They Did Bad Things (ARC) by Lauren A Forry

Author:Lauren A Forry [Forry, Lauren A]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781950691449
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2020-02-04T05:00:00+00:00

Maeve

During the day, the flat was hers. She’d pop open the curtains, put her books on the coffee table, her shows on the TV, move the potted plants to where she liked them best. She’d make a coffee and breakfast, sit down at the table with a paper, and pretend this was her life. Pretend every morning was a Sunday morning, and that this was the one day a week she needn’t go to her artsy job in the West End, or the BBC studios, or the National Theatre. She often pretended that she had a little dog—a terrier mix rescued from Battersea Dogs Home—that slept by her leg while she ate her eggs and toast. She’d speak to him some days—Duncan, she called him—comment on articles in the paper, pretending she knew the people involved. Some mornings she got so entrenched in her daydream, she would offer him scraps from the table and become confused when he didn’t take them. On these days, she burst into tears and had to scrub her face an extra five minutes before heading down to the unemployment office.

Whenever she had an appointment, she always came with a detailed list of the places she’d applied to or had interviewed with. Sometimes she really would have applied to one or two of them. She never had an interview. Afterward, she’d run errands, do a little cleaning, and watch her imagined life drip away as she restored Max’s flat to its original state. One by one he and his family would return, bringing reality with them. When the kids got home from their after-school clubs, they commandeered the television to watch their programs and eat their snacks on their sofa. Max’s wife was the next to return. She’d talk to Maeve about her day as she changed clothes and removed her jewelry, helped Maeve set the table. Unless he was working late, Max usually arrived home in time for dinner, the kids screaming his name, the conversation shifting away from Maeve as if they’d exhausted everything they had to say to her. Like they’d filled their daily quota of being kind to the strange spinster auntie who had taken over their spare room.

That was why Maeve disappeared to her room after dinner—to spare them the pain of having to tolerate her for the rest of the evening. To let them pretend it was only the four of them, the happy family, no fifth wheel. And Maeve would turn on her little television and eat a bag or two of M&Ms and pretend the sounds echoing throughout the rest of the flat were only neighbors.

It was on one of these nights, when she had already retired to the spare room—eating some stale Pringles she’d found under her bed and watching reruns of The Simpsons—that she got the text.

See you soon.

She sat in bed, the phone in one hand, a Pringle in the other, and wondered if it was too late to back out. Her thumb hovered over the phone, ready to reply.

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