Read Under Your Skin for Free Online Page A

just . . .”
    I take the photo and pretend to study it, and then I put it back on the mantelpiece. It makes me feel sad, the picture. I take a while lining it up so it is symmetrical with a picture of Millie doing gym.
    “So,” he says, “I expect you will be hearing from us.”
    “Really?” I say. “Oh, victim support. Of course.”
    “Victim support?”
    “We had a visit from an officer concerned about my mental health when my mobile phone was nicked out of my handbagduring a trip to Cineworld. She was really quite persistent. So I imagine you’re offered counseling when you find a dead body. Or maybe I’m wrong about that.”
    “I suppose the real victim of this crime isn’t in a perfect position to receive counseling in this particular case, however persistent.” It’s a reproof, and he is probably right, but I do wonder whether he realizes how awful it is to be an ordinary person and find a body.
    “A lot of alliteration in that sentence,” I say.
    “Plosives. A p is a plosive.”
    We study each other, as if neither of us is quite sure about the other anymore.
    “Anyway, I don’t need counseling. I’m stronger than I look,” I say.
    He is still standing by the mantelpiece and in this moment he seems to make up his mind about something. I can hear doors slamming in the street outside, the high-pitched squeals of exuberant girls. It’s too late. I didn’t get him out in time.
    “You know I’m just really struck,” he says, “by the physical similarities between you—or the way you look in this photograph—and the girl out there.”
    He gestures to the window with his chin, and I know he doesn’t mean my daughter, who is already clattering up the steps.
    “Just because we’ve both got red hair,” I say, flicking it over my shoulder to hide how unsettled I feel. “She looked much younger than me. And . . . and shorter.”
    He is zipping up his jacket, pulling on that greasy spot of fabric at the bottom, then stuffs his hands in the pockets. As he crosses the room, I notice the soles of his brogues leave the shape of themselves in the nap of the cream rug.
    At the front door, he says an odd thing: “ ‘Unnatural deeds do breed unnatural troubles.’ William Shakespeare.”
    “Poetry now. You’re not just a pretty face.”
    “What I mean is, be careful. That’s all. Be careful.”

SATURDAY
    Philip is next to me when I come to. He is down for the count, a still, quiet heaviness, a steadiness to his breathing. A fragment of feather on the pillow by his mouth flutters when he exhales—the only sign he is still alive. I have never known anyone to sleep as deeply, or wake as abruptly, as Philip. It’s a knack, I suppose, or a gift. It was about 2:00 AM when last night’s call came. He sat bolt upright and talked for ten minutes about convertible bonds, calculations spilling from his mouth like coins from a fruit machine, and then he hung up and lay back down and was dead asleep again before you could say “Diversified return.” He hardly noticed me; I kept my eyes closed.
    He had promised he wouldn’t be late when I rang him, said he would forgo dinner at Zuma, but in the end, I let him down. Exhaustion, the same head-crashing, world-blotting fatigue I remember from the day I buried my mother, caught up with me. I had fallen asleep before he came in; in fact, I kept falling asleep. First, while reading to Millie. We’re reading Swallows and Amazons, which we both love, but there is more sailing in it than you remember, and to a landlubber, it can have its longueurs. And later, after extracting myself from the entanglement of stuffed pink rabbit and duvet and small warm body, in my bath: Deep Relax oil, which Clara gave me after my mother died. She told me it would do thejob of a sleeping pill or a big glass of wine. (Well, I had had one or two of those as well.) In the end, I rolled into bed, legs snarled in a towel, still damp.
    I wake with the same headache, the same