The Family Friend C. MacDonald (reading comprehension books .txt) 📖

‘Feel much better now,’ Erin says, belittling herself with sarcasm. She feels like she’s had three double espressos, vibrating from grabbing at Amanda’s stuff, accusing her of something she has absolutely no evidence of. Erin doesn’t know what’s happening to her, doesn’t recognise this rash, suspicious person she seems to have turned into since the pictures were posted just a few days ago.

‘I think he wanted me to keep an eye on you, so I have been.’

‘He asked you to follow me?’ Erin bites her upper lip.

‘He seemed so worried about Bobby’s safety.’

‘He thinks I’m going to hurt my baby? The father of my child thinks I’m going to hurt my baby?’ Erin says, but it’s to herself as much as it is to Amanda. A hit of cold wind punches them both as they round a corner onto the front. ‘Is that what he thinks?’ Erin has to shout past the sound of the wind. Amanda shrugs, expression filled with pain. ‘That I’m a danger to my son?’

‘I’m so sorry, Erin,’ Amanda shouts back to her. Another wave of wind hits them and Bobby’s buggy begins to blow back towards them. Erin grabs at the handle to steady it, inadvertently barging Amanda away with her other hand. Amanda gives her a look of shock. Bobby wakes up and his scream pierces through the wall of sound.

41

She scours the local council website for the names of childminders. As she clicks through their profiles she sees all of them have between four and five children a day. That’s too many for Bobby. Bobby wouldn’t be able to handle three other toddlers prodding him and screaming and demanding their caregiver’s attention. It would be the same at nursery, Erin’s decided.

After they got home, Bobby outright refused her breast milk and, based upon the tiny quantities Erin’s been able to pump recently, she fears that she might have to give up on it completely. He also refused the bottle until she buckled and put a tiny bit of honey in it. Erin can’t understand how she’s got here. Feeding him was always her favourite bit. A time she could look down at her beautiful little boy and know that, however inadequate she may feel, however conflicted, she was doing something right. So as she watched her baby hungrily gulping down the sweetened breast milk before putting him down to bed, she felt the anger building inside and she made a decision. Amanda has to go. She may not be the person taking photos of her, but she is the reason her baby doesn’t clamour for her, she is the reason that every single day Erin feels like the only mother in the world whose infant doesn’t want to be held by them. Amanda offered to help with Bobby’s bedtime, offered to make dinner, but Erin said no, so now she’s skulking in the studio at the end of their garden. It’s not sustainable. Erin can see that it never was.

So now she has two options. Put Bobby into childcare or tell Grace that she’s going to have to delay many of her commitments for the next month or two. The PR person from Phibe has got her doing two or three events a week for the next month including quite a few evenings. She knows that trying to get out of them, just as the app’s launching, could be terminal for her hopes of getting more big-brand work so she’s going to have to make the childcare route work. There is a third option. Raf could take some time off. Although she’s never got too involved with the details of their family finances, the Phibe money, whenever they deign to pay her, must be enough to pay the mortgage and their day-to-day expenses for four or five months, at least. But Erin knows that she invited Amanda deeper into their lives, she was the one that set up their unconventional childcare arrangements, and she doesn’t think, in light of recent revelations, that she’s in a position to demand that Raf switch from being the primary breadwinner to the primary caregiver instantaneously.

She snaps her laptop shut and almost throws it onto the bottom shelf of the coffee table before slurping from her glass of wine – a perk, at least, of not having to breastfeed in the night. She glances at the wine bottle in the kitchen. There’s only about a glass left in it and she should probably ease off before Raf gets home.

She’s tried to keep her mind busy, tried to keep it rational, logical. Because ever since Amanda told her that Raf wanted her to follow her, she hasn’t felt particularly level. As she gave Bobby his cumin-spiced sweet potato, she had to smile at him through the molten oil of rage in the pit of her stomach, she had to sing the saccharine Disney melodies during Bobby’s nappy-off playtime with more gusto than she ever has to try and push down the anger that sits in her breastbone like heartburn. As she frothed his Olly Octopus in the bath she had to swallow back the medicinal bitterness at the back of her throat at the thought that her fiancé, the father of her son, thinks she’s such a bad mother, so dangerous to her own child, that he has to employ his lackey to follow her about. Why? So that she could intervene if Erin looked like she was going to throw Bobby off the cliff?

The key turns in the lock and Erin gulps the rest of her glass of wine down before going to the kitchen, rinsing the glass and putting it and the rest of the bottle back in the cupboard.

‘Smells good,’ Raf says, referring to the pasta bake bubbling in the oven as he comes round the corner to see her stood by the sink. His eyes dart out to the lights