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The portrait was in black-and-white, a studio shot taken when Rachel was still a toddler and Lucy a baby. The two children, wearing matching white dresses, sat on their parents' laps. Samantha laughed down at her daughters, her eyes averted from the camera. Josh, however, smiled directly into its lens, his jaw more angular than that of the man Michael knew now. His hair, too, was darker, cut in the same boyish style he still wore, but without the dustings of grey spreading at his temples.
Michael met the gaze of this younger Josh for a moment. He wondered if he should call him and let him know about the open back door. But his phone was in his flat, and Michael didn't know either Josh or Samantha's numbers. And perhaps he shouldn't worry them, anyway? From what he could tell there were no signs of disturbance. The kitchen looked just as it always did.
Michael had known the Nelsons for only seven months by then, but their friendship, once made, had been quick to gather momentum. Over the last few weeks it had felt as if he'd eaten at their table more often than at his own next door. The path that led from their lawn through a break in the hedge to the communal garden of his own block of flats had been indiscernible when he'd first moved in. But now there was already the faint tracing of a track, worn by his feet when he dropped by in the evenings and those of Samantha and the girls when they called for him on the weekends. As a family, the Nelsons had become a settling presence in his life, a vital ballast against all that had gone before. Which is why Michael could be so sure the kitchen hadn't been searched or disturbed. It was the room in which he'd spent the most time with them, where they'd eaten and drunk and where so much of his recent healing had happened. The room where for the first time since he'd lost Caroline he'd learnt, with the help of Josh and Samantha, to remember not just her absence, but also her.
Looking past the family portrait, Michael glanced over the chairs and sideboards in the conservatory. He should probably check the rest of the house, too. This is what he told himself as he went over to the phone and browsed the Post-it notes scattered around its handset. Samantha and Josh wouldn't want him to leave without doing so. But he'd have to be quick. He'd come round only to retrieve a screwdriver he'd lent Josh a few nights before. He needed it to fix a blade for his lesson. Once he'd found it and had checked the other rooms, he'd be gone.
Michael looked at his watch again. It was already almost twenty-five past three. If anything looked amiss he could always call Josh as he walked to his lesson over the Heath. Wherever he was, Michael figured, he and the girls couldn't be too far from the house. Turning from the phone and its scribbled notes, Michael walked towards the door leading into the hallway. As he crossed the kitchen, its terra-cotta tiles cool against his feet, his damp socks left a trail of moist footprints, slow-shrinking behind him as if a wind were covering his tracks.
Two
It was Josh whom Michael had first met, on the same night he'd moved onto South Hill Drive seven months earlier. Michael had never thought he'd live in London again. But when his wife, Caroline, hadn't returned from what should have been a two-week job in Pakistan, he'd eventually decided to sell their cottage in Wales and move back to the capital.
Coed y Bryn was an old Welsh longhouse, a low-ceilinged cottage and barn built into an isolated hillside outside Chepstow. The nearest other building was a rural chapel, used only for weddings and funerals. Woods and sky filled the views from its windows. It was not, Michael was told by his friends, a place to be alone. With Caroline gone, they'd said, he needed people, distraction. Eventually one of her work colleagues, Peter, had offered him a flat to rent in a fifties block overlooking Hampstead Heath. When Peter sent through the details, Michael didn't open the email for days. But then one night, after another long day on his own, he'd uncorked a bottle of red and sat down with his laptop beside the fire. Opening his browser, he'd clicked on Peter's message and looked through its attachments.
Excerpted from I Saw a Man by Owen Sheers. Copyright © 2015 by Owen Sheers. Excerpted by permission of Nan A. Talese. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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