“More chicken, Chris?”
Di pushed the enormous bird his way, then seemed to notice his plate was still half full of meat and gravy-drowned mashed potato.
“Not hungry?” she asked, and her eyes narrowed—or did they? All afternoon he’d been looking for signs that Vicky’s sisters were treating him abnormally, but he could wring meaning out of anything when he was feeling paranoid—a glance exchanged between Jane and Di, a casual question about what he’d been up to.
The first part of the meal had brimmed with discussion about Freya. Chris should have anticipated that she’d be the talking point of this week’s lunch, should have come mentally prepared. Instead he’d been dumbstruck as Di’s iPad had been passed round the table, the local news story on its screen, Freya’s photo beneath a smear of fingerprints.
“It’s awful,” Di had kept saying, her face stretched into a mournful expression, “just awful.” Chris had bristled with anger. She didn’t even know Freya. Why was she acting so upset? Whereas Jane, the younger sister, could barely hide her excitement at the fact that the missing girl was her sister’s neighbor, her brother-in-law’s student.
He’d been relieved when the others had picked up their cutlery and the iPad had been set aside. But now the spotlight was shining on his lack of appetite.
“Dieting?” Jane asked.
Chris’s hand reflexed to his middle and he was dismayed, as ever, by the soft paunch that seemed to have developed almost overnight when he’d hit his late thirties. Along with the thinning patch on his crown, which he would wince at in unflattering photos or mirrors at the wrong angle. That was why he shaved his hair short these days. Was it also why Vicky didn’t seem to find him remotely attractive anymore?
“I had a big helping,” he lied.
“Belly bigger than your eyes,” Di’s six-year-old daughter, Polly, diagnosed.
“Other way round, Pol,” Di said. “Eyes bigger than your belly.”
“Nobody’s eyes are bigger than their belly. Not even Anna’s and Elsa’s and they’ve got huge eyes . . .” Polly demonstrated by widening hers, fluttering her fingers on top of them like lashes.
“Anna and Elsa?” Chris said distractedly.
“From Frozen!” everybody else at the table replied, looking at him like he was an alien.
Di began pushing the chicken toward other people. Vicky took a whole leg and bit straight into it. She ate ravenously whenever they came here. Maybe it was a habit from childhood, the three sisters fighting over food at the dinner table. Di had done the cooking from a young age because their mum had rarely been up to it. Vicky still became emotional if she had to talk about the last meal they’d eaten together before they’d been placed with different foster families. She couldn’t even look at macaroni and cheese—as Chris had found out on their third date when he’d made it for her, oblivious to its significance, and had seen behind her tough façade for the first time.
He watched her now, chicken grease glistening on her lips, and felt a pang of affection. Maybe she sensed it because she actually smiled at him, then wiped her mouth with a napkin and laughed at her own table manners.
The moment was broken when Jane said, “So what’s she like, Chris?”
“Who?”
“The girl! Freya. You must’ve got to know her a bit, teaching her to drive?”
He trailed a finger in his cold gravy. “Not really. There isn’t much chitchat during a lesson. I’m generally just trying to keep us both . . .” He caught himself before he said alive, and an uneasy silence fell.
“Her parents must be worried sick,” Jane said.
“Well, maybe they should’ve taken better care of her.” This was Di, suddenly indignant, aggravating Chris again, even though part of him wanted to agree.
“That’s harsh, Di,” Vicky said. “Horrible things can happen to anyone.”
There was another silence, a twang of tension, and Chris sensed their history swirling between them, sensed that they were half talking about their own parents now, and their different levels of forgiveness.
It was Di’s husband, Gav, who defused things, scooping up plates and blathering about pudding. The man couldn’t cope with serious conversation for longer than a few seconds. Chris was grateful to him tonight, though. The atmosphere adjusted with the clatter of crockery and a discussion about treacle sponge cake. He felt Vicky’s eyes on him, but when he glanced up she wasn’t looking at him at all: She was twisted away, talking to Jane.
Di never let anyone help her clear up after lunch. Chris hated the martyred air with which she retreated into the kitchen, washing every dish and putting them all away, loudly urging her guests to relax. The other sisters thought nothing of it: This had always been Di’s role, Chief Grown-Up, and now that she had the biggest house it seemed even more entrenched.
On his way back from the bathroom, Chris poked his head into the kitchen. He normally avoided asking Di if she needed any help, reluctant to offer her an extra chance to decline heroically, but tonight he had to talk to her.
“Want a coffee, Chris?” She began filling the kettle with her left hand, scouring a baking tray with her right.
“I’ll make them.” Chris managed to wrestle the kettle from her, and got out the mugs, which had the same speckled pattern as his and Vicky’s cups at home—Di had donated her spares. He decided to use this as a route into the conversation he wanted to have. After stumbling over a line about Di being generous, always giving things to others, he segued into “That bracelet you gave Vicky is nice.”
Was there a pause? Did she clang a saucepan to buy herself time?
“Yeah, I thought it would suit her.”
He stared at Di’s profile, bent over the sink. Her lips were pressed together, accentuating her overbite, and her dish-scrubbing had become more vigorous.
Chris didn’t know what he’d hoped for. Of course Di would pick up on the need to cover for Vicky, even if the bracelet hadn’t come from her. The three sisters had a shared radar for defending one another.
It doesn’t suit her, he wanted to snarl. Not at all.
“Did you buy it for her, or was it yours?”
“I bought it.” Her brush scratched manically at the saucepan. “Thought it might cheer her up a bit.”
“Cheer her up? Is she . . . Has she said something to you?”
“She’s just seemed a bit down since switching wards, don’t you think?”
“Switching wards?”
“Oh . . .” Di stopped her assault on the pan, her cheeks flushed. “I thought you knew.”
“No, I—”
They were interrupted by Vicky walking into the kitchen. She looked from one to the other, seeming to detect an atmosphere. “Everything okay?”
Di leaped in: “Fine! Chris is kindly making coffee.”
Vicky arched an eyebrow. The post-lunch coffees used to be his regular role, back when he’d had the energy and inclination to insist. Chris wondered if Vicky was thinking of the day she’d first brought him round here, how anxious he’d been for acceptance, and how they’d kissed in the car afterward, laughing about Chris calling Gav “Garth” and Di interrogating him about his intentions.
Now Vicky glanced at her sister and at Chris again, before her face smoothed into that exasperating blankness.
“Which one’s mine?” she asked, nodding toward the drinks.
Chris was relieved when Vicky suggested they head off. As usual there was a lengthy good-bye process, new conversations budding on the doorstop, Polly throwing a tantrum because she didn’t want her aunties to leave. Chris waited on the pavement. He’d once asked Vicky whether she and her sisters found it hard to say good-bye because of being separated when they were young. She’d grinned, pecked his cheek, and said, “Nah, we do it because it drives our husbands up the wall.”
As Polly began performing diversionary handstands, Chris gazed around the street as if to test whether this one, two miles from his own, gave him that same sense of being scrutinized. The house opposite had its curtains open, revealing a couple lounging at opposite ends of a sofa, reading different sections of the same newspaper, their feet entwined. With a stab of sadness, Chris turned away toward his car.
He froze when he clapped eyes on it.
There was a piece of paper on the windshield, tucked beneath the wipers. A chill zipped down his spine. His eyes swept the street again before settling on the note. It couldn’t be . . .
Vicky appeared beside him. “You all right?”
“I’m fine.” He walked on, tripping slightly on an uneven paving slab. Vicky pulled out her phone and seemed preoccupied, reading messages. Then she lifted her head and noticed the note. “Oh, what’s that?”
Chris snatched it before she could, and kept it out of her line of vision as he unfolded it.
He almost choked on a rush of outward breath. It was just a message from one of Di’s fussy neighbors, asking “whom it may concern” not to park in front of their house. Chris tore it in half, relief and irritation clashing together.
“There aren’t any parking restrictions here, mate,” he mumbled, glancing at number 52. “You don’t own this spot.”
Vicky rolled her eyes—at Chris or at the neighbor, he wasn’t sure—and prompted him to unlock the car.
As they drove home Chris felt shaken, hoping Vicky hadn’t noticed his reaction. She turned up the radio but Chris turned it down again and she looked at him in surprise.
“Why didn’t you tell me you’d moved wards?” he asked.
This was where a lot of their conversations seemed to happen: driving to and from places, each the captive audience of the other.
“Didn’t I?”
“Don’t play dumb, Vic. It doesn’t suit you. When was it?”
“Three weeks ago.”
“Where are you now?”
“Cardiology.”
He glanced toward her, but she was staring out of her window. “Did they make you move?”
“No.”
“Then why?”
“I fancied a change, okay?”
“Did something happen?”
“I said no! Stop interrogating me.”
“I just wish you’d tell me stuff.”
She made a small sound through her nostrils.
“What was that?” he asked.
“What?”
“You made a noise. Like a nose-sigh.” In the past, his spontaneous invention of the term might have made them both chuckle, dissipating the tension.
“I’m just breathing,” she said. “I assume that’s allowed.”
She flicked the radio back up. Chris drove on autopilot, his mind whirring. How many times had he driven between Di’s house and theirs? Past the florist where he’d bought Vicky tulips that one impulsive time; past the record shop where he’d once bumped into Paul Harlow and made painfully awkward small talk. How would he feel if somebody told him he’d never do this journey again, that the routines he often bemoaned could vanish in a flash?
“Slow down, Chris,” Vicky said.
He realized how fast he was driving, his hands tight on the wheel. Yet he didn’t slow. In fact, he swung around the next corner without braking, and Vicky lurched sideways. “Chris, for fuck’s sake.”
“Did something happen?” he repeated, his face hot. “On the ward?”
“No! Aren’t you listening?”
He accelerated again. He wanted to shake her up, wake her up. Then he caught sight of her stricken face, her fingers gripping the door handle, and felt a surge of shame. His throat filled with bile as she morphed for an instant into Freya. He thrust his foot onto the brake to slow the car right down.
“You don’t tell me everything either,” Vicky said once he’d been driving normally for a while.
“What are you talking about?”
“I don’t keep nagging you about why you’re so jumpy and weird lately,” she said, “so don’t nag me about what’s going on at work.”
Chris let his hands slip to the base of the wheel. It was as if she was offering him a pact. Let’s agree to keep secrets. Agree to pretend. He wondered how far such a deal could possibly stretch. What would it take to shock them both out of their denial?