‘If it’s a problem, I can send out a car for you, so you don’t have to catch the train.’
‘You don’t have to—’
‘After what happened today, no more trains. It’s not safe.’ He looked across at her. ‘Understood?’
‘Now, hang on,’ she started, her concerns about Shayne giving way to irritation. No matter what they agreed between them about the future of this child, there was no way he could tell her how she was going to get from point A to point B. Especially since Shayne had taken the car when he’d gone. ‘What if I don’t have a car?’
‘You don’t?’ He sounded incredulous, and then, in the next breath, took hers away.
‘Then I will have one delivered tomorrow. I do not want you walking around this area either.’
‘No! You can’t—’ But she didn’t finish what she was going to say, not once she’d looked around and realised he’d taken the first two turns into her suburb without her telling him which way to go and was already signalling the turn into her street and pulling up alongside her house.
‘How did you…’ But he was already out of his seat and halfway around to her door.
She didn’t wait for an explanation. She was already getting out of the car, determined to say her goodbyes here, before he got closer to her house. If he thought her pitiful already, what would he think if he knew the full extent of her pathetic circumstances? It was inevitable he’d find out some time—she could hardly keep it a secret for ever—but damned if she wanted him to find out today. She was too emotionally wrung out to take any more of his contempt today.
For a big man, though, he moved fast. She was barely out of her seat and he was there, hemming her in between her open door and the force field of his presence, blocking off the promise of escape.
‘Thanks for the lift,’ she said. ‘Bye.’ But he made no move to let her go and there was no stepping around the barrier he made with just his sheer physical presence.
‘Maybe I can meet your husband now, if he’s home.’ It wasn’t a question.
She clutched her bag to her chest, shook her head. ‘He’s not.’
An eyebrow arched in question. ‘How can you be so sure?’
She looked longingly towards the house. It wasn’t much to look at but it was almost all hers and right now she yearned for the sanctuary its walls would provide. ‘He…he never gets home before five.’ Though it had been closer to nine, she remembered with a touch of bitterness, before he’d walked out on her completely, claiming he was working overtime while all the time he’d been out with the new office assistant. How naive she’d been!
‘Are you all right?’ he asked, wondering at the tension around her eyes and mouth and the bright spots of colour in an otherwise pale face, worried she might be about to faint on him again.
‘I’m fine,’ she said, at odds with her increasingly edgy body language as she shifted nervously on the spot and tucked wayward tendrils of hair behind her ears. She was smiling, if you could call it that, her lips drawn tight, her eyes so falsely bright that he wondered again if she wasn’t hiding something. ‘Thanks again for the lift. I won’t hold you up any longer.’
‘I’ll be in touch tomorrow,’ he said, moving aside to let her pass, and within seconds she’d scooped the mail from her letterbox and was halfway across the dust-bowl of her front yard, the wave from one hand her only response.
He waited there while she let herself into the house, saw her look over her shoulder one last time before disappearing inside. Maybe she was just embarrassed. Looking at the house, he could understand why.
The building was low and squat, perched meanly over what had once been a lawn before soaring summer temperatures and water restrictions had killed it off. He knew exactly what the house would look like on the inside because there were street upon street of them, all with slightly different frontages, half with the driveway on the left, half on the right, but all based on the same two or three basic floor plans. He could still see it now. Just inside the front door would be a lounge room along with a rudimentary kitchen and bathroom. There would be three bedrooms, one slightly larger passing for the master bedroom, one half the size of that and just big enough for a single bed and chest of drawers. The third would be half that size again, no more than a storeroom really.