Expelled

"I had been so afraid of the dark outside my windows. It never once occurred to me to be afraid of the girl who had a key to my front door."

"Get out!" The scream ripped up out of me before I even had my feet under me, and I threw myself back off her, away from her hands, my palms skidding on the wet glass for anything to hold. The water was still coming down over both of us, the steam hanging thick in the hard bathroom light, and she just stood there in it, watching me, calm as anything.

I grabbed the nearest towel off the rail and flung it at her face and snatched another for myself, dragging it round me, my hands shaking so hard I could barely keep hold of it. "How dare you!" My voice came apart on it. "How bloody dare you!"

She caught the towel out of the air without any hurry at all and held it against herself, almost thoughtful about it, her wet dark hair stuck in ropes to her shoulders. It made her look young. Younger than she was, even — a schoolgirl, which was exactly what she was, and somehow that was the most frightening thing in the room.

"You're upset," she said, in that soft, even voice she used in class when she read Shakespeare aloud, the one that used to make the whole room go still. "I understand. It's been a difficult night."

"Difficult?" The laugh that came out of me was an ugly, cracked thing, half a sob. "You're in my house. In my bathroom. You're my student, for God's sake!" Even saying it aloud made the floor feel unsteady under me — that I should have to say any of it, that it was real enough to need saying. "How did you get in here?"

Her smile was gentle, almost patient with me. "I've had a key for months. Ever since that day you let me borrow your drama texts." She wound the towel around herself, slow, unbothered. "You really should be more careful with your belongings, Mrs Triffett. Jenny. My Jenny."

My own name in her mouth turned my stomach. "Don't," I said, and heard how thin it came out, and kept backing towards the door. "Don't you dare call me that."

"But it's your name," she said, and took a step after me. "The name Nial calls you. Called you." She let the change sit there between us, the was where the is should have been, and watched me hear it.

"What have you done?" It came out barely above the water. "What do you know about Nial?"

"He wasn't good for you," she said, and there was something new under the softness now, something with an edge on it. "He didn't understand you like I do. The way you light up when discussing theatre, how your hands move when you're explaining stage direction." Another step. "How you sing lullabies to Sammy when he has nightmares."

The floor dropped out from under the word Sammy. "You've been watching us? In our home?"

"Watching over you," she said, like the difference mattered, like it was the whole point. "Protecting you. Sammy's night terrors started getting worse, did you notice? Around the same time Nial began staying late at work, making all those secret phone calls."

I understood then what she was steering me towards, and it was worse than everything else she had said put together. Sammy. Six months of him waking in the night screaming that someone was in his room. Six months of him refusing to have his door shut, of the drawings none of us could make sense of, of Dr Carmichael's careful voice telling me that sometimes these things simply have no cause we can put a finger on. Six months of me sitting on the edge of his bed with my little boy shaking in my arms, promising him over and over that there was no one there. There had been someone there the whole time. There had been her.

"You've been in my son's room?" I could barely make the words.

"Our son," she said, and smiled like she was handing me something precious. "He likes it when I sing to him. The same songs you use, but he says I do the voices better."

The room went sideways. I got a hand to the doorframe and held on while everything in me heaved — the thought of her leaning over my sleeping child in the dark, humming, doing the voices, reading to him, night after night, while I slept just down the hall and never once knew. "You're sick," I got out. "You need help."

The softness went out of her face. "I'm not sick. I'm the only one who truly sees you, who understands what you need." She came closer, water still running off her hair and spotting the tiles. "Did you think I wouldn't notice the way you looked at me in class? How you always chose my scenes to workshop, always found time for extra rehearsals?"

"I was doing my job!" It tore out of me. "You were a talented student who needed guidance. Nothing more!"

"Lies," she hissed, and for the first time the calm cracked and something raw showed through underneath it. "You're lying to yourself, just like you lied about being happy with Nial. But I fixed that. I made it so we could be together."

"What did you do to my husband?"

"What I had to." Her voice had gone almost small, almost childish, and that was the worst of it. "He was in the way. But now we can be a proper family. You, me, Sammy..." She lifted a hand towards my face. "I've taken care of everything."

Something in me came loose. I hit her — both hands, hard, in the chest — and shoved her back and away from me and my child and my whole ruined life, and her bare feet went out from under her on the wet tile. She dropped. Her head caught the edge of the bath on the way down with a sound I felt in my own teeth, solid and final.

For a second neither of us moved. She lay sprawled on the tiles with the water misting down over her, a thin line of blood starting at her hairline and running down past her ear. When her eyes came up to mine they were wide and wet and full of hurt, as though I were the one who had done something monstrous.

"You're just like him," she whispered, touching her fingers to the blood and looking at it. "You're hurting me, just like he did when he caught me in Sammy's room."

The thing she had let slip — he caught me in Sammy's room — went through me, but I had nothing left to do anything with it. "Get out," I said, shaking so hard the word shook with me. "Get the fuck out of my house right now, or I swear to God—"

She got to her feet slowly, holding the towel to herself, and the awful calm came back down over her face like nothing at all had happened, blood and all. "You'll understand eventually," she said. "When you're ready to accept what we mean to each other. What we could be."

"If you've hurt Nial—" But the threat went nowhere, died in my mouth, because she smiled at me. The same soft, sweet, wrong little smile she had given me across the drama room only yesterday, when she was still just a girl I taught and I was still just her teacher and none of this had a name yet.

"I'll come back when you're feeling more reasonable," she said, bending to gather up her clothes. "Give Sammy a kiss for me. He'll be asking where his 'night-time friend' has gone."

The scream built up somewhere in my chest and never made it out. I stood frozen against the door and watched her dress herself, unhurried, and walk out of my bathroom and down my stairs, her footsteps easy and unbothered on the boards, like the house was already half hers. The front door opened and closed. The click of the latch was the best sound I had ever heard and the worst, both at once.

She had a key. She had walked in and out of my home for months. She had stood in the dark of my son's room with her hands on his blankets. Nial was somewhere out there in the middle of all of it, and this girl had stood in my own bathroom and told me she had taken care of everything.

My legs went out from under me and I slid down the wall to the floor, the cold of the tiles coming up through the towel, the shower still running and filling the room with steam I no longer felt. My mind would not stop. It kept going back over months of small things I had explained away one at a time — the night terrors, the specialist, the drawings, Nial's late nights, the sense I'd had more than once of being watched in my own kitchen — and laying them down side by side until they made one long, straight, unbearable line that led all the way to her.

She was still out there. Watching, waiting, the way she had watched and waited all along. She was not the only thing in the dark that night, either — somewhere across the city there was another dark room, and a black shape crouched over what was left of a man, and a woman's voice going round and round in my head, keep your mouth shut, we were never there. Monsters, the lot of it. Some of them had teeth and some of them had a soft voice and a key to my door, and I sat on the floor of a steaming bathroom with my arms wrapped round my knees, shaking, and I did not know which of them had taken my husband.