PART 1 — THE BOX
Garrick and I had been married seventeen years when Sylvana Prentiss moved into number nine.
Newly divorced, on her own, and I felt sorry for her, which is not a crime.
I took a pie round. I helped her get a wardrobe up the stairs. I had her over for coffee twice in the first fortnight.
Inside about six weeks she had started finding reasons to be at our house when Garrick was home.
A cupboard door. A parcel. A bulb she could not reach.
Then one afternoon in the May, with him at work, she sat at my kitchen table and said:
“I’m going to take your husband.”
I laughed, because what else do you do.
She did not.
“You want to start getting ready for a divorce, Nora. They go off it after that many years.”
After that she stopped bothering with the cover stories.
She would lean on our fence when he was cutting the grass. She brought him things she had baked. She put a hand on his arm whenever she was within reach of it.
He stepped back every single time. Every time, in four months, and I watched most of them from a kitchen window.
Then in the September she put on a barbecue for the close.
She invited Garrick.
She did not invite me.
He showed me the card with his face doing something complicated.
“I’m not going to that.”
And I said, “Actually, I think you should.”
He looked at me like I had grown another head, because by then I had a plan and I had been building it for four months and I had not told him one word about it.
Half an hour in, I walked into her garden with a wrapped box in both arms.
There were about twenty-five people out there. Both the Pembertons. The couple from eleven. Three children on a trampoline.
The talking went down in patches as people noticed me.
Sylvana came over.
“What are you doing here?”
“I brought the hostess a present.”
And she took it straight out of my arms and turned to put it on the table behind her.
“Give me that, I’ll open it later. You weren’t invited, Nora — go home before you embarrass yourself in front of everybody.”
And I said, “Open it.”
She stood there for about two seconds with everybody in that garden looking at her.
Then she took the lid off.
And all the colour went out of that woman’s face.
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