About Last Night

by Ruthie Knox

  Could she say pish-tosh? She so wanted to. Instead, she said, “Come on. You’re only about twenty percent done. It’s going to take you at least thirty hours’ work to finish that, and then she’s just going to wad it up and throw it in the back of her wardrobe. It’s a complete waste of your skill.”

  This time, Cath was sure she caught admiration in Evita’s cool, assessing gaze. Evita enjoyed being challenged. Like mother, like son. How hilarious that the lessons Cath had learned from one Chamberlain would apply to another.

  She forged ahead. “I’ll just show you what I have in mind. Nev, honey, can I borrow that?” She crossed quickly to the window, where Nev handed her the notebook and his charcoal pencil, his lips all sexy bemusement. She kissed him quick. Couldn’t help herself.

  But the sight of her face on his sketch pad caught her up short. He’d drawn her from the neck up, her head against a pillow, hair mussed, eyes wide and liquid, mouth slightly open. The very image of a thoroughly satisfied woman. She flipped quickly through the book, looking for a blank page and trying to get a grip. There were other drawings of her. Maybe two dozen.

  They’re just pictures. Not love letters. Pictures.

  They were love letters.

  “You’ve been drawing me,” she murmured.

  “I can’t help it. I hope you don’t object.”

  She didn’t object, but she hadn’t needed to know how much she was going to hurt him. It wasn’t something she’d let herself think about, and now she wouldn’t be able to avoid it.

  She was going to hurt him bad.

  “They’re beautiful,” she said quietly.

  He captured her hand and turned it over to press a kiss into her palm. “They don’t do you justice.”

  She sank to the ground beside him, a little dazed, and began to draw. Twenty minutes later, she’d discarded a few ideas and come up with one she liked, a chunky cabled tunic with short sleeves and a cowl neck inspired by some designer sweaters she’d recently seen. She sketched it on a tall, thin thirteen-year-old frame, pairing it with black leggings, a long-sleeved black shirt, and boots, and then she handed it to Nev. “What do you think?”

  Nev studied the drawing for a while. “The tattoos are your own designs, aren’t they? I had no idea you were such an artist.”

  “I only draw a little. It’s nothing like what you can do.”

  “Nonsense.” He plucked the pencil out of her hand and quickly filled in Beatrice’s hair and features where Cath had put the barest suggestion of a head. “I think she’ll love it.”

  Satisfied, Cath crossed the room and presented the sketch to Evita, who’d spent the interval continuing to labor away on the Starmore sweater.

  Evita took one look at the sketch and wrinkled her nose. “It’s a little mature for a girl her age, don’t you think?”

  “This is the style now. Half the sweaters for sale at H and M are variations on the theme.”

  “No one in this family shops at places like that,” Evita said bluntly.

  “I do,” Cath said, just as blunt. “They have good stuff.”

  Evita frowned and pursed her lips, but Cath knew she was wavering. Time to push. “You have to choose the lesser of two evils, Evita. Either you spend dozens of hours knitting her a sweater she hates because it looks like something her grandmother would wear, or you spend ten hours knitting her something she likes because it makes her look like a tramp.”

  Evita raised an eyebrow.

  “What?” Cath asked. “She’s thirteen years old. Looking like a tramp is her highest aspiration in life.”

  And then the most astonishing thing happened—Evita laughed. It didn’t last long, but it was a genuine laugh, and it seemed to surprise her as much as it did Cath.

  “You don’t have a very high opinion of Beatrice,” Evita said.

  “Oh, please. Are you trying to tell me you didn’t spend your teenage years stealing lipstick from your mother and making out with boys she didn’t approve of? I bet you were the hottest thing since sliced bread.”

  Evita tsked dismissively, but she couldn’t conceal her amusement. Richard said, “Watch what you say, darling. I’m the only person in the room who knew you back then, and I could tell tales on you if I wanted to.”

  “Shush, Richard,” Evita replied, her Cruella persona firmly back in place. “Honestly.” She turned her attention back to the sketch. “This looks like a very heavy piece. What weight of yarn did you have in mind?”

  Got her.

  Evita would make the sweater. Cath had won her over, maybe even won the woman’s respect. It was a major victory, and one that might eventually develop into friendship.

  Except after tomorrow, you’ll never see her again.

  The reminder jolted her out of her reverie. Leyton was only Limbo. She and Nev weren’t married, and they weren’t going to be.

  “Heavy,” she said. “You want something really chunky, and those giant turkey-baster needles.”

  Nev’s mother frowned to indicate her distaste for the whole notion of chunky yarn and giant needles. Cath got it. They were gauche. She was gauche. The sweater wouldn’t belong in this family any more than she did.

  “Don’t worry,” Cath reassured her. “It’ll be over quick, and then you can forget it ever happened.”

  She was no longer talking about the sweater.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Until Winston showed up to spoil it, it was the most pleasant morning Nev could ever remember spending with his parents. All down to Cath, of course. She chatted with his mother about yarn weights and gauges and other mysterious knitting things, and then she reclaimed his sketch pad and began making notes with his charcoal pencil while carrying on a conversation with his father about German art, which she seemed to know rather a lot about.

  When Winston appeared in the entranceway, he wore a remote, hard expression, and his eyes shone with a manic light Nev recognized from childhood. His stomach tightened in an instinctual response he hadn’t felt for years. Winston was up to something. The bad kind of something.

  “Where have you been?” their mother asked. “Come and sit for a while.”

  Winston stayed put. “I’m terribly sorry to interrupt, Mother, but I’d like to speak to you and Father and Neville privately. May I have a few minutes in the library?”

  The request seemed to fluster the normally unflappable Evita, who sputtered, “Well, I don’t know. I think not. It would be terribly rude to leave Cath on her own. But perhaps, if it’s important …”

  Cath rose then, her eyes on Winston, and Evita fell silent. His brother and the woman he loved stared at each other for what seemed a long time, some silent communication passing between them.

  “I’ll go,” she said.

  She dropped the sketchbook on the couch and walked straight out of the room without so much as glancing in his direction. She departed like royalty, like the faerie queen she was—spine straight, head held high, footfalls inaudible on the thick carpet as if she were floating.

  Nev ought to have admired her fortitude, but he found himself shuddering instead, filled with a dreadful uncertainty. She’d left the room like he was nobody to her. Perhaps it was true. He’d find out soon enough. Trouble had been approaching, slow and inexorable, since he’d asked Cath to come to Leyton with him. Now it had arrived.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “I had her investigated.”

  “Winston!” his mother said. But her indignation was put on, her tone the one she used to feign surprise. She’d known. She’d probably asked him to do it.

  “Over the bank holiday weekend?” Nev asked. It was an inane question, but then he always responded to his family’s insanity this way, with flippant calm. It was what they expected of him. It was what he expected of himself.

  “The law firm found someone who could act quickly and discreetly,” Winston said. “Our attorneys understand the gravity of the situation. Unlike you.”

  “Cath is not a ‘situatio
n.’ ”

  “She’s worse than that. She’s a bloody gold digger.” Winston entered the room and tossed a fat envelope toward Nev’s lap. “See for yourself.”

  The envelope missed the target, hitting his thigh and sliding to the floor. Nev didn’t move to pick it up. It would unleash plagues.

  Unfortunately, the refusal didn’t buy him any time. Winston would tell him whatever the pages revealed.

  “Cath doesn’t want money,” he said, confident in the truth of the statement.

  “No? She certainly doesn’t have any. No savings in the bank. Hardly a penny to her name.”

  “Being poor isn’t a sin.”

  “No, but being a liar is.”

  “She’s not a liar.”

  He’d brought her here and made her lie to his family, but everything else that had passed between them told him she was scrupulously honest. Secretive, but honest.

  “She lied about having an arts degree. She never finished university.” Winston made the announcement casually. Nev didn’t flinch. Cath had told his family she’d attended a prestigious art school in Chicago, but she’d never said so to him privately. She’d never spoken of her education at all.

  It was one of hundreds of things he didn’t know about her.

  Mother played devil’s advocate. “That may be true, Winston, but it hardly warrants all this drama.”

  “There’s more.” Winston’s voice betrayed the rush it gave him to bear bad tidings. “She’s a criminal. She comes from a well-known Mafia family in Chicago. Her first husband”—he looked at Nev with ill-disguised glee—“is serving twenty years on racketeering charges.”

  Her first husband. The baby’s father, then. She hadn’t told him she’d been married. He’d simply assumed she hadn’t. He’d thought he knew her well enough to guess what her life contained, to fill in the cracks between her stories with his intuition about her.

  He’d been wrong. Cath had been married to another man. His Cath. The fact lodged in his throat, solid and sour. She’d pledged her love to someone. Worn his ring. Carried his child. Some slick Italian criminal from the States. A stranger he couldn’t even imagine.

  She wouldn’t do the same for him. Wouldn’t wear his ring—not really. She hadn’t even trusted him enough to tell him she’d had a husband.

  He was a fool.

  “You’ve nothing to say to that, Neville?” Winston asked. “No matter. There’s more. This woman you’re so obsessed with? This schemer you’ve made your wife? She’s a felon. She’s been arrested for arson.”

  It would’ve given him enormous satisfaction to tell his brother to shove off, that Cath couldn’t possibly have committed a crime. Not without his knowing of it. But she had a lit match branded into the skin of her lower back.

  “What do you know about all this?” Richard asked him. His tone said, Tell me it’s not true.

  It was true. It had to be. Cath had married a criminal. She’d committed a felony. Hadn’t she told him she’d made mistakes? If Cath had gone astray, she’d have done it properly. No childish errors for his Cath. Only catastrophes. Only disastrous mishaps she clutched tightly to herself, though he’d courted her and coddled her and loved her every way he knew how for more than a month, hoping she’d loosen her grip on them.

  Winston flapped a dismissive hand in his direction. “He doesn’t know anything. He’s let himself be blindsided by a cheap tart for the sake of the promotion, and now we’ll all have to cope with the fallout.”

  “Winston!” His father’s voice thundered, his face red with emotion. Nev had never seen him so angry. “That’s enough! You’ll apologize to your brother for slandering his wife, or you’ll leave this house immediately.”

  It ought to be you, he thought. You should be the one defending her. But he couldn’t seem to break free of the part he always played in these scenes. Mother pulled the strings. Winston acted as her right-hand man. Father normally remained above the fray. Nev’s role was to go along.

  This time, he knew, his complaisance constituted a betrayal of Cath. It would be nobler if she’d betrayed him first, but the truth was she hadn’t even done that. She didn’t care enough to betray him.

  He’d been a bloody hopeless fool, thinking every day that passed brought them closer, that he’d managed to pick the lock that protected her heart and it was only a matter of hours before she gave it over to him.

  It would never happen. She’d told him next to nothing. In the twisted algebra of her psyche, he was an insignificant variable. Not worthy of her confidence. Not worthy of her love.

  Winston leaned back against the wall, unperturbed by Richard’s rage and Nev’s fraught silence. “You haven’t given her any money, then?” Winston asked Richard with a sneer.

  “He hasn’t,” Cath said from the doorway. “And he won’t.”

  Nev’s heart rate spiked when he saw her, but he kept his seat. He didn’t know what she’d heard. She had the fierce expression she’d favored when they met, the challenge in her eyes and the lift to her pointy chin that dared anyone to toy with her.

  Let her fight her own battles. She was more than capable. She didn’t want his help.

  It surprised him when she turned and trained all her ferocity on him. “Neville and I aren’t married. He only told you we were for the sake of his lousy job. Which he hates, by the way. But we’re not.” She glared at him as she twisted the rings off her finger and hurled them in his direction. Her cheeks were pink with anger, but in her eyes he could see only pain. “I wouldn’t marry you. You’re a despicable coward.”

  She walked out.

  He said nothing. He couldn’t muster any words, insouciant or outraged, indignant or shamed. She’d kept her secrets from him, messed him around for a month, let him fall for her while she walled off her heart, and now she was angry with him?

  And why did he care? Why did the misery in her eyes pull him to his feet and force him to pace the room and battle the impulse to follow her and find her and hold on to her tight until she stopped looking so wounded? He had nothing to say to the woman. They were broken. There was no fixing it, and it wasn’t his fault. It was entirely hers.

  “Well,” Winston said eventually. “That was unexpected.”

  “Sod off.”

  “Neville, darling,” his mother said, “I’m not really certain what—”

  “Shut up.”

  “Pardon?” his mother asked, her spine stiffening.

  “I said, ‘Shut up,’ ” he repeated. “I don’t want to listen to you pretending you didn’t arrange this whole bloody episode. You set me up. You issued the ultimatum that gave me the stupid idea of bringing Cath here to begin with. Now that you’ve managed to ruin my life, the least you can do is sit there and keep your meddling mouth shut.”

  “Nev,” his father said sharply.

  Nev rounded on him, ready to fight for the right to speak his mind, but Richard didn’t seem inclined to put his fists up. “Go after her,” he said instead.

  “There’s no point.”

  “You love her, don’t you?”

  “Of course I love her. I worship her. I wanted to marry her. I’d marry her today if she’d have me. That’s not the issue. The issue is she won’t bloody have me.”

  “She will. Go after her.”

  “Richard,” Evita interrupted. “Perhaps we’d best—”

  “Keep out of it, darling. You’ve done enough for the day.”

  “With all due respect, Father—” Winston said.

  “You too,” Richard replied. “Keep out of it. You should both be ashamed of yourselves.” He said this without turning away from Nev, as casually as if he ordered his wife and son around every day. So far as Nev knew, he’d never issued an order to either of them in his life. He’d never come to Nev’s defense. Not once. Until now.

  “She loves you,” his father told him. “It’s perfectly obvious. She looks at you like you’re the sun and the moon and the stars, all rolled into one.”

  �
�She does?”

  “She does.”

  His mother sighed and said, as if very bored, “She does, Neville. Honestly, you can’t see that? I’d always thought you were such a perceptive boy.”

  “I’m not a boy.”

  “She’s a felon,” Winston said.

  “Shut up,” Richard and Evita said simultaneously.

  They were on his side. Both of them. He’d marvel at that, but he was too preoccupied with trying to sort out the horrible tangle his thoughts and feelings had become.

  “What if I can’t fix it?” he asked.

  “What if you can?” Richard replied.

  What if you can?

  Oh, fuck. What had he done?

  “Right.” He walked straight out of the room. By the time he hit the end of the corridor, he was moving at a dead run.

  “Cath! Bloody hell, Cath, stop and talk to me.”

  “No.” She stalked down the road, moving as quickly as her stubby little legs would carry her, but there was no way for a woman on foot to escape a car, no matter how fast she went.

  Just mow me down, already. Get it over with.

  He drove along behind her at turtle speed, slow enough to stall the engine of a less finely tuned machine. She refused to look at him. On the narrow road that connected Leyton to the village of Harpenden, tall hedgerows boxed her in, trapping her in a green corridor under the ridiculously hot August sun with a luxury sedan nipping at her heels.

  There was a bus stop in Harpenden. She’d seen it on the way to the house. In five minutes or so, she’d be there, and she’d take the first bus to wherever, and she’d never lay eyes on Nev again.

  Good riddance. The worm. The jerk. Shoddy excuse for a man, dressing her up like the world’s stodgiest baby doll so he could get some kind of promotion at work. She didn’t know the details, but she didn’t need to know. He’d sold her out. Made her a pawn in his chess game with Mummy and Winston. Meet the wife! Where’s my raise?

  The car rolled to a stop behind her, and then the engine cut out and she heard the door open. She felt Nev’s presence beside her, but she didn’t turn her head.