My Husband's Son: A dark and gripping psychological thriller by Deborah O'Connor Page A

fire or start someone’s heart, all in one convenient mounted spot.
    ‘Mark? Lager?’ I asked in a diversionary swoop. I was now standing right in front of him. I didn’t wait for a reply and put the can in his hand.
    ‘Thanks,’ he said, belatedly.
    He still hadn’t made eye contact with Jason or I. But then we were used to this. It often happened with new people. They felt that perhaps they should say something, some words of condolence or sympathy, and sometimes they did. Having to chat to people we’d only just met about how well we were or weren’t coping with the loss of our children was always hard and, when I and Jason would talk about it in private, we would always snip at how, though well intentioned, most folk were thoughtless and needed to learn how to keep their mouths shut.
    Carla had been in the garden but now she re-entered the kitchen, went over to Mark, whispered in his ear and giggled. Smiling benignly, he let her lead him outside and over to the bench we kept pushed up against the back wall. I watched through the window as she motioned for him to take a seat. Once he was settled, she arranged herself on his knees, wrapped her arms around his neck and nuzzled her cheek against his.
    I could not stop thinking about what I’d seen earlier. That estate agent showing people around did not bode well. What if Keith were to move on before I was able to establish the child’s identity? I looked at Carla and Mark. I was itching to talk to her, but I decided I’d be better off trying to get her on her own at some point later in the evening.
    Placing a couple of painkillers on my tongue, I washed them down with a mouthful of cold rosé and wondered how I’d go about explaining my injuries to Jason. There was one very simple excuse I knew he’d buy without question: high heels. Regardless of the sometimes ankle-twisting consequences, they were the one wardrobe staple I couldn’t be without. I wore them all the time: to work, to the supermarket, to long walks in the country. Most people assumed it was because I was so short and, while this was true to a certain extent (stilettos allowed me the dignity of being able to reach the higher shelves of the supermarket without asking for help), in reality, there was more to it.
    It was hard to explain, even to myself, but by wearing heels – things that by their very nature made it difficult to walk – I found I could force myself to stay conscious of the act of putting one step in front of the other. Yes, they hurt and, yes, sometimes they made life more difficult but, for me, that was kind of the point. Wearing them meant I never switched off to the sensation of the ground striking my ball, sole and heel; wearing them meant I never grew complacent about going forward, onward, towards whatever the future might bring.
    I considered the Eeyore plaster on my knee. It was conspicuous. Jason would ask where it had come from. I reached for the first-aid kit. It would be easy to replace it with something anonymous and flesh-coloured.
    As the anti-inflammatories began to dull the ache in my hip, I emptied a tub of coleslaw into a serving bowl and looked out at the crowd already here. We didn’t have a huge space, but it was enough to comfortably host about twenty people, roughly the amount that seemed to have turned up tonight. It had been a concreted wasteland when we moved in, and Jason had set about renovating it immediately. Fitting a small deck outside the kitchen door, he’d used a thin gravel path to divide the rest of the rectangular space into two, laying lawn on the left and a row of raised beds on the right. I looked towards the end of the garden and the gate that led out to the back alley. A small group of Jason’s first-aid-instructor pals had segregated themselves there and were nursing cans of lager, their bodies turned into each other, in some kind of huddle. Tesh and Anth meanwhile, welders Jason used to work with, were busy tormenting him while he