Free The Radleys by Matt Haig

hears his sister step into the shower.
    “Light the fire?” his mother says.
    Rowan looks at his watch. It’s ten past midnight, but his mother is adamant. “Please, just get some coal from outside and light the fire.”
    Helen waits for her son to do as he’s told and wishes the coal shed were farther away, so she could have time to work this al out. She goes to the phone to retrieve the number. Already she knows who it was. She doesn’t know the number the machine gives her, but she knows, when she cal s it, she wil hear Wil ’s voice.
    Panic beats in her head as she dials.
    Someone picks up.
    “Wil ?” she says.
    And then he’s there. His voice as real as it always was, sounding young and ancient al at once.
    “Now, I’ve had this dream five thousand times . . .”

    In a way, this is the hardest thing of the whole night. She has fought for so long to cancel out thoughts of his existence, of speaking to him, of feeling his deep voice quench some hidden thirst inside her and course into her soul like a river.
    “Don’t come here,” she says, with whispered urgency. “Wil , this is important. Don’t come here. ”
    Rowan wil have fil ed the coal bucket up by now and be heading back to the house.
    “Normal y it goes a little differently,” says Wil . “The dream.”
    Helen knows she has to get through to him, has to stop it from happening. “We don’t need you.
    It’s sorted out.”
    He laughs, crackling the line.
    She could col apse. She looks at one of her paintings in the hal way. The watercolor of an apple tree. It blurs and she struggles to bring it back into focus.
    “I’m splendid, thanks, Hel. You?” He pauses. “Ever think of Paris?”
    “It’s just better if you stay away.”
    The shower stops. Clara must be getting out. There’s another noise too. The back door. Rowan.
    And stil , the same demonic voice in her ear. “Wel , now you mention it, I’ve missed you too.
    Seventeen years is a lot of lonely space.”
    Her eyes are closed tight. He knows what he is capable of doing. He knows he can pul gently at a single strand and cause everything to unravel. “Please,” she says.
    He says nothing.
    She opens her eyes, and Rowan is there, with a ful coal bucket. He is looking at the phone, and at her, at the fearful prayer that is her face.
    “It’s him, isn’t it?” says Wil .
    “I’ve got to go,” she says and presses the red button.
    Rowan looks half-suspicious, half-confused. She feels naked in front of him.
    “Could you go and start the fire.”
    It’s al she can say. But her son stands there, not moving or saying anything for a good few seconds.
    “Please,” she says.
    He nods, as if understanding something, then turns away.

    A Certain Type of Hunger

    The night moves at the speed of panic.
    Peter comes home.
    He burns his and Clara’s clothes on the roaring fire.
    They tel Rowan the truth. Or half of the truth, and even that he can’t believe.
    “She kil ed Harper? You killed Stuart Harper? With your teeth ?”
    “Yes,” says Peter, “she did.”
    “I know this al seems very weird,” adds Helen.
    Rowan groans in disbelief. “Mum, it’s over the hil from weird.”
    “I know. It’s a lot to take in.”
    Peter only has his trousers to go. He screws them into a bal and throws them on the fire, pressing the cotton fabric down with the poker to make sure there is nothing of them left. It is like watching a whole other life disappear.
    And it is about this time that Clara decides to speak, in a smal but steady voice.
    “What happened to me?”
    Her parents turn to look at her, sitting there in the green dressing gown they’d bought her when she was twelve or thirteen but which stil fits her. She looks different, though, tonight. Something’s gone and something else has taken its place. She’s not as frightened as she should be. She lowers her glasses down her nose, then lifts them back up, as if checking her eyesight.
    “You were provoked,” Helen tel s her, as