Did she still feel justified?
Everything had seemed so ordinary after speech therapy. There had been no more peculiar revelations from her daughters, and Isabel had seemed especially cheerful after her haircut. It was a short pixie cut, and from the way Isabel was holding herself, it was clear that she thought it made her look very sophisticated, when it actually made her look younger and sweeter.
There had been a postcard for the girls from John-Paul in the letterbox. He had a running joke with his daughters, where he sent them the silliest postcards he could find. Today’s postcard featured one of those dogs with folds of wrinkly skin, wearing a tiara and beads, and Cecilia thought it was stupid, but true to form, the girls all fell about laughing and put it on the fridge.
“Oh, come on now,” she said mildly, as a car suddenly pulled into the lane in front of her. She lifted her hand to toot the horn and then didn’t bother.
Note how I didn’t scream and yell like a mad person, she thought for the benefit of that afternoon’s psychotic truck driver, just in case he happened to have stopped by to read her mind. It was a cab in front of her. He was doing that weird cabbie thing of testing the brakes every few seconds.
Great. He was heading the same direction as she was. The cab jerked its way down her street, and without warning suddenly stopped at the curb outside Cecilia’s house.
The lights in the cab went on. The passenger was sitting in the front seat. One of the Kingston boys, thought Cecilia. The Kingstons lived across the road and had three sons in their twenties, still living at home, using their expensive private educations to do never-ending degrees and get drunk in city bars. “If a Kingston boy ever goes near one of our girls,” John-Paul always said, “I’ll be ready with the shotgun.”
She pulled into her driveway, pressed the button on the remote for the garage and looked in her rearview mirror. The cabbie had popped the boot. A broad-shouldered man in a suit was pulling out his luggage.
It wasn’t a Kingston boy.
It was John-Paul. He always looked so unfamiliar when she saw him unexpectedly like that in his work clothes, as if she were still twenty-three and he’d become all grown-up and gray-haired without her.
John-Paul was home three days early.
She was filled with equal parts pleasure and exasperation.
She’d lost her chance. She couldn’t open the letter now. She turned off the ignition, pulled on the handbrake, undid her seat belt, opened the car door and ran down the driveway to meet him.
THIRTEEN
Hello?” said Tess warily, looking at her watch as she picked up her mother’s home phone.
It was nine o’clock at night. Surely it couldn’t be another telemarketer.
“It’s me.”
It was Felicity. Tess’s stomach flipped. Felicity had been calling all day on her mobile and leaving voice mail messages and texts that Tess left unheard and unread. It felt strange, ignoring Felicity, as if she were forcing herself to do something unnatural.
“I don’t want to talk to you.”
“Nothing has happened,” said Felicity. “We still haven’t slept together.”
“For God’s sake,” said Tess, and then to her surprise, she laughed. It wasn’t even a bitter laugh. It was a genuine laugh. This was ridiculous. “What’s the holdup?”
But then she caught sight of herself in the mirror above her mother’s dining room table and saw her smile fade, like someone catching on to a cruel trick.
“All we can think about is you,” said Felicity. “And Liam. The Bedstuff website crashed—anyway, I won’t talk to you about work. I’m at my apartment. Will is at home. He looks like a wreck.”