“How could you?” Eve said. “How could you call him? What gives you the right to play God with my life? It’s not as if you’ve made such a big success of your own.”
Her friend spun around, eyes wide with hurt.
Eve hesitated, but she didn’t stop, couldn’t. She knew she was hurting Clare, but that was fine. Eve wanted someone to hurt as much as she did. “You didn’t even discuss it with me.”
“When would I have done that? Like I said, you’ve hardly got out of bed for the past week. The only bit anyone’s seen of you is the top of your head.”
“Do you want me out? Is that it? All you had to do was say the word and I’d have gone. You didn’t have to do it this way.”
“Where the hell did that come from?”
“That’s why you phoned him, isn’t it? That’s why you told Ian I’d lost the baby. What else did you tell him? Did you tell him everything?”
“Eve!” Clare took a step toward her.
“Well?” Eve demanded.
“Of course not. I told him you were staying here, I told him you’d miscarried. He has a right to know, Eve. And it wasn’t just my decision, it was all of us. I discussed it with the others and they agreed—”
“The others?”
“Lily, Melanie, Mandy…your friends, remember?”
“You told them? You discussed it with Lily, Melanie and Mandy, but not me?” The tears were back in Eve’s eyes, and then they were rolling down her face.
“You weren’t in a fit state,” Clare said. “Of course I did, they’re your friends, they care about you.”
“What did you tell them?” Eve stared at Clare, and for the first time her friend met her gaze. Guilt replaced with…Eve wasn’t sure what. She wished she could lose it again, shout, scream and throw things, but she simply felt hollow.
“I told them you’d been pregnant,” Clare said evenly. “That you’d left Ian when he wanted you to have an abortion, and then you lost the baby anyway.”
“What else?”
“Isn’t that enough?”
Eve didn’t reply.
“Nothing else was mine to tell,” Clare said when the silence between them became too much.
“That much wasn’t yours to tell.”
“Yes, it was.” Clare was defiant. “They care about you. They’re your friends. You can’t go through this alone.”
“Seems like everyone has a say in my life except me.” Eve began to turn away. Where she was going, she had no idea. Back to her bedroom. Clare’s bedroom.
Feeling Clare’s hand on her shoulder, she shook her off.
“I’m sorry you’re angry,” Clare said. “Truly the last thing in the world I want to do is hurt you more than you’re already hurt. But I don’t regret calling Ian and I won’t apologize for it. You’ve been so unhappy you can barely function. I thought Ian should know how unhappy he’d made you. Anyway, he had a right to know about the baby.”
“What about me?” Eve said, fighting back more tears. “What about my rights? Don’t I have a right not to tell him? Didn’t he lose his right when he asked me to get rid of it? Made me choose between him and our baby?”
Clare opened her mouth. Shut it again. “You want me to answer that?” she said finally.
Eve didn’t, not really. Because she knew the answer. Ian already had one Elastoplast baby. Alfie, adorable though he was. And Ian thought he was looking at another one. He didn’t know what had happened when Eve had been at uni. He hadn’t been acting with the full set of information, because she hadn’t given it to him.
Thirty-four
It wasn’t as strange being back at work as Eve had expected. All right, Miriam had obviously felt she’d had to say something to explain her features director’s absence. But it turned out that that something had centered on the collapse of Eve’s relationship, the miscarriage going unmentioned. Eve was grateful for that, at least.
Miriam had told the other department heads in confidence, who’d promptly told their deputies, who’d gotten on the phone and e-mailed their friends. So now the entire industry knew that Eve and Caroline Newsome’s widower’s relationship was over as quickly as it had started; and she’d only been out of the office a week. Admittedly, a week in which she’d been pregnant and then not been, blown her one chance to get Ian back, and thrown her best friend’s good intentions in her face. All in all, not good going, even by Eve’s standards.
Work had always been her lifeline. She should have remembered what a safe haven the office provided and run back to it sooner, instead of wallowing in Clare’s single bed, feeling sorry for herself and making sure everyone else did too. If she’d done that, maybe Clare would still have been speaking to her, not communicating through terse notes.
Poor Lou appeared not to have a clue what the hell was going on between her mother and Eve, other than the fact that she was trapped in a war zone. Although, Eve suspected, she did…the girl was fourteen, for crying out loud. And like most fourteen-year-olds, was fourteen going on forty, and much smarter than most of the adults around her. Smarter than Eve, certainly. Smart enough to use the cold war as an excuse to stay over with her dad as often as possible.
Rolling back her office chair, Eve picked her way past overflowing Marks & Spencer’s bags covering the floor around her desk. Peace offerings. Food and wine for Clare, plus a bottle of champagne so they could toast Eve’s imminent departure. Tonight Eve planned to tell Clare she’d found a apartment via the office message board. Shooter’s Hill wasn’t perfect—for a start, it was south of the river—but it would do as a stopgap until her own tenants vacated. If the landlord would agree to a short-term sublet, Eve was ready to hand over her check for the full amount that evening and be out from under Clare’s feet in just over a week. If not, she’d find a hotel over the weekend. In her purse nestled a hundred pounds’ worth of M&S vouchers, by way of paying her share of the bills and an extra apology. And fifty pounds in Topshop vouchers for Lou, simply for putting up with the grief. Whether it was enough to salvage fourteen years of friendship Eve could only hope.
Relishing the routine, Eve took her newly edited copy from the printer and dumped it in Miriam’s empty tray. There were times when the endless hamster wheel of ideas meetings/issue planning/ commissioning/editing drove her to distraction. If it wasn’t spring/ summer fashion, it was high summer bikini diets. If it wasn’t the autumn/winter catwalk issue, it was Christmas, swiftly followed by a New Year, New You life change special. But now she appreciated it. It reminded Eve she had a purpose; there was something she was good at. She felt, if not whole, then a semblance of her old self again.
As Eve wandered back to her desk, Miriam’s secretary waggled her fingers. “Call for you,” she said. “Sounds like Ian again.” Eve shook her head and turned away, trying not to listen as Beth announced that Eve was in a meeting.
“No,” she heard Beth say. “I’ve no idea when she’ll be out. Her diary’s packed.
“Why don’t you just talk to him?” Beth asked when she had replaced the receiver. “That’s his third call since lunch. Poor guy sounds desperate.”
“There’s no point,” Eve said flatly. “We’ve said all there is to say.”
“Don’t say that too loud,” Beth warned her. “They’re already forming a not-so-orderly line in the art department. I had to stop Caitlin asking you outright if Ian was back on the market.”
Eve forced a grin, but it didn’t reach her eyes. It hadn’t escaped her notice that Caitlin glanced pointedly at Eve’s naked left hand whenever she passed her desk.
The truth was, today’s calls had thrown her.
The poor guy sounds desperate? That didn’t sound remotely like Ian. Even if he was desperate, which Eve doubted, he was far too English to let a total stranger on the other end of a phone know it. Let’s face it, Eve thought, he’s hardly the type to let the woman he loves know it.
Loved. Past tense.
It was over. Well and truly. He’d made that clear. As had she. All that remai
ned was to collect the rest of her things and put it down to experience. She wanted nothing from him, except…
There was no way that was going to happen. As Melanie said, stepmothers don’t get access. Especially not ones who never even married. If they did, Melanie would still be in touch with Vince’s daughter, if not Vince himself. But as a stepparent your rights were precisely zero. And so were your responsibilities, she could almost hear Ian say, or you’d never have just walked out on them like that.
Eve forced that thought from her head, as well as the tears that had threatened to accompany it from her eyes. The whole moving in, stepfamily thing, it was just an aberration. Eve Owen had never been the marrying kind, or the mothering kind, for that matter. She should have remembered that and steered well clear of other people’s children. It was time to move on.
Clicking away a screensaver, Eve shut down the interview she’d just finished editing, transferred the copy to the magazine’s server, and called up her browser. Thereluctantstepmother.com opened to reveal page after page of unread messages, as the old-timers talked to each other and new visitors chipped in. About a third of the way down was one asking why there had been no updates from reluctant stepmother herself.
Because I’ve been busy, Eve thought crossly, scanning on down.
A couple of hundred comments later was one from Bella, which surprised her. And in the in-box, among Eve’s usual junk and requests for interviews and life updates from readers of the blog who considered her their friend, was one from Bella. It was headed, You Okay?
No, Eve typed back. Not really…
And then she added a line saying she was planning to pull the plug on the site—for reasons that had to remain private—but wondered if Bella would be interested in taking it over? Either run it herself, or with the help of a handful of the regulars…thereluctantstepmother.com had taken on a life of its own. Whether or not Eve needed it, there were plenty of other women who still did.
Pressing Send, Eve wondered if Bella would reply. And then decided she would. Bella hadn’t needed to send that You OK? message in the first place.
The desk phone was driving Eve mad with its constant ringing. Where was voice-mail when you needed it? In fact, where was Beth when you needed her? Not at her desk, that was for sure. Instinct told Eve to let it ring, but unanswered phones were one of Miriam’s big bugbears. An unanswered reader is a lost reader, she often said. Eve had to refrain from asking what happened to unanswered publicists.
“Hello, Beau.”
“Eve, thank God I’ve got you.”
The caller ID might not have been familiar, but the voice was.
“H-hello, Ian,” Eve said. Cursing herself for saying his name out loud, she lowered her head behind her computer screen as ears pricked up around her.
“Look, I’m sorry to bother you, but I need to know if you’ve seen Hannah?” Beth was right. Ian did sound desperate. Eve should have known she wasn’t the cause.
“Why would I have seen Hannah?” The words came out before she could think better of it.
“She’s gone, missing. Her school called to say she’d sneaked out at first break and hasn’t been seen since. She’s been gone five hours. I just thought maybe…”
“Ian,” Eve said. “You know as well as I do that I’m the last person she’d run to. And you’d be the first person I’d phone in the unlikely event she showed up here. Have you tried Caro’s parents?”
He sighed. “Of course I have, that was my first thought.”
Of course it was. Where else?
“My parents, her school friends’ parents…no one’s seen her. And her cell phone’s switched off.” An edge of hysteria had entered his voice.
“So, I’m your last port of call?”
“Pretty much.”
Eve bit back the retort that sprang to mind. Her voice softened. “No, I haven’t seen or heard from Hannah. Last time she spoke to me…” She stopped. They both knew how that sentence ended; she didn’t need to spell it out.
“You’re right,” he said. “I’m sorry to bother you. I’ll let you get back to work now.”
“Ian?”
“What?”
“Let me know if…” Eve caught herself. “It’s going to be fine. But let me know when you find her, all right?”
“Really?” Ian sounded surprised. “All right, I’ll text you.”
“Where’ve you been?” Eve asked when Beth got back.
Beth looked at her. “Cigarette break, freezing on the steps outside with the other social rejects.”
“Can I bum a cigarette, then?”
“You don’t smoke.”
“I know. But I need one now. I’m going out to get a coffee, d’you want one?”
“No, thanks. I’ve had my daily quota.” Pulling a packet of Silk Cut and a lighter from her bag, Beth handed them to Eve. “Don’t smoke them all at once.”
Eve headed for the stairs; you always ran into someone you didn’t want to see in the elevator. And what she needed right now was a cigarette, a coffee and some fresh air. Failing that, polluted central London smog. In no particular order.
She could kick herself for answering the phone: she’d been fine before she’d talked to Ian, something approaching her old self. But now her carefully built façade was cracking. She needed some time to herself, before it collapsed completely in front of the whole office.
The midafternoon air was typical late February—a gray, chill drizzle that turned her newly blow-dried hair to instant frizz. So much for Lou’s prescription.
Cigarette first, Eve thought, then coffee. She tried to ignore her shaking hand as she raised the Silk Cut to her lips. She wasn’t crying, definitely not, but she turned her back to the street to shield the lighter from the wind that bit her face and stung her eyes. It was the damn hormones. She’d never been weepy before.
Hunched in on herself, Eve didn’t hear the voice until its owner was standing right behind her.
“Can I have one?” The voice was familiar.
“Please?” it added.
Eve looked around, stared at the slim blonde in confusion and prayed it wasn’t obvious she’d been crying. Could this day get any worse?
“Didn’t know you smoked,” the girl added. Her tone made Eve think this one small thing had already made her slightly less dull than Hannah had previously thought.
“Hannah…I don’t. Smoke, that is. And no,” she said, pulling herself together, “I can’t let you have one.” Eve braced herself for the torrent of loathing that could be the only reason for this unexpected visit. It seemed Ian had been right to call her after all.
“Don’t smoke? That looks like a cigarette to me.”
“It is, I mean…Does your dad know you’re here?”
“I’m not falling for that. So, can I have one?”
“No, they’re not mine. And I’m taking that as a no, your dad doesn’t know you’re here, right?”
“No, of course he doesn’t,” said Hannah impatiently. “He wouldn’t have let me come. He doesn’t let me do anything these days.”
As the nicotine hit her lungs and rebounded, filling the air with smoke and steam, Eve hoped her sigh was hidden behind the smoke. She badly needed to cough, but pride wouldn’t let her.
“You should call Dad,” Eve said. “He’ll be worried.”
“He thinks I’m at school.” Shifting awkwardly from foot to foot, Hannah shrugged, feigning indifference. She looked both incredibly young, in her gray-and-red-trimmed school uniform, and far more adult than Eve remembered. But then, Eve had never seen Hannah like this before. Out of the context of being one of Ian’s children. Never seen Hannah as just Hannah. A person in her own right.
“Can we go somewhere? Get a coffee or something?” Hannah asked.
“Only if you call your dad first.” Eve heard the adult in her voice, saw Hannah’s lips tense and stopped. “I don’t mean to be bossy,” she said, trying a smile. “And I know it’s none of my business, but he does
know you’re not at school, and he is worried.”
A sly look crept onto Hannah’s face. “You call him,” she said. “You know the number.”
“Uh-uh.” Eve shook her head. Did she look stupid? “You do it. Anyway, I don’t have my cell phone. I left it on my desk.”
“Coffee first, then I’ll call Dad,” Hannah said, knowing she’d won. “It’s my best offer.”
“I want to know what’s going on,” Hannah said, when they were tucked at a corner table at the back of a small Italian café on a Mayfair side street, with two cappuccinos, one with extra chocolate, in front of them. The only other customers were Polish builders. Eve wondered if they were as conspicuous as she felt.
What did they look like? Mother and daughter? She was old enough, just, to be Hannah’s mother. Auntie and niece? Half sisters? Friends? Stepmother and stepdaughter? Whatever that looked like.
“What d’you mean?”
“I might be ‘only thirteen,’ but I’m not stupid,” Hannah said, eyeing Eve over the froth of her cappuccino. “I’m fed up with everyone treating me like a kid. I want to know why you and Dad broke up. One minute you’re all loved up, the next you’ve gone and Dad is in the worst mood ever. Just like that. I want to know why.”
“You’ll have to ask him,” Eve said evenly. “It’s not my place to tell you, I’m sorry.”
The girl paused. Eve could see her weighing up her choices. “If I ask you a question,” Hannah said finally, “do you promise to answer it?”
Never make a promise you can’t keep. Ian’s words echoed in Eve’s head.
“I can’t promise,” she said. “Because if I can’t answer it, then I’d have to break my promise, and I can’t do that.”
“Then answer it and you won’t be breaking it.”
“I’m not promising, Hannah,” Eve said. “But ask me the question, and if I can answer it, I will, that’s a promise.”
“OK. Is it my fault?”
Eve was taken aback. “Is what your fault?”
“You and Dad breaking up. Did you leave because of me?
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