had moved there when Simone was about sixteen months, and Emily was well on the way, and she had never wanted to go anywhere else, even though they had always all been tripping over each other, fighting over whose turn it was to use the one
bathroom, moaning about the lack of cupboard space and soundproofing.
    When the girls were home she barely noticed the clutter, but now she had to force herself to turn a blind eye to it and head straight for the kitchen. She had decided on her journey home that she would cook Jason his favourite meal – a
calorie-laden and time-consuming fish pie. She wanted to do something nice for him, but not so nice that he would realize something was wrong. As if she might be able to offset some of the damage his father was doing by feeding him a tasty bit of haddock in a white sauce.
    She knew that if he asked her if everything was OK, she would probably blurt out what she had seen – and that was the last thing she wanted to do. That would be on a par with announcing to your five-year-old that the tooth
fairy was a kiddie fiddler, or that SpongeBob and Patrick secretly hated each other. She needed to process, to decide what she should do next, before she acted.
    Spending an afternoon cooking wasn’t Jen’s natural inclination, but she knew that if she didn’t get on with it right away, the chances of it happening once Jason got home were minimal. She would get caught up in the stories of
his students – he worked, these days, teaching drama at the local sixth-form college – and opening a bottle of wine, and they would end up with grilled fish and boiled potatoes for tea. Nice, but not exactly the point. Besides, the mindless tasks of cubing the haddock, boiling and then
mashing the potatoes and making the creamy sauce would give her the chance to think things through properly.
    She forced herself to replay lunchtime’s events one more time, frame by frame. Whatever way she looked at it – fast, slow, forwards, backwards – the impression it left was the same. She tried to take herself out of the picture, to imagine
the encounter from the