by T. M. Logan
The little girl shook her head, long ginger bunches jiggling from side to side. She ran off again, giggling and dodging around the tables of other diners.
Farther down the table, Daniel was reading his Harry Potter book while Lucy was slumped silently in her chair, absorbed by her phone.
Jennifer’s boys were also transfixed by their phones. They had never looked particularly alike, but they seemed to grow further apart in looks as they grew into their midteens. Jake, the older of the two and in the same year as Lucy at school, was his mother’s son with fair hair and gray-blue eyes, beautiful long eyelashes and Cupid’s bow lips. Tall and slim, long-limbed like her—he was going to be a heartbreaker. His younger brother, Ethan, on the other hand, had all his father’s genes: dark hair and olive skin, eyes so deep brown they were almost black. Just fifteen, he was already stockier through the shoulders and waist, his legs thick with hair.
Russ returned to the table as the food arrived, steaming plates of creamy chicken in mushroom sauce, entrecôte with Camembert, turkey escalope, panfried potatoes, pasta salads, and mountains of pommes frites, along with two more bottles of La Deuxieme Chance.
Odette finally came and sat down, her little face wrinkled in disgust.
“Don’t like that,” she said, pointing a small finger at her plate. “Or that.”
Rowan leaned over and began cutting it up for her.
“Of course you do, darling. It’s just chicken like you have at home.”
“Smells funny.” She pointed at Rowan’s bowl of pasta salad. “I want yours, Mummy.”
“You have yours, darling. Look, it’s chicken, do you see? You always have chicken.”
“Want yours.” Her high voice was suddenly strident and sharp, cutting through the rest of our conversations. “Don’t want chicken.”
“Sit at the table, please,” Rowan said calmly.
“No!”
Watching their argument unfold, I realized that everyone else at the table was doing the same, looking at the confrontation but trying to pretend that they weren’t. Rubbernecking at the scene of a domestic incident like drivers gawking at a highway pileup.
Odette tossed her head and started walking away.
Keeping her voice even, Rowan said, “Odette, darling, if you eat some of your chicken you can have pudding afterward.”
“Don’t want pudding.”
“How about you just have some of the fries instead of—”
Russ turned suddenly in his chair, his face an angry shade of red.
“ODETTE! COME BACK HERE AND SIT DOWN!” he bellowed, his deep voice echoing off the old stone walls. “NOW!”
A hush fell over the little village square as all the other diners turned to look—a dozen conversations halted midsentence, forks frozen midair, wine midpour—eyes flicking between the tiny child and the tall man. Every customer and every waiter staring at the standoff.
Russ was sitting next to me and I could feel the anger crackling around him like static electricity. I didn’t know where to look. I certainly couldn’t look at Rowan. I caught Jennifer’s eye, opposite me at the table, and saw my own expression mirrored there.
Odette slowly returned to the table, slumping back in her chair and folding her arms.
Rowan squirted ketchup onto the side of her daughter’s plate. “Thanks, Russ,” she said quietly, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “But I don’t think that was completely necessary, was it?”
Russ ignored her, pulling his daughter’s chair as close to the table as it would go.
“Now eat,” he said to her, his voice low and hard.
Slowly, the murmur of conversation returned to the tables around us as people went back to their meals.
With a tear running down her face, Odette picked up a single fry, dipped it carefully in the ketchup, and began to eat it with tiny bites.
9
An awkward silence descended on our table, broken only by the clink and tap of cutlery on plates, Odette sniffing back her tears, and the bustle of the waiters around us. Russ picked up his own cutlery and began furiously sawing at his steak, the rest of us mutely resuming our meals. The atmosphere was as thick as soup, but no one wanted to be the first to break the impasse.
Eventually, Alistair and Jennifer both spoke up at the same moment.
“Hey, boys—”
“Have you—”
Jennifer gave an embarrassed smile and gestured to her husband to continue.
“Hey, boys?” Alistair said to his sons, leaning forward over his turkey escalope. “Do you know why this square is called Place du Quatorze Juillet?”
“Nope,” Jake said, not looking up from his plate.
“To mark the fourteenth of July. It’s a big day in France—do you know why?”
“Nope.”
“Can you guess?”
Jake studiously avoided eye contact with his dad as he shoveled pommes frites into his mouth.
“Nah.”
“From the French Revolution,” Alistair said, holding his hands up. “Bastille Day.”
“Bastard day?” Jake said, grinning.
Ethan snickered through a mouthful of food.
“Jake!” Jennifer said sharply. “You know what I’ve told you about swearing.”
“Dad started it.”
“Bastille Day,” Alistair repeated. “When the revolutionaries stormed the biggest fortress in Paris. It was a great victory for the—”
Jake gave an exaggerated yawn and turned back to his plate. “—common man,” Alistair finished.
Jennifer picked up the baton and the conversation drifted to a couple I knew vaguely through the PTA, Laura and David something, who had been the subject of a maelstrom of school-gate gossip in the last week of term.
“Apparently,” Jennifer said conspiratorially, “he was only doing thirty-six in a thirty zone when he was clocked by the camera. Not exactly dangerous. But he already had nine points, and he’d done that tedious speed awareness course already, so he was going to lose his license. Only problem is, he’s a sales director for some big food company, drives every day for work.”
“So he asked his wife to take his points?” Rowan said. “Say she was driving, not him?”
“That’s what I heard. She agreed, but somehow it came out that she was in Brighton that day—something she put on Facebook—and the police got to know about it, and the you-know-what really hit the fan.”
“That’s awful,” Rowan said. “So she’s taking the rap for it?”
“They’re both taking the rap—he’s lost his license, anyway, and she’s in hot water for lying to the police. They both blamed each other.”
“Awful,” Rowan said again.
“Isn’t it? I heard they’d separated and he’s moved out.”
Alistair said, “It was probably the straw that broke the camel’s back. There must have been other … concerns in their marriage, things we don’t know about.”
“The gossip is,” Jennifer said, leaning forward, “they’re now talking about lawyers, divorce, custody—all of that.”
Lawyers, divorce, custody. Each word felt like a slap across my face. What did Jennifer know about it, anyway? What right did she have to be gossiping about people she barely knew? Sticking her nose into someone else’s marriage? With considerable effort, I managed to stay silent.
Rowan was shaking her head, genuine sadness on her face.
“All that over a dumb speeding ticket; it seems so unfair. Their poor kids.”
“I know, right? She was only trying to help him out of a tricky situation. I’d have done the same.”
“Me too,” Rowan said. She looked over at Sean and Alistair. “How about you, boys?”
“Perhaps,” Alistair said with a theatrical flourish.
“Probably,” Sean said, refilling his wineglass.
Jennifer looked over at me. “What do you think, Kate?”
“Me?”
“About the Laura and David thing?”
I s
hrugged. “I heard some of the rumors. Didn’t realize they’d separated.”
“But what would you have done? Do you think she was right to take his points?”
“Right?” I shook my head. “Of course not.”
“Even though she was trying to protect him, help him keep his job? Wasn’t she trying to do the best thing for all of them?”
“Doesn’t make it right. She broke the law, made herself into a liar.”
“For the right reason, though.”
“It’s either right or it isn’t, Jen. It’s not complicated. There isn’t a third answer.”
I felt myself getting wound up, the simmering heat of my anger over Sean’s betrayal threatening to boil over.
Not here, not now! I needed to be calm. Do what Sean sometimes gently suggested: let things go more often, bend a little, smile and shake my head and just move on. He would joke about it sometimes, asking me, What’s the view like up there on your high horse, Kate? The irony of that seemed particularly dark, in light of what I’d discovered.
“The truth,” Sean muttered into his wine, “the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”
There was another awkward silence.
Jennifer grabbed her fork and tinged it loudly against the side of her glass. “How about we have a toast?” she said brightly, filling the glasses nearest to her with more of the smooth local red wine. “As it’s our first night here.”
There was a general murmur of agreement, glasses being raised. I held my own glass up, forcing my mouth into a smile.
“To Rowan,” Jennifer said. “For making it possible for all of us to stay in this wonderful place, and bringing us all together.”
All the adults clinked glasses and drank.
“So, Rowan,” Jennifer said briskly, “I hear great news could be on the way for your company?”
“Fingers crossed,” Rowan said.
“Is it happening, then? It’s really going to go ahead?”
Rowan nodded slowly, smiling like a proud parent.
“All the signs are looking good at the moment.”
Her company specialized in ethical PR—total transparency and commitment to the very highest ethical standards, both in her own operation and the people she worked for. It set her apart from some of the competition and had won her an impressive roster of clients over the last ten years, principally tech and social media companies keen to avoid the stigma of privacy breaches and fake news that had afflicted Facebook and others. So much so that she had caught the attention of a global leader in the ethical field, a US-based company, which was proposing a buyout. As founding partner and CEO, Rowan stood to become very wealthy from the move.
“Hopefully it should go through in the next month or so,” she added.
Russ returned from another cigarette break. Even though the cigarette was out, a fug of stale smoke came with him as he sat down next to me at the table, opposite his wife, folding his long frame into the wicker chair.
“As long as you can convince them you’re absolutely squeaky clean, right, darling?”
It was virtually the first time I’d heard him speak since his outburst at Odette. His voice was loud, with a tone of forced joviality that was impossible to miss. I watched as Rowan turned her gaze on her husband, something in her eyes I couldn’t place, a slight narrowing of the eyes. As if they’d had this conversation before.
“The due diligence has been very thorough,” she said. “No stone unturned.”
Russ took a long drink of wine, emptying half the glass in one gulp.
“Squeaky clean,” he said again.
10
I couldn’t sleep.
Sean’s soft snores had taken on the slow regularity of deep sleep perhaps an hour ago. He’d always had the annoying ability to drop off as soon as his head hit the pillow, not bothered in the slightest by the low hum of the air conditioning. But it wasn’t the barely perceptible noise of chilled air circulating that was keeping me awake.
Every time I closed my eyes, I started to feel sick. So instead, I stared up at the darkness, crisp cotton sheets cool against my skin, my mind sifting through an endless carousel of possibilities: round and round, and then round and round again. With every circuit, my inadequacies became clearer. Inadequacies as a woman, wife, mother. How come I’d never seen this before? It seemed so obvious now.
My friends.
Rowan, who was cleverer than me, always had been.
Jennifer, prettier than me, then and now.
Izzy, who was funnier than me, always able to make Sean laugh.
How could I compete against that? What was I good at? What did I contribute? Where did I fit in, compared to them? Somewhere in the middle, I supposed. Somewhere in the background.
Round and round, went the carousel.
My friends.
Rowan. On the verge of becoming wealthy enough to afford the lifestyle Sean had always yearned for and never had.
Jennifer. His university sweetheart, his first love. And he had told me in a moment of either a) drunken candor or b) misjudged humor, the best sex he’d ever had.
Izzy. Sean’s oldest female friend, who had suddenly reappeared in our lives, apparently with a plan to settle down. What was she to him? Freedom, lack of commitment, no kids, no ties. Another chance at youth, another chance to start again.
Rowan. Jennifer. Izzy. We were all intertwined, had been for years. I had worried that we’d been drifting apart as our lives took us in different directions, but in reality it was the opposite—at least for one of them. One of them had got closer to my family than I would ever have wanted.
But which one of them was it? Which one was playing this elaborate game? The more I thought about it, the more sleep eluded me, and at one o’clock I gave up.
Pulling on my thin summer dressing gown, I padded out of our bedroom, marble tiles cool against the soles of my bare feet. I went to Daniel’s room first, opening the door as quietly as I could and waiting for a moment as my eyes adjusted to the darkness. He had turned the air-conditioning unit off, insisting the low, blowing noise would keep him awake. He often didn’t sleep well on the first few nights in a new place anyway—away from his own bed, his own pillow, his own things—but tonight he was fast asleep, curled into the sheet. I moved closer, leaning in until I was above him, close enough to see the rise and fall of his chest in the shadows of his room. My little miracle boy, who had arrived unexpectedly after three miscarriages—at a time when I was starting to resign myself to never having a second child.
I held my breath and stood very still, turning my ear toward him until I could hear slow, steady breathing, hear the breaths in and out … in and out.
It was a habit I’d developed when Lucy was a baby, standing over her Moses basket in the middle of one broken night, unable to sleep until I was sure she was OK, listening in the silence, punch-drunk with fatigue, until I was sure I could hear her breaths coming and going. And here I was now, sixteen years later, still doing it with her brother. Still listening. Still checking, even though I knew it was not entirely rational. Daniel was fine—he had been fine when he went to bed, and he would be fine in the morning.
But it was a hard habit to break.
He was still in his pajamas, despite the heat. I touched my fingertips lightly to his forehead. Satisfied he wasn’t too hot, I closed his door quietly behind me and went across the hall to his sister’s room.
Lucy was awake, her face illuminated by the light from her phone screen. I opened the door a little wider.
“Lucy,” I whispered, “it’s one o’clock in the morning. You should turn that off and get some sleep now.”
“Not yet.”
I took a step into the room and saw that there were tears on her face, shining in the iPhone’s cold glow. “What’s the matter, Luce?”
She turned onto her side, away from me, the phone still inches from her face.
I sat down on the edge of her bed and put a hand on her shoulder. Her skin felt h
ot, despite the air-conditioned chill of the room. I made a mental note to check she was using enough suntan lotion tomorrow.
“What’s happened, Luce?”
“Nothing, Mum. It’s fine.”
“Doesn’t look fine. Is something bothering you?”
“No.”
“You know you can talk to me about anything, don’t you?”
She nodded and sniffed, wiping tears away with the heel of her hand. “I know, Mum.”
“Anything at all. Doesn’t matter what it is.”
She half turned toward me but wouldn’t look me in the eye. “Even if it’s something … bad?”
“Especially if it’s something bad.”
“Something awful?”
I took a tissue from the box on the bedside table and handed it to her. There was a lot about her that I didn’t know—more and more each day, it seemed. “I can help you, Lucy. Whatever it is.”
She wiped her eyes with the tissue. I waited, letting the silence stretch out between us.
“Sometimes I hate myself,” she said quietly.
I felt an ache, deep in my chest. Fingers squeezing my heart. “Why?”
“Because I’m … worthless. I’m a horrible person.”
“Of course you’re not, Lucy! What’s happened?”
“Doesn’t matter. Can’t do anything about it now, anyway.”
“About what?” I said gently. “Is it a boy?”
She said nothing.
“Is it one of your friends? Being mean?” I was constantly amazed by the capacity of teenage girls to be horrible to one another. Girls who were supposed to be friends but who seemed to delight in making one another miserable. Was I like that, too, as a teenager? Did we still carry it with us now, this capacity to spite and sting and wound those closest to us, hidden under a thin veneer of adult civility?
Lucy gave a tiny shake of her head, fresh tears welling in her eyes.
Without another word, she sat up suddenly and hugged me, close and fierce, clinging on tight like she used to when she was a little girl. She used to love hugs, especially when she was upset. But now, as a sixteen-year-old, she was so blasé and standoffish that it took me by surprise when she hugged me. It was one of those things she wouldn’t do anymore in front of her friends, wouldn’t do in public. A few years ago—I wasn’t sure exactly when it had happened—she had suddenly become embarrassed by me, the closeness we had had seeming to fall away as she grew taller and more beautiful with every day. Sometimes, when she looked at me, I thought I saw open contempt in her eyes.