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

the sides of her eyes, she looks exhausted, spindly arms wrapping the twins with their too-big heads. Kristina’s there, her Eden dressed in what looks like an Elizabethan ruff. Then there’s Amanda and Bobby at the heart of the photo. She seems older than in real life, her cheekbones softer, hair more mussed than usual, and although there’s no resemblance to speak of, Raf’s genes so dominating the shape of every one of Bobby’s features, no one would think that she wasn’t the baby’s mother.

Erin’s spent hours in the last two days looking at the photostream of Bobby that Raf set up when he was born. The boy always looks concerned in pictures. But there’s a few, a few where he’s looking at Erin and she’s looking back at him and she sees it, love. Pure unbridled love in both of their faces and she knows she would never hurt him, not like she hurt Raf. And she feels so annoyed at herself for not having seen it, amid the screaming and the painful feeds and, to her shame, her eyes glued to the screen of her phone, he loves her and needs her and he’s in pain and he’s confused and she can be the person to soothe him through all of that tumult.

She notices something on Bobby’s wrist at the bottom of the image. She zooms in but she can’t see much detail. The class is full of fancy dress, bubbles and all sorts of other baby paraphernalia. There’s a bit where everyone’s given a little silk scarf so perhaps someone’s tied something onto him. Erin takes a screenshot and then zooms in on the image. It’s not a scarf. It’s a bracelet. The picture has started to pixelate, but it’s a bracelet with what looks like beads on it. Or stones.

Erin sits up in bed. Why is he wearing a bracelet? And why hasn’t he been wearing it around the house when Erin’s been with him? That means Amanda must be putting it on him when they’re out of the house. She hadn’t wanted to leave Bobby with Amanda but she didn’t feel she had a choice. She had assaulted Raf, if he was telling her she needed a break, she couldn’t say no, but the honey in the milk, the cuddling, lying about the painting and now this. She has to tell Raf, she has to get him back on her side, make him understand that Amanda is up to something, but if she mentions a bracelet, she can picture the conversation, picture him sighing, turning away from her, clutching the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger, perhaps insisting that she goes to see someone.

Erin looks on Mercedes’ Instagram and sees that Amanda is out with them at the playground near the seafront and she bolts out of bed and down the stairs, outside into the garden, the mud soaking into the bottom of her slippers as she gets over to Amanda’s studio. There has to be something, there has to be some clue as to what it is she’s up to. The first thing Erin sees on the table is Amanda’s crystal arrangement, but the stones are different now. The grey obelisk still stands in the middle, the pale pink stones, the bright red rubies, the hot-pink crystals with white, the same ones she found in the bag. But now there are blue stones interspersed, small royal-blue pebbles arranged in a triangle among the lines of stones. She hovers her phone over the top and takes a picture. She looks at the pattern that the stones make on her camera and sees the shape of a star, a five-pointed star. A pentagram, the shape she’s seen so many times in schlocky scenes of high school séances. Hadn’t she noticed the shape before or is this new? There’s nothing here that tells her anything, but these blue stones, what do they mean? And why has the shape changed?

She looks underneath the sofa bed and sees the jar is still there. She pulls it out but it’s different as well. The glass has been covered with some sort of purple material that’s been taped up with parcel tape. Erin tries to find a chink in the opaque material to shine her phone light into but there isn’t one. There’s a faint smell from the jar, something furtive. Erin puts it back in its hiding place but then makes a note on her phone of what she remembers being in it, a doll, chilli powder, was there some mud? She writes it down anyway, no idea what this list is for, but it feels good to be out of bed and doing something proactive. Raf might be right. She might be losing the plot. Perhaps all of this, all of her suspicions of Amanda, are driven by some cynical outlook that thinks anything remotely spiritual is in some way suspicious, but ever since Erin saw this woman, this interloper in her house, topless and holding her baby boy sleeping to her breast, she hasn’t been able to shake the idea that there’s something much darker going on than a lovely friend of the family helping out with some childcare.

The built-in wardrobe behind her is slightly ajar and Erin opens it up to see Amanda’s rucksack. Erin rifles her hand through the two main sections but they’re both completely empty. She hears a rustling outside and swings round, panicked, face hot with embarrassment but it’s only a seagull that’s landed on the decking outside the studio. She puts the bag back in the cupboard but as she does she feels something in a pocket of the top flap. She unzips the pocket and pulls out Amanda’s passport. It looks brand new. The only stamp in it is from this trip. She flicks to the back page and sees that the passport’s starting date is 3 January. Erin tries to think back to when she arrived, it