Free One Plus One: A Novel by Jojo Moyes Page A

point,” Des said.
    She vacuumed the entire house before Tanzie came home. She was so tired she should have been comatose, but in fact she was so angry it was possible she did it all at double speed. She couldn’t stop herself. She cleaned and folded and sorted because if she didn’t she would take Marty’s old sledgehammer down from the two hooks in the musty garage, walk round to the Fishers’ house, and do something that would finish them all off completely. She cleaned because if she didn’t she would stand in her overgrown little back garden, lift her face to the sky, and scream and scream and scream, and she wasn’t sure she’d be able to stop.
    By the time she heard the footsteps on the path, the house floated in a toxic fug of furniture polish and kitchen cleaner. She took two deep breaths, coughed a bit, then made herself take one more before she opened the door, a reassuring smile already plastered on her face. Nathalie stood on the path, her hands on Tanzie’s shoulders. Tanzie walked up to her, put her arms around her waist, and held her tightly, her eyes shut.
    “He’s okay, sweetheart,” Jess told her, stroking her hair. “It’s all right. It’s just a silly boys’ fight.”
    Nathalie touched Jess’s arm, gave a tiny shake of her head. “You take care,” she said, and left.
    Jess made Tanzie a sandwich and watched her wander away into the shady part of the garden to do algorithms and told herself she would let her know about St. Anne’s tomorrow. She would definitely tell her tomorrow.
    And then she disappeared into the bathroom and unrolled the money she had found in Mr. Nicholls’s taxi. Four hundred and eighty pounds. She laid it out in neat piles on the floor with the door locked.
    Jess knew what she should do. Of course she did. It wasn’t her money. It was a lesson she had drummed into the kids: You don’t steal. You don’t take what is not yours. Do the right thing, and you will be rewarded for it in the end.
    Do the right thing.
    But a new, darker voice had begun a low internal hum in her ear. Why should you give it back? He won’t miss it. He was passed out in the car park, in the taxi, in his house. It could have fallen out anywhere. It was only luck that you found it, after all. And what if someone else from round here had picked it up? You think they would have handed it back to him?
    His security card said the name of his company was Mayfly. His first name was Ed.
    She would take the money back to Mr. Nicholls. Her brain whirred round and round in time with the clothes dryer.
    And still she didn’t do it.
    —
    Jess never used to think about money. Marty worked five days a week for a local taxi firm, handled all the finances, and they generally had enough for him to go down to the pub a couple of nights a week and for her to have the odd night out with Nathalie. They took the occasional holiday. Some years they did better than others, but they got by.
    And then Marty got fed up with making do. There was a camping holiday in Wales where it rained for eight days solid and Marty became more and more dissatisfied, as if the weather were something to be taken personally. “Why can’t we go to Spain or somewhere hot?” he’d mutter, staring out through the flaps of the sodden tent. “This is crap. This isn’t a bloody holiday.”
    He got fed up with his work; he found more and more to complain about. The other drivers were against him. The controller was cheating him. The passengers were tight.
    And then he started with the schemes. The knockoff T-shirts for a band that fell out of the charts as quickly as it had arrived. The pyramid scheme they joined two weeks too late. Import-export was the thing, he told Jess confidently, arriving home from the pub one night. He had met a bloke who could get cheap electrical goods from India, and they could sell them on to someone he knew. And then—surprise, surprise—the someone who was going to sell them on turned out not to be the