Today's Reading
CHAPTER TWO
As the call came in, the bedside clock read 03:17. Nicola Bridge was not asleep.
She had managed just under four hours, waking around 2:42 a.m. Since then, she had been lying still, refusing the urge to pick up her phone or turn a light on, instead keeping her head on the pillow and examining the new ceiling. The light from the hall—they still kept it on overnight, despite their son, Ethan, now being seventeen, a habit from his childhood years none of them yet wished to break—was coming through the gap in the door, casting a narrow shaft of light across the floor and the end of the bed.
Nicola had not yet managed an undisturbed night in the new house. Seven weeks and counting. She didn't think it was the house. The house was fine. The bedroom was fine. She even hoped to like it, in time. But she found herself jolting awake around three o'clock every morning.
Angry.
She had always been a light sleeper. That only increased with Ethan's birth, when she had found herself more sensitive to night noise, alert to the needs of her new son. In the years since, undisturbed nights had become panaceas enjoyed only by others, including Mike. When they first got together, she had boggled with admiration at the way he slept: rarely moving, seemingly at peace. He claimed never to dream, either. She had found that suspicious.
She'd learned to live with her own nocturnal wakefulness. Previously she had even liked having the dark to herself. The silence meant she could think, sometimes about work, sometimes about life. It occasionally brought clarity or a new perspective. That had changed since the move. Her 3 a.m. thoughts were no longer ones she wanted to be alone with. Quite the opposite.
She could feel the anger rising as she lay there. The sweep of bedbound emotion usually followed the same pattern. Anger would become resentment, which would slowly slide into self-doubt, guilt, ultimately falling into a pit of profound existential dread, before once again rising up into what she could only describe as a seethe. Her heart would be racing once she hit seethe mode, and this was the moment she would attempt to regulate her breathing.
Some nights she would be lucky and get back to sleep by five or so. Others, she would lie there till seven, having at some point shoved in earphones and started listening to her playlist of songs which took her back to being seventeen and full of hope.
The question that tugged at her, the undertow of every concern as she lay there in the early hours of every morning, was simple: 'have I made the right decision? Have I been a fool?'
* * *
Her ceiling-staring was harshly interrupted by the buzzing on the bedside table. Nicola was still in the habit of laying her phone, switched to vibrate, on a soft flannel overnight so that any call would disturb only her, as the lighter sleeper of the two. The flannel now was moot, but she hadn't changed the habit. She grabbed the phone quickly, feeling it buzz in her hand, answered the call and took in the urgency of the voice on the other end of the line.
Detective Sergeant Nicola Bridge listened to the description of what she was being summoned to with rising incredulity.
* * *
As she attempted to slip noiselessly out of the bedroom and into the light of the landing, she crashed into two as yet unpacked moving boxes and swore.
Ethan must have moved them out of his own way as he stumbled to bed, repositioning them as a trip hazard for anyone else: the oblivious self-regard of a seventeen-year-old expressed in cardboard.
The door of the spare bedroom opened a crack and a bleary-eyed Mike peered out.
"Sorry, sorry..." whispered Nicola.
"Everything all right?" he mumbled back, still half asleep.
"Got a shout," she said, holding up her mobile as documentary evidence.
Mike nodded. "Go safe," he said, and retreated mole-like to the darkness of the spare room, softly closing the door.
I'm glad you're sleeping fine, thought Nicola uncharitably as she headed downstairs.
* * *
...
