Peter remembered so clearly the day that Chloe was born. Of course he did – he was her father – though he hadn’t understood this, not really, until the moment she’d emerged from her mother, blood-smeared, bluish and wrinkled, a soft fruit left too long in the sun.
No cry had come from her for the longest time. Activity in the operating theatre had sharpened, redoubled. Machines beeping, masks and scrubs, the bright, bright lights. Peter had stood redundantly, holding Laura’s hand; her cheeks were wet, and he’d reached across to dry them with his fingers. ‘Where is she?’ Laura said. ‘Why isn’t she crying? Why can’t I hold her?’
Nobody replied: they were busy, all of them, a flock of blue-gowned birds with their daughter at its centre. He held Laura’s hand, and his breath, and after a long, long moment, finally it came: the cry, a ragged bleat. The flock scattered and regrouped. Peter let go of his breath. Someone – the paediatrician, perhaps; he had forgotten all their names, would not remember their faces either, though at the time he’d thought they would stay forever imprinted on his brain – came over to the operating table with Chloe in her arms. A mewling bundle in a hand-knitted hat and the blanket they’d brought from home: white merino wool, an absurd choice, now daubed with unidentifiable rust-coloured smears.
‘Your daughter,’ the faceless doctor said. ‘You can hold her for a moment, Laura, try to feed her if you like, and then we’ll have to take her upstairs. She’s doing OK, but she’s going to need a bit of special care, all right?’
All right: what could possibly have been all right about any of this? But he’d nodded, he’d tried to smile. Peter was crying now, too. His daughter, cradled against her mother’s chest, between the wires and the sticking plasters and the loosened neckline of her hospital gown. The little woollen hat, its red bobble, a cherry on a cake. Chloe’s tiny mouth, opening and closing, giving out its high, kittenish wail. The tight-drawn slits of her eyes.
He’d placed a hand to the bulb of her head and felt the warmth of it through the wool, the pulse of her blood, the fragile armature of her skull. My daughter. My child. One hand still in Laura’s, the other cradling their daughter’s head: the three of them, together for a moment before the blue-gowned birds had carried the child away.
‘What would you like, then, Chloe?’ he said.
She didn’t look up: her head was bowed over her phone, she was texting as she ate, shovelling oats into her mouth. Nightly, she made this strange concoction, oats soaked in yoghurt with honey and dried berries she ordered in bulk online, spending more than Peter did on several bottles of wine. Sometimes Chloe didn’t finish her morning jar, and then it sat there on the top shelf of the fridge, multiplying, spawning replicas of itself, until the ones at the back started to bloom with mould, and then it was he – he – who had to throw the whole lot away, scraping the clagged contents into the food waste bin, scrubbing the insides of the jars. He’d tried to speak to her about it, but she just gave him a look and turned away; reminding him so much, in those moments, of Laura that Peter ended up turning away also, saying nothing, for fear of betraying a frustration that wasn’t, of course, really Chloe’s to receive.
‘Like?’ she said.
Peter shifted his gaze to the window: the car park, the unemptied bins, the low wall with its amateurish graffiti – sok, one tag read, gnomically. He took a breath. Breathe, the nasal Californian on his meditation app told him daily. Breathe, and feel yourself drawing towards the centre line. What, he always wanted to snap back, with a most unmeditative frustration, is a centre line? I’m not a bloody Tube train.
‘For Christmas, Chloe. What would you like for Christmas?’
She looked up then, offered him her slow-lidded, brown-eyed gaze. Her mother’s eyes. His own frown, on his daughter’s face, now softening into a smile. ‘Sorry, Dad. I said I’d do a list, didn’t I? I’ll send you a few things today. Promise.’
Peter smiled back. What a miracle she was, sitting there in her pyjamas, eating her oats, holding her phone, connecting neuron to synapse; what a bright, shining miracle. It always came back to that, didn’t it? Always, it came back to that.
‘Be great if you could, Chlo. It’s not long now, and the deliveries are up shit creek. Queues at Dover. The same old story.’ She said nothing; she had returned her attention to the glow of her screen. He stood, carried his plate and cup to the sink; rinsed and sluiced, left them upturned on the draining board. Well trained, he supposed he was, though of course it was reductive to think of men – of himself – as needing training. He wasn’t his father, either: Laura had never had to hassle him to help. He’d done most of it: the cooking, the washing, the cleaning (well, when Patricia was unwell, or on holiday, and couldn’t do her four hours a week). Laziness, at least, had never been a source of Laura’s complaints.
‘Which day are you leaving for London again, Chlo?’
‘Christmas Eve, Dad. I already told you. The day after the party. I’ll take the train.’
He leant back against the worktop (marble-effect plastic, ugly as hell, like the whole house), watching her. The reddish hair she hardly ever brushed, drawn into a careless knot at the nape of her neck. The long curve of that neck, curled like a question mark over the table, the phone. Which party did she mean? Oh yes, the Lyttons’; she was meant to be waitressing: one of the other girls at the café had asked if she wanted to earn a bit of extra cash. Peter had been invited, actually – Lenbourne was a small town, not so many parties to go round, and he’d done some work with Adam Lytton. He hadn’t decided yet whether to go: it would be odd, perhaps, for Chloe to have her dad there as a guest while she was handing round canapés.
The curve straightened, became a line: Chloe looked at him again and said, ‘You will be all right without me, Dad, won’t you?’
Peter nodded. ‘Of course, sweetheart. I’ll be just fine.’
He would be, surely he would. He was on the waiting list for a table at the Plough: he’d wanted to take Chloe – a treat to celebrate the end of a truly awful year – but, as with everything, he’d left it too late, and they had no space. It didn’t matter anyway, now that Chloe was going home for Christmas. Home: he couldn’t help it, that was still how he thought of the house in Crystal Palace, though none of them actually lived there any more. Not even Laura. There were strangers, now, in the house that had been home for twenty years.
‘Well. I suppose I’d better get to work.’
‘All right, Dad.’ Chloe was back fiddling with her phone; honestly, it was as if it had been surgically attached. ‘See you at lunch, then, maybe, yeah?’
The departmental meeting overran, as it usually did: there was always somebody, droning on about something, hijacking the agenda, indifferent to the growing restlessness of his colleagues (it was almost always a he). At least it was easier to ignore them on Zoom than it had been when he still worked in the office. Peter minimised the window and carried on rummaging around online, trying to find something for Chloe. A surprise: but what on earth would she like? Trainers, perhaps – she did wear those – though would she really like those enormous clodhopping soles, and anyway, what was her size? He’d have to go hunting about in her wardrobe, and he didn’t fancy that: who knew what he might find? Jewellery, then: he liked the idea of that, a father choosing a necklace for his almost grown-up daughter. Something tasteful, discreetly expensive, like this rose-gold bee. He checked the price, swallowed: who was he kidding?
His name echoed from his laptop speakers: he closed the jewellery website, returned to Zoom. The meeting was staggering to its end. ‘Great, then, that’s a plan,’ Peter said. ‘Let’s regroup in the new year.’ He slammed his laptop shut and rushed downstairs, hoping to catch Chloe, but she’d already gone out, leaving a bowl of soup for him with a plate over it and a note. Back for dinner, Dad. C.
She hadn’t said what she was doing this afternoon or with whom. He ought to know: perhaps Laura was right, he was useless at keeping track of their daughter’s comings and goings. But she was eighteen now – old enough, he thought, to have a longer leash; longer, anyway, than the one Laura allowed her. And if he called her to ask, he’d get some vague, evasive answer (‘Just out with a friend, Dad, all right?’): Chloe hated being held to account, just as Laura always had. ‘You’re so smothering,’ Laura had said once, towards the end, when she’d been late back from work for the fifth night in a row and he’d been sitting there waiting for her at the kitchen table, her dinner overcooking on a low oven, like some pathetic bearded version of a 1950s housewife. Even his mother had had more dignity: at least, in the face of his father’s long unexplained absences, Irene had enjoyed herself, had had her friends round, had sat with them at the dining table under the low, green-shaded lamp. Playing cards, laughing; a record on, the smoke from their cigarettes curling up towards the ceiling and hanging there, suspended, like fine wisps of fog.
His mother. Irene. It was almost two o’clock, and he’d said he’d be round at three: if he ate quickly, there’d be time for a quick trawl around Market Square. There was that new homewares place – perhaps he’d find something for Chloe in there – and he could pop in to see Maddy in the bookshop. Peter took a spoon from the drawer, carried the cooling soup over to the table. Perhaps Maddy would be able to help him with this absurd pretence that he knew his daughter: that he had any idea at all about what Chloe wanted, or thought, or felt. And if Maddy couldn’t, no matter: just seeing her would lift his mood.
Chloe’s decision to come with him to Lenbourne had taken all of them by surprise: Laura, Peter, perhaps even Chloe herself.
She’d mentioned it for the first time casually, over breakfast, which Laura was insisting on them all having together at the kitchen table – the three of them, even on weekdays, even though they were no longer a proper family (he was leaving, for God’s sake, the house was up for sale). They’d been eating their toast (Peter), granola (Laura) and Weetabix (Chloe, who hadn’t yet discovered the oat thing), the radio droning away in the background, when she’d come out with it, blithe and offhand, as if she’d been offering some comment on the news.
‘Dad,’ she said, ‘I’m going to come with you.’
Laura put down her spoon.
‘Come with me where?’ Peter said, stupidly: he knew she didn’t mean to Waitrose.
‘To Lenbourne, of course.’ Chloe took another mouthful of cereal; from across the table they watched her, her mother and father, in equal silent astonishment. Mildly, Chloe added, ‘If you’re moving out, Dad, then so am I.’
Peter had seen Laura angry before – they were divorcing, weren’t they? – but that morning, things had gone to another level. She hadn’t shouted, or thrown things – not at first – but her cheeks had sprouted a deep-red rash, and her voice had taken on that low, husky, measured quality that, in their early days, he’d found impossibly sexy, even when she was telling him in no uncertain terms to fuck off.
‘No, Chloe, you’re not. Don’t be ridiculous. You’re seventeen years old. You have your A-levels, for God’s sake – I don’t care that the exams have been cancelled, you’ve still got a hell of a lot of work to do. And then university. You’ll be leaving home then. You’re not going anywhere now.’
Chloe had turned to her mother, said coolly, ‘I don’t think you’re in a position to lecture me on what I should and shouldn’t do, Mum, do you?’ And then it had begun: the door-slamming and the shouting and the calling of names, a whole string of them, hard-vowelled insults Peter had hardly imagined their quiet, studious daughter even knew (yes, she was seventeen, but in his mind she was still about four, pouring imaginary cups of tea for Peppa Pig).
Peter had hung back, unsure what role to play: it was ridiculous, of course Chloe couldn’t come with him, he hadn’t even sorted out anywhere to live yet, and wasn’t she off to Brighton in a few months anyway, all being well? But on the other hand … Well, Chloe had chosen him, hadn’t she? She was taking his side, and for that, naturally, he was grateful. Amazed, even: he’d felt, ever since Chloe was little, if not invisible to her, then a little smudged – a blurred photocopy, compared with the clear, high-focus image of her mother. A lieutenant, perhaps, to Laura’s captain. Which was a part of the problem, it seemed, as Laura saw it: his passivity, his reluctance to take charge. For this, and more, she was ending their marriage, calling time.
‘You’re enjoying this,’ Laura had spat at him that morning before she’d left for the office: she’d had to go, she was due in at half past nine, and Laura was never late, never absent, even if the world was imploding around her. When it had imploded, in fact – the virus, the chaos, the panic – she’d still insisted on going in, masked and gloved on an empty train, until the senior partners had voted to close the office doors. ‘You’ve put her up to it. Turning her against me. My own daughter.’
Peter had found his tongue then, still sitting there at the kitchen table, his tea cold, his toast unfinished. ‘My daughter too, Laura. And for God’s sake, if she’s angry with you, it’s because you’ve decided to break her family apart.’
Laura had looked at him for a long moment, dignified in her navy wool coat, her eyes brown and fierce, her red hair loose across her shoulders. A part of him had still loved her then, despite it all: still found her beautiful, still wanted her. Pathetic, he supposed; but perhaps she had felt it too – the weight of their history, of the people they had been, the daughter that still bound them. For she had turned suddenly gentle, wistful even, and said, ‘Peter. I have to go. Just please, for once in your life, talk to her, will you? Tell her this isn’t going to work. She must see that. She must.’ And then she’d turned and clipped off down the hallway and out the door, leaving him alone with the breakfast things, and the radio, and their almost-adult child still stomping around upstairs.
His mother’s flat smelt of oranges and cloves: she was mulling wine when he arrived, stirring a pot at the stove. Carols on the radio, her other hand waving a cigarette like a conductor’s baton. The sight cheered him, chimed with his mood, with the sense of lightness that seemed to follow any time he spent with Maddy. Lovely Maddy, with her fringe and her dresses and her fine, intelligent eyes. She knew Fran, didn’t she, Adam Lytton’s wife? It struck him now to wonder whether she was going to the Lyttons’ party, and how he might find out.
‘Mother,’ he said, ‘it’s three in the afternoon.’
Irene turned, nodded, offered her cheek for a kiss. Her apron had a black cat on it, apparently stirring a mug of tea with its paw. The words I Do What I Want were stamped in fat black letters underneath.
‘Half past,’ she said. ‘You’re late.’
‘I stopped at the bookshop on the way. Chloe won’t tell me what she wants for Christmas. I’m stumped. Is that new?’
She was stirring the pot again now; steam rose from it, boozy and fragrant. ‘What?’
‘The apron.’
Irene nodded again. ‘Alina,’ she said, drawing two mugs from a cupboard. When he said nothing, she added, ‘You know. Alina. My carer. An early Christmas present. I gave her one, too. Smellies from Boots – nice ones. We opened them yesterday. We didn’t want to wait. We had tea and some of those mince pies you brought.’
‘Oh.’ Alina. Peter could muster only a vague image to accompany the name – small, slim, rather attractive, as he recalled, in a dark, pixie-ish way. ‘That’s nice.’
‘It was. Here. Drink. Sit.’ She handed him a mug, and he followed her obediently through to the living room. Tinsel around every picture, the plastic tree he remembered from his childhood – it had to be almost as old as him – blinking red and green and gold from its foil-wrapped plinth beside the television. Nicer than his, for all Chloe’s efforts. The whole place, small as it was – and in a sheltered housing block, for goodness’ sake – was nicer than his. What was he doing there, in that ugly little terraced house, in the town in which he’d been born; what were they doing, he and Chloe? He should speak to her, sit her down, persuade her to return to London, stay on with her mother into the new year. School was done with now; she was supposed to be working somewhere more exciting, career-developing, than the coffee shop on Market Square: taking courses, doing something to justify the concept of a gap year. This had been a condition of her mother’s eventual acceptance of Chloe’s rebellion, one fought on several fronts: delaying university (Chloe had won her place to read psychology at Sussex, now deferred), upping sticks from London to Kent.
Laura was right: he just wasn’t up to solo parenting. He couldn’t even work out what to buy Chloe for Christmas. ‘Does she read novels?’ Maddy had asked him earlier, smiling at him in that way she did, that way that made him feel calmer, steadier: a life raft, a buoy. Better than any meditation app. They’d been friends at school, or almost-friends: their mothers had known each other from church. He’d hardly remembered Maddy, not really, and now here she was, here they both were, in late middle age, washed up again in their home town. ‘Which writers does she like?’
He’d frowned, attempting to picture Chloe’s expansive bedroom in London, the built-in bookshelves, neatly lined with out-turned spines; Chloe was tidy and ordered like her mother, and yes, she did read, though he couldn’t for the life of him think of the name of a single author on those shelves. Austen? Dickens? J.K. Rowling? Peter didn’t read much himself, not much other than business reports and sports news and gig reviews; he was ashamed to admit it, especially to Maddy, but it was true.
‘A camera,’ Irene said now, sipping her mug of wine, lifting berry-stained lips from its rim. ‘Chloe wants a camera. A proper one, you know, with one of those lenses that extends. A zoom lens.’
He stared at her. ‘How do you …?’
Irene shrugged. ‘We talk. I listen.’
He took a gulp of wine, let it slip, spiced, warming, down his throat. ‘I listen to her.’
‘No you don’t. Not really. Neither of you do.’
Peter drew a breath, counted. One, said the nasal Californian. Two. Three. ‘What is Chloe saying’ – he spoke slowly, carefully – ‘that we’re not hearing?’
Irene shifted on her chair, fixed him with her long-nosed, beakish gaze. She was handsome in her dotage, white-haired, pale and winnowed as driftwood; straight-backed, almost regal. Fashion still preoccupied her, even if its precepts, for her, were those of an earlier, more formal, age. The apron was an aberration (she must really like this carer); under it she was wearing a wool twinset, ivory Angora, and a knee-length skirt of green tweed. Peter knew that the worst things for his mother, in the hospital, had been the gowns, indecorously gaping at the back, and the inability to wash her own hair: he’d done it for her, leaning her head gently back over the basin, and brought her best dressing gown and slippers from home. Irene had still been in the old house then: Nelson Street, one street away from Maddy, or Maddy as she’d once been – a child, like him, both of them younger than Chloe. All the old places; all the gaps in memory, all the spaces they had left behind.
‘Where,’ Irene said, ‘do you think Chloe is right now?’
Peter set his mug down on the table beside him, a little too hard, sending a small spatter of wine across the cover of the festive edition of the Radio Times. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘But, come on, Mum. Don’t talk in riddles. What are you trying to say?’
Irene pursed her lips, took another long swig from her mug. Really, she was infuriating; he ought to have chucked her in a home, left her there to moulder, not moved fifty miles out of London the better to see to her care … Oh, better to be honest, he’d had nowhere else to go: nowhere, at any rate, that he could afford on his reduced divorcé’s budget (and it wasn’t as if he did that much for his mother anyway, really, other than pop by a couple of times a week; the carers saw to all the rest).
‘Don’t worry,’ Irene said. ‘Chloe’s fine. Well, more or less. Ask her, Peter. Talk to her. You’re her father. It really isn’t my story to tell.’
Peter suggested they went for a walk the following afternoon; he didn’t have much in the diary, everyone was winding down for Christmas, and Chloe was on the morning shift (this, at least, he knew). He met her outside the café. Black-painted sign, gold trim, the daily roast chalked on a blackboard. His daughter seemed diminished, seen from a distance, standing on the pavement in her coat, hat and scarf: a padded bundle, armed against the cold. That swaddled newborn, opening and closing her tiny mouth. That toddler, stumbling in puddle-suit and wellington boots; that small girl, quiet and watchful, in her hat and mittens, staring back at him impassively as he pushed her on the swings.
‘Have you eaten?’ he said as he approached. ‘Want to get something on the way?’
Chloe shook her head. ‘I had a panini.’
‘All right then. Let’s go.’
They crossed the square, took Church Street, following the cobbles down past the huddled Elizabethan terraces, with their struts and gables and hand-decorated wreaths, to follow the course of the creek. The town fell away quickly: the last straggling buildings – his favourite, the Captain’s House, once neglected, almost derelict, now renovated, clad in tasteful white and grey – gave way to mudbanks, reeds, the high, anguished yelp of gulls. It was milder than it had been in recent days: the wind had dropped, the sky lay heavily, a dirty off-white, like sullied snow.
‘Chloe,’ he said eventually, reluctantly breaking a silence he’d been enjoying, interpreting as easy, even companionable. ‘Are you OK? Grandma said …’
She turned her head sharply. ‘What did Grandma say?’
Fear tugged at his gut: what did his mother know? ‘Nothing, really. Just that I should talk to you. That perhaps I wasn’t … listening. To whatever it was you might need, or want, to say.’
‘Oh.’
Silence again: not easy now, but fraught, charged. Peter cleared his throat. ‘I know I’m not always the best at … well, communicating. God knows, your mother made that clear enough.’
‘Dad, don’t.’
‘Sorry.’ He was. They walked on. Damn it, why was he so bloody useless at doing what seemed to come so naturally to everyone else? Asking questions, opening up. It had driven Laura to distraction, and now he couldn’t find a way to tell Maddy how he was starting to feel about her – even to frame it for himself, in his own mind – and far worse, his daughter was in some kind of trouble, and he was making a hash of it all. Terrible images flashed through his mind, drawn from news stories and late-night TV documentaries: sex trafficking, grooming, predatory older men. Was that why she’d wanted to make a getaway from London, why she’d decided to spend a year down here with him, in a town where all that passed for nightlife was a handful of ancient pubs hosting quizzes and occasionally sending generally amiable drunkards spilling out on to the street? Was Chloe fleeing some sort of tragedy, some sort of … whisper it; no, Peter couldn’t even do that, not aloud … abuse?
‘There was someone,’ she said, her face angled away from him, her voice trailing off towards the estuary, the silver, receding sea. ‘There was someone I loved, and now there isn’t.’
Headlines still swirled in his mind; his mouth was dry. ‘Someone? Who? A man? How old?’
She looked at him, disdainful. ‘Dad. For God’s sake. A man, yes – or a boy. I don’t know. Well, I mean, I do. His name’s Jas. Jasper. He’s nineteen. At uni now. Glasgow. Miles away.’
The relief: Peter was giddy with it, floating. Jasper! Nineteen! Thank God! Shout the boy’s name from the rooftops! He gathered himself. He breathed. ‘Jasper? You never mentioned a Jasper. Was he at school? The year above? Does your mum know about him?’
Chloe shook her head. Beside him, she seemed to shrink a little, draw her neck down further into her scarf. ‘Nobody knew about him. About us, I mean. Not really. I didn’t tell anyone. He had a …’ The ellipsis hung for a moment, and he let it, fought the urge to fill the gap. ‘A girlfriend, Dad. He still does. In fact, she’s his fiancée now.’
‘Oh, Chlo.’ They had reached a fork in the path: left along the coastal trail, deeper into the marshes and the mud; right to loop back towards Lenbourne. They stopped. He faced her, put his hand on her arm. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes damp. She wouldn’t meet his gaze.
‘I was with him yesterday,’ she said. ‘Jas came to see me here. He’s back in London for Christmas. He kept messaging me. I thought he was going to end it with her. I thought we were …’ She lifted her face, looked at him. Tears were coursing down her cheeks. ‘Special, I guess. I’m an idiot. The worst kind. I hate myself, what I did. I …’
‘Chloe. Darling. Come here.’ He opened his arms and she stepped into them, and they stood there, wrapped around one another, alone among the reeds and the gulls, under the low December sky.
He found the camera on eBay: a decent one, he thought, a Nikon, five years old but in full working order, sold by a reputable second-hand shop in Bristol. It was the landscape around Lenbourne, she’d explained, that had made her think seriously about photography: the marshlands, the estuary, the widescreen sky. She’d been taking photos on her phone, but it wasn’t the same. There was a digital photography course she was thinking of taking next year, at that adult education college in Holborn: yes, it might make more sense for her to stay on with her mother in London after Christmas, at least for a bit; she could always come back if he was lonely.
‘Is that why you came with me, Chlo?’ he’d said; they’d been having dinner, fish and chips from the good place on the Canterbury Road. ‘Because you were worried I’d be lonely?’
‘Maybe a bit.’ Chloe squinted at him over her paper bag, holding her wooden fork: they hadn’t bothered with plates, or even proper cutlery. Sachets of ketchup and tartare sauce, and the incomparable mingled tang of vinegar and oil and salt. ‘I mean, who’d want you now, decrepit as you are?’ She smiled. ‘But no, really I just wanted to get away. Be somewhere different, you know?’
‘I do.’
They were silent for a bit, eating, and then Peter said, ‘Call your mum tonight, Chloe, eh? Tell her what’s been going on. She needs to know. She’ll want to know.’
‘All right. Yeah, I guess I should.’
She had. And he’d talked to her the next day, Laura; she’d called him on her mobile, said she was walking along Central Hill. He’d imagined her, striding through their old neighbourhood (with customary good fortune, she’d managed to find a renovated loft apartment not far from the house they’d sold), and felt … nothing, not really. Laura’s features, in his mind, seemed blurred, indistinct; the only faces he could really picture clearly in that moment, he realised, were his daughter’s and Maddy’s. He’d heard back from the Plough. There’d been a cancellation for Christmas Day. A table for two. He was going to text Maddy later, invite her, to that and to the party: sod it all, he had to open his mouth and speak.
‘She’s all right, though, do you think?’ Laura had asked him on the phone, with a deference that was unfamiliar to him, untested.
‘She is. She is. Or she will be, anyway.’
There was music at Laura’s end of the line: he caught tinny snatches of it, guitars and drums and phoney celestial bells. ‘Santa Claus Is Coming to Town’. ‘OK, Peter. Well, you did well in getting her to open up. God knows, Chloe’s a closed book sometimes.’
‘Aren’t we all.’
Laura gave a small, brittle laugh. ‘Yes. Well. I’d better go, I’m meeting Kate for brunch at Brown and Green. I’m outside now. I’ll see Chloe on Christmas Eve. And Peter …’
‘What?’
‘Have a good Christmas, if we don’t speak before. I hope it’s … Well. I hope it’s restful, or whatever you need it to be.’
‘Thanks, Laura. You too.’ And then she was gone, the phone silent, and he was back on eBay, ordering the camera: the perfect one, the one he would wrap and watch his daughter opening, smiling, looking up at him as if in response to words only the two of them could hear.