The Broken by Tamar Cohen Page B

how you’d expect her to be. The thing is though, Dan, she still thinks you’re coming back.’
    Dan looked pained. ‘Obviously it’s going to take a while to sink in. I don’t expect her to accept it overnight, but you know . . .’ He gazed at Hannah with wide eyes, and she saw something in them that she’d never noticed before, a hardness glinting beneath the layers of navy and aquamarine like diamond wrapped in tissue paper. ‘I’m never going back.’

5
    Josh found having a house guest even harder than he’d anticipated. It wasn’t that Dan was intrusive – they hardly ever saw him, and when they did he always seemed to be on the phone, long calls taken at the end of the garden, his shoulders hunched against the late-September chill. It was just that his presence in the flat was unsettling . Not just the physical evidence of him – the suitcase in the corner, from which faded T-shirts and jeans spilled out messily, the extra toothbrush and shaving stuff in the bathroom. It was also the change in the atmosphere, a sense of restlessness that stirred up the air in the flat, turning what used to be a relaxing environment into a place where you couldn’t sit down without feeling as if there was something else you really ought to be getting on with, another world outside your living-room window that was going on without you.
    It was getting to the stage where he was almost relieved to be at school, where even the giggling of the Year Eight girls and the rudeness of the Year Eleven boys felt reassuringly unchanged and familiar.
    During lessons, there was little time to think about anything other than whatever set text he was attempting to drum into the largely unreceptive minds of his pupils. ‘Not being funny, Sir, but why do we have to read the book when we could just go and see the film?’
    Only at break times or, like now, driving home in their thirteen-year-old Golf that shuddered alarmingly up the hill towards Crouch End did his mind swing back to what was going on at home, and he’d find himself frowning as an unexplained knot formed in his stomach and his heart beat slightly faster than normal. When he tried to analyse what was making him feel so on edge, he found he couldn’t put his finger on it. It wasn’t that Dan ever got in the way, he was so rarely around, so why was his presence, or rather his absence, so unnerving?
    ‘Maybe you’re just jealous because he’s out being single and having fun while you’re stuck at home with me and Lil,’ Hannah had teased him the night before.
    Josh had made a joke of it, pressing his nose up against the front window as if desperate to escape, much to the delight of Lily, who insisted on climbing on to a chair to push her own plump cheeks up against the cold glass. Now, though, he was starting to wonder uncomfortably if Hannah might not have hit upon something. Not that he was jealous of Dan. Josh didn’t envy his friend the late nights in crowded bars or wherever it was he was hanging out when he wasn’t in their flat. No, it was more than that – something to do with the sight of that suitcase in the corner, so compact and portable, and the way Dan breezed in and out without having to give any account of himself, and the whiff of fresh starts that clung to him. It was that sense of the future opening up. Josh felt, by comparison, washed up and overburdened.
    In private, Hannah griped about Dan’s presence. She hated not being able to wander into the living room if she woke up during the night to sit down at the dining-room table and work in the T-shirt she wore to bed, or scroll through Twitter catching up on people’s news, and she resented the pile of clumsily folded blankets on the end of the sofa whenever they sat down to watch telly. But as Josh waited by the temporary traffic lights, gently revving the accelerator and hoping against hope that this wouldn’t be the day the Golf’s dodgy clutch gave up the ghost altogether, he found himself