Page 114 - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

“Yes please.” She measured tea into a teapot, put the shopping away in the

cupboards. The tea brewed and then she and Jacob sat down in the living room,
he took a couple of sips and said: “Remind me how this is superior to a nice cup
of Tetley?”
She couldn’t really taste the tea herself. She was sweating, and Jacob wasn’t.
He was comfortable, right at home. She took a jumper off, to see if she’d feel the
cold less that way. Putting on jumpers and turning on the heating only seemed to
increase the cold. When she looked at Jacob from the side she could see that he

wasn’t her husband. He had no shadow and he didn’t smell like her husband—he
didn’t smell of anything—he was warm and he could drink tea and be snarky
about the tea, and perhaps she would’ve been more willing to keep him around if
he’d been shadowless but smelled right. But the way things were she was too
conscious of this person not really being Jacob.

“Sorry, but I think you’d better go,” she said, checking her watch for some
reason. It’s twelve-thirty, time for you to go.
He set his cup down on the coffee table. “OK. But if you tell me to leave I
won’t come back.”
She patted his knee. “That’s fine. Thanks for understanding.”
He stood up, and so did she. “I’m leaving, but everything that’s between us
will stay.”

She couldn’t help laughing at that. “You’re so soppy, Jacob.”
He laughed too, then put an abrupt brake on the laughter. “I didn’t mean it in
a soppy way.”
“Er . . . OK . . . Bye . . .”
“Good to see you,” he said, and left the room. She stayed still for hundreds of
heartbeats and thousands of shivers but didn’t hear the front door open or close.

At twelve-thirty she got up and made sure that he was gone, then she recorded
the entire encounter in her notebook and broke a rule of the test by phoning
Jacob. If you tell me to leave I won’t come back, now that she thought about it
she didn’t like the sound of that. Jacob took a long time to answer the phone;
she’d almost given up when his voice came down the line: “J?”
“Jacob! Are you OK?”
“Yeah . . . you?”

“Fine, just . . . Have you seen me at home yet?”
“No. Not yet,” he said. Something else had happened. He’d gone out for a bit
and come back to find the front door open (she bit her lip so that she didn’t