Fiction Friday (2)

Millie didn’t open the message immediately. She tugged gently on the charging cord and felt the phone come free in her hand, then she sat down on the edge of the bed, underwear forgotten. She hovered her fingers over the keyboard and sighed, the stood up, making her way purposefully out of the bedroom and down the hall towards the bedrooms where her children slept.

Livvy was on her side, her elephant tucked in the crook of her arm, her breath softly tickling the little tuft of hair on the top of his head. She had had that elephant since she was four years old, he had been a replacement for a beloved lion that she had lost on holiday, one minute there and the next gone, Liv absolutely inconsolable. She had sobbed through picking Eli, the tears drying on her face as she realised that she could tuck his head under her chin just as she been able to do with Lion. She had fallen asleep in her car seat, and Millie and Tom had exchanged a look of pure relief. Stood in that bedroom, her hand hovering over her daughter’s shoulder, she could have been back in that car, the heat on the brink of unbearable, her legs slim and sun kissed in a tiny dress that she’d never have the nerve to wear today. Shaking her head, she pulled the duvet an imperceptible amount up the bed and touched a kiss onto Liv’s forehead.

George was splayed out on his back, one of his many soft toys leaning on his cheek. Millie moved it aside, and his mouth moved towards her hand as if he could sense that she was standing there, even in his sleep. She bought the palm of her hand against his face, her fingertips almost able to feel the flutter of his absurdly long eyelashes and she smiled. She took a couple of steps backwards and sunk into the armchair underneath his window. His face was illuminated just slightly by the nightlight he still preferred to have on and she allowed herself a good long look at her little boy as she tried to think clearly.

The likelihood was that there was a perfectly good reason for his silence. She had not contacted Emma since the stilted conversation of a few days before, and Emma hadn’t contacted her. She wasn’t surprised in the least, she had read through the messages just once before deleting them and had been mortified that she hadn’t thought through what she should have said, why she hadn’t just taken half an hour out to think about exactly what she wanted to say. Not that it mattered, Millie was seriously past caring, but when she did think about it, there was a pang of embarrassment.

She had speculated wildly about the reasons for his silence. For not talking to his children mostly. This was a man who cried the night before a tour, at the very thought of leaving them, this was the longest by far that he hadn’t spoken to them. She was livid with him for that, furious that she had had to fob them off, to lie to them, to fudge when he would talk to them next. Had he been ill? Had he broken his phone, or lost it? Had he been unable to get to a computer to let her know via email where he was and what he was doing?

Millie sighed and stood up, glancing just once at George as she left the room. She would check on him again before she went to sleep, she always did, thoughts of that would happen if she didn’t never very far from her mind. She made her way slowly down the hall to her bedroom, her phone still lit up, face up on the duvet. She sat on the edge of the bed and scooped it into her palm, quickly tapping out her password and opening up the message screen.

She took a deep breath and let her eyes focus on the screen.

There were three messages, the first two sent quickly then a pause of ten minutes before the third.

“Just remember that I love you, through all this, remember that.”