Tilly went straight to Alice’s house from the station. The footpath was still wet and glistening from the rain.
Nothing looked the same. Alice’s house was silent. Its tidiness seemed forced, like gritted teeth. Mr Layton was never coming home. Tilly began to cry before the door opened as if she could feel the house’s sorrow pressed up against that door. She didn’t even know the woman who opened the door.
Everything had swerved so sharply from one thing to another. Raff Cavallo would never love her now. She had meant to impress him with her worldliness and instead she had turned him against her. She had done something terribly, irreversibly wrong. And her dad had done something terribly irreversibly wrong, too.
The woman at the door guided Tilly inside. The woman knew nothing of her wrongs. There were already flowers. Alice sat at the kitchen table. She didn’t smile. Her lip trembled. Alice, who usually bounced past all calamity, had fallen beneath it.
She and Tilly went into Alice’s bedroom, sat on the bedspread of roses and wept together.