Chapter 1: The Twenty-Second Morning
My kids were late for school three times because my neighbor kept blocking our driveway — On the fourth Monday I decided to teach her a lesson she'll never forget.
My neighbor parked across our driveway for the twenty-second morning in a row, and when I asked her to move it, she told me I'd survive.
Her name's Denise.
She moved into number 14 in May.
She has a driveway of her own and two spaces on the road outside it, and for reasons I still don't understand, she puts her silver Corsa across the bottom of ours.
Not near it.
Across it, nose into the hedge, so there's no angle out.
The first time I knocked, she was lovely.
"Oh — I'll only be a minute, sorry!"
Second time, same sentence, word for word.
By the fourth time, I stopped believing it and started photographing the car with the time on my phone.
She stood at her front window and watched me do it.
Tuesday the ninth was the bad one.
I had both boys in the back — eight and six — bags on, shoes on, and we sat on that drive for twenty-two minutes.
My six-year-old asked if he was going to be in trouble again.
He'd had a late mark two weeks running and he'd worked out that the late marks go up on a chart in his classroom with everybody's name on it.
I walked them in the end.
I got to work an hour late and had a conversation with my manager I have never had to have in eleven years.
So that afternoon I knocked again.
"Denise.
I'm asking you properly now.
My kids are being marked late and it's affecting my job."
She had one hand on the door frame.
She looked at me for a moment, and then she rolled her eyes.
"You'll survive."
And she shut the door.
That night I didn't knock, and I didn't post a note through her door, and I didn't say a word to my husband about it either.
I set an alarm for half past five.
I got up in the dark, made a coffee, and stood at the kitchen window looking at that silver Corsa with the hedge in front of it.
Then I picked up my phone, scrolled back through three weeks of photographs with the times on them, and made one call.
I was still on the phone when I noticed her bedroom curtains.
Closed.
Not a light on in the whole house.
I said, "No, she's asleep.
Take your time."
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What did she do next — and what happened when Denise woke up?
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