Lauren reappeared with another tray containing three coffee cups. The coffee would be perfect, made exactly the way Rachel liked it: hot with two sugars. Lauren was the perfect daughter-in-law. Rachel was the perfect mother-in-law. All that perfection hiding all that dislike.
But Lauren had won. New York was her ace. She’d played it. Good on her.
“Where’s Jacob?” asked Rachel.
“He’s drawing,” said Lauren as she sat down. She lifted her mug and shot Rob a wry look. “Hopefully not on the walls.”
Rob grinned at her, and Rachel got another glimpse of the private world of their marriage. It seemed like it was a good marriage, as far as marriages went.
Would Janie have liked Lauren? Would Rachel have been a nice, ordinary, overbearing mother-in-law if Janie had lived? It was impossible to imagine. The world with Lauren in it was so vastly different from the world when Janie had been alive. It seemed impossible that Lauren would still have existed if Janie had lived.
She looked at Lauren, strands of fair hair escaping from her ponytail. It was nearly the same blond as Janie’s. Janie’s hair was blonder. Perhaps hers would have darkened as she’d aged.
Ever since that first morning after Janie died, when Rachel woke up and the horror of what had happened crashed down upon her, she had been obsessively imagining another life running alongside her own, her real life, the one that was stolen from her, the one where Janie was warm in her bed.
But as the years had gone by it had become harder and harder to imagine it. Lauren was sitting right in front of her and she was so alive, the blood pumping through her veins, her chest rising and falling.
“You okay, Mum?” said Rob.
“I’m fine,” said Rachel. She went to reach for her cup of coffee and found that she didn’t have the energy to even lift her arm.
Sometimes there was the pure, primal pain of grief, and other times there was anger, the frantic desire to claw and hit and kill, and sometimes, like right now, there was just ordinary, dull sadness, settling itself softly, suffocatingly over her like a heavy fog.
She was just so damned sad.
FORTY-NINE
Hello,” said Felicity.
Tess smiled at her. She couldn’t help it. It was like the way you automatically, politely say “thank you” to a police officer who is handing you a speeding ticket you don’t want and can’t afford. She was automatically happy to see Felicity because she loved her, and she looked so nice, and because a lot had been happening to her over the last few days, and she had so much to tell her.
In the very next instant she remembered, and the shock and betrayal felt brand-new. Tess battled a desire to fly at Felicity, to knock her to the ground and scratch and pummel and bite. But nice, middle-class women like Tess didn’t behave like that, especially not in front of their impressionable small children; so she did nothing except lick her greasy lips from the buttery hot cross buns and move forward in her chair, tugging at the front of her pajama top.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“I’m sorry for just . . .” Felicity’s voice disappeared on her. She tried to clear her throat and said huskily, “. . . turning up like this. Without calling.”
“Yes, it might have been better if you had called,” said Lucy. Tess knew her mother was trying her best to look forbidding, but she just looked distraught. In spite of all the things Lucy had said about Felicity, Tess knew that she loved her niece.
“How is your ankle?” Felicity asked her.
“Is Dad coming too?” said Liam.