The other thing he didn’t understand was why she’d insisted on booking into the Marriott down on the waterfront when her parents had a perfectly good six-bedroom house less than an hour’s drive away in Cambridge.
In that, at least, Vince and her parents had been in total agreement.
Even so, inviting him had been the easy part. Calling home had been an entirely different ball game. Several times she’d picked up her office phone and started to punch in her parents’ number. Once she’d even allowed the line to connect and had heard the phone on the other end start ringing. But always she’d hung up before there had been any chance of anyone’s answering.
What was she supposed to say if they did? Hey, Mom, it’s me. I’ve got a new boyfriend and I’d like you to meet him. Yes, I know we’ve hardly spoken since I phoned to tell you Simeon had dumped me and you said I told you so….
She could always play dumb. Hey, Mom, how’s Pete? How’re the kids? How’s Dad’s work? I was thinking, if you’re around at the weekend, Vince and I might drop by.
Or confrontational? Hey, Mom. No, still not pregnant, sorry. But I thought maybe I’d come see you anyway. Maybe you could invite my brother and his brood, just to highlight to my new man what a total letdown I am on the grandchildren front.
The fact was, when you hadn’t seen your parents for three years, had only exchanged holiday and birthday cards since…Well, there was no easy way to pick up the phone.
And so she hadn’t. Resorting instead to the coward’s way out, she’d e-mailed her father at his office, mentioned that they were going to be on the East Coast anyway, and suggested that she and Vince come to visit.
It had been so long since she’d lived in the States that it had slipped Melanie’s mind that they would be there right after Thanksgiving. Thank God they hadn’t chosen to go a week earlier. Thanksgiving weekend with her folks would have been way too loaded. Much later and it would have been too close to Christmas for comfort. And anyway, Christmas was out of the question for Vince. His holiday season was fully booked with a complex web of Ellie-related arrangements. Christmas Eve and Boxing Day were his, Christmas Day she would be with her mother. New Year’s Eve, Ellie was with Vince again, New Year’s Day, back to her mother.
And, as always, Vince would be doing all the delivering and collecting, driving on some of the worst days of the year. Melanie couldn’t help feeling he’d been set up, but she knew she had to keep that thought to herself if she wanted to be part of his complex Christmas equation. And she did.
Melanie had met Ellie twice since her visit to personalshopper, and their relationship was growing easier with each meeting. The girl was chatty and friendly and outspoken in the way only children can be. She was certainly easier company than almost everyone else Melanie spent time with. To Ellie, Melanie was Daddy’s friend; and now that Daddy didn’t live with Ellie, Daddy needed a friend because otherwise he would be lonely when Ellie wasn’t there.
Having accused Vince of planting this devious, if brilliant, thought, Melanie had been forced to accept the fact that Ellie had arrived there on her own. It had been that straightforward.
At the beginning, Melanie had wondered if Eve was doing something wrong with Ian’s daughters. Getting on with Ellie seemed so effortless. How could Hannah be so much more difficult? But Vince had seen it more clearly. Ellie wasn’t threatened by Melanie. Melanie was Daddy’s friend, so she was Ellie’s friend. Ellie was happy to let Melanie keep Vince company when Ellie herself was otherwise occupied. Which was often. After all, Ellie was a busy girl, what with having to look after her mother on top of school and ballet and music lessons and drama.
For Hannah and, to a lesser extent, Sophie, it was different. Their father had them. Why would he possibly need Eve too?
Put like that, Melanie could see Eve’s problem.
Melanie’s father had responded promptly. Maybe not with as much enthusiasm as she would have liked, but with as much as she could reasonably have hoped for. His acceptance had come with inevitable grumbles. What a shame you couldn’t have managed a week earlier and been here for Thanksgiving weekend, after missing all these years. Your mother is surprised you won’t be staying at the family home. She says it’s no trouble to make up your old room and one of the spare rooms. She has to change your bed anyway, after Peter’s eldest will have used it for Thanksgiving.
How one person could pack so much disapproval into a single paragraph never failed to amaze Melanie. All those sly little put-downs. A dozen responses had itched to escape her fingers and wreak havoc on the keyboard. A dozen responses to pour oil on fire, as they had a thousand times before when she had bitten her tongue less resolutely.
Instead she’d decided to ignore it. It had been that or get into a family fight before she’d even set foot in America. And Melanie had been determined to prove that this time, she had moved on.
Boston’s smell always took her by surprise. Briny, pungent, a melting pot of salt and that day’s catch stirred by a chill wind off the Atlantic. A constant reminder that the city owed its existence to the sea. Why it came as a shock to her, Melanie didn’t know. She had grown up here, since her family had only moved from the Back Bay area to Cambridge when she’d been well into her teens and her father’s business importing electrical goods from Shanghai had hit the big time.
“I had no idea,” Vince said as he slid into the seat of the car they’d hired, looking better for a night’s sleep in a newly pressed jacket and his smartest jeans. He’d even broken out a pair of real shoes for the occasion. Melanie had only seen him this smart once before…. It didn’t bode well, so she pushed that memory away.
“No idea what?” she asked, unwilling to let black thoughts cloud her day.
“That Boston was a port. I know it probably sounds stupid to you, but I just didn’t know. When people say Boston back home, you think trees, leaves…the whole New England autumn thing, you know.” He shrugged.
Melanie grinned at him. “Trees I can do. But the beginning of December’s a bit late for the leaves. We’re all out of them by mid-November, usually. Mind you, the weather’s so screwed, there might still be some hanging around for your viewing pleasure.”
He punched her arm gently and settled back in his seat to take in the view. How could one person look so instantly at home? Melanie wondered, pushing the doubts that had plagued her since she’d embarked on this to the back of her mind and firmly shutting the door on them. Wherever Vince wound up—with the occasional notable exception—he just put his feet on life’s desk/sofa/dashboard and let events take their course.
What a skill, Melanie thought as she tried to focus on steering them through the traffic that clogged West End’s streets as they made for the Longfellow Bridge.
This was OK, this could work. Vince was a good guy, with a great kid, and she liked being with him. Scratch that, she liked being here with him. Now that was something she thought she’d never say. She liked seeing the city she’d known her whole life, and hadn’t been able to escape from fast enough, through his eyes. It made her wonder if, just maybe, she could learn to love it again. And, by extension, her family.
Surely they would take to Vince? How could they not? And through him, maybe they would take to her again too?
Twenty-five
What am I supposed to wear?” Lou demanded.
Her mood, which had been ricocheting precariously from exhilaration to thunderous ever since Clare had told her that her dad was back, was now practically murderous.
“I get to meet my dad for the first time,” she glared at Clare, making it clear precisely whose fault she considered this, “and all my clothes are crap.”
Taking a deep breath, Clare tried not to rise to the bait. She had considered taking her daughter shopping to buy a new outfit for the occasion, but there was no way her credit card would stretch to it.
“Wear what you usually do, my love,” she said mildly. “It’s you he wants to see. But get on with it. Will…your dad�
��s…going to be here in fifteen minutes.”
Dad. The word made her want to gag.
Lou glowered at her as if Clare’s comment was beneath contempt, and slammed off up the hall to her bedroom.
Clare had thought her heart would break irretrievably the morning she’d punched Will’s number into her cell phone and called him to declare surrender. She had not told him that his victory had come from the unexpected army she had found marshaled against her. The enemies lurking among her closest allies. It had been their support for his position—Eve, Lily and even Mandy—that had finally defeated her.
Will had had the good grace to keep the triumph out of his voice as he’d suggested he write a letter to Lou, explaining “everything.” When Clare had agreed, but only on the condition that he send it via her with a stamped-addressed envelope so she could censor it first and then repost it, he’d made it clear what he thought of her idea but had gone along with it anyway. Why wouldn’t he? He’d won. What had it cost him to give her that particular inch?
As it was, his letter hadn’t really explained anything at all. Certainly no more than Louisa already knew.
All it had said was that he was Lou’s father; he was deeply sorry he had been out of her life for so long; and he hoped to make it up to her now. After Lou had read it what had to have been over a hundred times, the first few out loud, the rest huddled behind her closed bedroom door, the fury that Clare had been waiting for had finally come crashing down on Clare’s head.
Secretly Clare hoped the fury held firm in the face of Will’s charm. She had a horrible feeling it wouldn’t.
“What’s with the eyeliner?” Clare asked when Lou emerged fourteen minutes and fifty-nine seconds later.
Her daughter’s eyes were rimmed with hard black lines. She looked both much older and very, very young.
“I’m not taking it off. You can’t make me.”
Clare was about to point out that, actually, she could—if she could be bothered, if she had a death wish—when the doorbell rang. “That’ll be him,” she said unnecessarily.
“You don’t say,” Lou shot back as she stomped toward the door.
Keep calm, Clare told herself. She doesn’t mean it. She’s just scared.
“If he hates me it’s all your fault!”
Wow, Clare thought as the door slammed with such violence that a framed print on the hall wall bounced on its cord. Where did Lou learn to be so harsh? Surely she doesn’t get that from me? Does she?
Clare had promised herself she wouldn’t look. That she wouldn’t stand at her window, that she wouldn’t peer through a crack in the curtain, that she wouldn’t make it harder for herself than it already was.
So, of course, she did all three.
He was waiting on the pavement below her window, hovering beside his car, which was something large, midnight blue and new. Something Clare was sure would impress the hell out of Lou. At least he had the grace to look nervous.
His coat was just the right side of too big, his hair the right side of short, his body the right side of skinny and lanky. From this distance he could almost pass for the boy who had stood outside her mother’s front door waiting for Clare to hurtle down the stairs into his arms fifteen years ago.
Then the downstairs door slammed and fifteen years vanished and Lou was there. Tall, slender, eyes so dark that, from this distance, they looked like black pools, thick dark floppy hair…the mirror image of the man who stood on the pavement with his arms outstretched, the man whose arms she was throwing herself into. The image of her father.
It was an hour before Clare was able to pull herself together. If she thought she’d cried after surrendering to Will, both times, it was nothing to the sobs that wracked her as she recalled her daughter folded in Will’s arms.
The hug had gone on for ever. It had been all Clare could do not to run downstairs and rip them apart, but she had caught herself. Instead she had cried as father and daughter had hugged and hugged, as if hugging could make up for all the years of missed hugs and bath times and birthdays and Christmases. Then he’d opened the passenger door of his big, midnight blue car, and her daughter—her daughter—had slid into the seat as if big cars and wealthy fathers had been something she’d been born to.
A minute later Clare had watched, tears still washing down her face, feeling her heart twist in her ribs as if Will had grasped it, as Will drove Lou away.
She didn’t know which hurt her most: that Will had come back into her life and turned it upside down or that he had come back, but so obviously not for her. All this time, she saw now, she had been waiting. Waiting for nothing.
Clare didn’t know what to do with herself.
She couldn’t believe how silent the apartment was without Lou. It was stupid, because the apartment was always silent without Lou, and usually Clare relished the peace and quiet. Not to mention the hot water. But this time it was as if her apartment knew the silence was more permanent.
Not permanent, she corrected herself. Three hours was hardly permanent. Lou had been known to spend longer than that in Topshop.
Will had promised he’d have her back by five. And he would. She knew he would. A lot rested on this visit. He wasn’t Satan, he hadn’t come to steal her baby and feed Lou to the flames. He just wanted to take his daughter somewhere quiet so they could talk. The apartment was too small, and Clare would have been ashamed to let him see inside anyway. It would have been pointless to refuse.
She could always pick up the phone and go out too. Lou wasn’t the only one with places to go, people to see. Clare hovered by the hand-set, running through the names and numbers logged in her head.
Eve, usually her first port in a storm, was tied up with Ian and his kids. To be fair, she’d already offered to play hooky, to distract Clare with a late lunch, alcohol and mindless chat. But Clare had put on a brave voice and refused. Stupidly, she saw now.
Lily? Hardly. She and Lily were only back on speaking terms, thanks to Eve’s international peacekeeping skills.
Visiting her mom was out too. “Finally!” she’d exclaimed, her voice almost exhilarated when Clare had called her in search of sympathy and possibly tea and cake too. “That girl needs a father, didn’t I always say so?”
The answers to that had been so many and various that Clare, for once in her life, had been speechless. Good job too, since she was running out of family members to fall out with.
There was Mandy, of course, but much as Clare liked her, she felt awkward about ringing her again.
Melanie? She would never expose herself to Melanie like that. Ms. skinny latte and dressing on the side? No way. The mere thought of the horror written across Melanie’s face as the last meeting had descended into sibling warfare still made Clare shudder with embarrassment.
There were friends from school, but they were just that—“teacher friends.” Fine for sharing a coffee in the staffroom and moaning about work, but not people you turned to in a crisis. She could call one if she fancied a shopping trip, but they’d realized years ago that participation in their much-gossiped-about monthly shopping hits on Brent Cross was out of the question for Clare.
So that was that, then.
She was all out of people to phone. Not much to show for thirty-three years of friendships, Clare thought bitterly. A teenage pregnancy did that to your social life. The friends who had deserted you in case your condition had been contagious (or if they hadn’t, their parents had) and the opportunities to make new ones had been few and far between.
In the kitchen Clare flicked the switch on the kettle to make tea, then flicked it off again.
She could cook, she supposed. Maybe bake something for Lou’s return? Chocolate fudge cake always went down well. At least when Lou forgot she was on a permanent diet.
Reaching into the overhead cupboard she took down a bag of self-rising flour, cocoa powder and the scales, and then stopped….
Lou would have eaten already. And something told her baking wasn’t
going to cut it today. Her heart wasn’t in it. Her heart was speeding along the A10 in a smart blue car.
Replacing the ingredients in the cupboard, Clare opened the fridge. She ate the remaining triangle of Laughing Cow creamy swiss and peered inside Lou’s personal jar of crunchy peanut butter before pouring herself the dregs of that week’s bottle of wine. Barely half a glass. Not enough for her sorrows to even paddle in.
Her purse didn’t offer much respite.
It contained a single ten-pound note. If she went out and bought another bottle, she wouldn’t have enough for delivery pizza tonight. And it was Saturday. Lou always had pizza on Saturday. It was the law.
That said, if Lou ate with Will, she might not want pizza. On the other hand, if Lou hadn’t, Clare’s spending the money would simply highlight her already glaring financial inadequacies. Unwilling to risk it, Clare slid her purse back into her bag.
At the end of the hall, Lou’s bedroom was dark and smelled of teenager. All dodgy perfume and dirty socks. Clare pulled the curtains to let in the weak winter sun, took one look at the mess it revealed, and shut them again. But not quickly enough to avoid her red-eyed, puffy-faced reflection in Lou’s mirror.
Her own room wasn’t much better. It didn’t smell of teenager, obviously, but it smelled of something, and it was crammed with junk. It was where Clare kept the flat’s overspill; everything there wasn’t room for in the other two and a half rooms lived here, which meant one wall was piled high with cardboard boxes full of the detritus of her and Lou’s existence.
She hadn’t even known what she was looking for until she hefted a box out of its place halfway down the pile and emptied its contents onto her unmade bed. Her teenaged diaries. She hadn’t looked at them or even thought about them for years. Not since Lou was born. She hadn’t had time to keep them up, with a baby to look after and a degree to get. And then teacher training, real lessons and marking homework had taken their places. Or so she’d told herself.
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