Rachel stiffened at the voice and ducked into the living room, out of sight. What had she done to deserve living opposite Sara Fortescue, with her sharp little nose and all-seeing beady eyes? She tried not to groan aloud as she heard the woman calling to Becca in honeyed tones of fake sympathy, barely disguising her breathy eagerness to know the gossip. It was a miracle she’d waited this long, frankly.
To Rachel’s relief, Becca wasn’t having any of it. ‘She’s fine,’ she replied coolly. ‘Anyway, must get on, so—’
‘But she’s all right?’ Oh, Sara wasn’t going to be fobbed off so easily, no way. Rachel could picture her, hands clasped together earnestly, scandal antennae twitching. ‘Everyone’s been so worried!’
Rachel rolled her eyes. Bollocks, had they. Nosey, more like. Please, Becca, she thought, feeling tired and sore and vulnerable. Don’t let her in. The last thing Rachel wanted was to be gawped at by the Breaking News queen.
‘No need to worry,’ Becca said. ‘As I said, everything’s fine. I’ll pass on your best wishes. Bye now.’
Then came the blessed sound of the door being shut. Thank goodness. Rachel leaned back against the chair, a headache tight around her temples. Through the window she could see Sara retreating to her own house, shoulders stiff, mouth no doubt pursed in a knot of annoyance.
Becca sidled into the living room again, looking shifty. ‘Er . . . That was the woman over the road,’ she said. ‘I hope I wasn’t too brusque with her, but . . .’ She pulled a face. ‘Well, I wasn’t sure about her, that’s all. Is she really your mate, or just a one-woman neighbourhood watch scheme?’
‘She’s not my mate,’ Rachel replied. She paused, and added, ‘Thanks for getting rid of her.’
‘No problem,’ Becca said, with a guilty glance out of the window. ‘Anyway, we should have some lunch. I’m famished, and you must be too. I’ll make us something.’
Rachel felt her spirits sink even further. Eating was usually something she enjoyed enormously, but it had lost all appeal for her since the operation. All food had to be soft and liquid while her jaw was wired: soup, smoothies, runny porridge, apple sauce . . . nothing that required chewing, basically. Baby food. She had a flashback to all the purees she’d made her own children when she was weaning them – the sweet potato mush and stewed pear, poured into ice-cube trays and frozen for convenience. Bags of them in the freezer, carefully labelled and dated. Those were the days when she thought she had motherhood down pat. Ha!
‘I’m not very hungry,’ she lied. ‘I might just go to bed.’
‘Have something first,’ Becca insisted. ‘You stay there, I’ll whiz up some soup. Won’t be long.’
Before Rachel could argue, Becca was in the kitchen peeling and chopping carrots, rifling through the spice jars to find cumin and coriander, and hauling Rachel’s biggest pan onto the hob. Kind as she knew her sister was being, Rachel just found it irritating, having her waltz into her kitchen like that, clanging pots around as if she owned the place. It was only when she remembered that Becca had been here several days minding the fort, looking after her children, that she was able to swallow back her disgruntlement. ‘I’m making enough to keep you going for a few meals,’ Becca commented, as Rachel limped in and lowered herself to a seat at the table.
‘Thanks,’ Rachel said, without much enthusiasm. Soup reminded her of Wendy and her ridiculous diets. She’d had them all eating cabbage soup for days on end one January when she was on a new year’s self-improvement bender. The house had smelled so disgusting that Rachel had joined the school athletics club, preferring to be outside every dark rainy evening, running laps on a floodlit track, than at home, being slowly gassed to death by the stench of cabbage and farts.
‘I was sorry to hear about you and Lawrence,’ Becca ventured after a while. Her hair was sticking damply to her face with the heat from the soup pan, and she pushed it away. ‘You don’t have to tell me about it if you don’t want, but . . . Well, what happened?’
The fingers on Rachel’s good hand clenched into a fist under the table, as Becca began crumbling stock cubes into a jug. Don’t you dare, she thought. Don’t you dare even mention his name to me. She looked pointedly away, willing her sister to shut up, and Becca, for once, got the message.
‘Sorry. None of my business,’ she said, sounding awkward. ‘Forget I asked.’ She prodded a piece of carrot with a knife, then drained the pan and whizzed the cooked carrots in the blender, adding pinches of spice and several turns of ground black pepper, before returning the mixture to the hob and stirring through the vegetable stock. Meanwhile, Rachel leaned back on her chair, sapped by tiredness, looking ahead to the moment when school would be out in an hour or so and her babies would be home.
Of course, Becca couldn’t stay quiet for long. ‘Well, it sounds like you’ve totally been through the wringer,’ she said eventually. ‘But do you know what? You’ve kept going and held things together, and even started your own business when most women would be on their knees crying. Can I show you my admiration with a bowl of spiced carrot soup?’
Rachel forced a smile. The soup looked and smelled revolting, but she feared she had little choice. ‘Yes, please,’ she lied.
‘MUM!’ cried Scarlet later that afternoon, bounding through the front door and into the living room. Wiped out after the journey home, Rachel had retreated to the sofa while Becca did the school run, and must have dozed off. She struggled to sit upright as she heard the door, but Scarlet had stopped dead at the sight of her. ‘Whoa,’ she said, eyes round behind her glasses. ‘Shit a brick, Mum. Luke, come and see.’
‘Scarlet!’ Rachel remonstrated feebly. There was no mother alive who actively wanted her ten-year-old daughter to say things like ‘Shit a brick’, but she knew this wasn’t the moment to start carping. ‘Come here and give me a hug. Oh, I’ve really missed you,’ she cried as Scarlet ventured closer and then all the way over for an embrace. Rachel put her chin on her daughter’s head and breathed in the smell of her, feeling her own body relax in response. Now she felt properly at home. This was what she needed – forget soup, forget morphine: the best cure was to have your own child back in your arms, safe and close. ‘How are you? How’s school? Has everything been all right?’
‘Your voice sounds so weird,’ Scarlet said, her own voice muffled from being hugged so tightly. ‘Like you’re gritting your teeth the whole time.’
Rachel released her a fraction and stroked her daughter’s freckled cheek. Precious girl. Precious, funny, tell-it-like-it-is girl, she thought. ‘That’s why I didn’t phone you. I know it’s a bit hard to understand what I’m saying, but you’ll get used to it, I promise. Hey, Luke,’ she added, seeing her son sidle into the room. ‘Hello, lovely. Are you all right? It’s still me, under the bruises, don’t worry.’
He was staring saucer-eyed, hanging back in the doorway as if he was scared of her, as if he didn’t quite trust that it really was her.
‘Come and look, Luke, you can see all the stitches and bits of metal where they fixed Mum,’ said Scarlet, who was far less squeamish about such things.
‘Did you have a fight with someone?’ Luke asked, coming a few brave steps closer. ‘Does it really really hurt?’
Rachel tried to make her eyes smile, because she knew her mouth wasn’t up to moving in the proper directions just now. ‘It does hurt a bit,’ she admitted, ‘but I’ll be all right. That’s the main thing, okay? I’ll be fine. And how are you? How was school? Tell me all about your day.’
It took a minute or two for them to get over their shock at seeing her so wounded and unlike her usual self, but eventually she had both of them nestled against her on the sofa, telling her stories about their day at school, catching her up on all the important news she’d missed – that Scarlet had nearly taught Harvey how to roll over at the weekend, that Luke had been invited to a swimming party next week, that Scarlet had got a new best friend, this girl who’d just joined the class, called Lois. ‘Oh yeah,’ said Scarlet, as if tacking on an afterthought, the least important thing to have happened, ‘and Luke went to hospital on Thursday.’
‘Yeah, Mrs Keyes took us in her car,’ he said, ‘and had to jab me in the leg, but she did give me a lolly and said I was really brave.’
Rachel couldn’t speak for a moment. WHAT?, she wanted to screech.
Becca came in just then, catching the tail end of the conversation, and her creamy freckled skin flushed pink. ‘Ahem, yes, I was going to tell you about that,’ she said guiltily, setting down a tray of orange squash and a plate of cut-up apple pieces. ‘I’m so, so sorry, Rach. It was all my fault. I didn’t know he had a nut allergy and I gave him some of a Snickers bar. But he’s fine, it was dealt with really quickly and there was no harm done.’
‘Apart from the jab in my leg,’ Luke pointed out.
‘Apart from that, yes,’ Becca said, chastised.
Oh my God. Rachel felt dizzy with horror. She stared at her sister, wondering if this was some kind of joke. Judging by the pleading light in her eyes and the way she was clasping her hands together so nervously, it wasn’t.
‘I helped,’ Scarlet said importantly. ‘I took him to the office.’
‘You did,’ Becca said. ‘Scarlet was very cool in a crisis.’
‘And I was brave,’ Luke prompted, determined to hang onto the spotlight.
‘You were brave.’ Becca bit her lip, gazing at Rachel. ‘And I’m really sorry. He’s absolutely fine now, obviously. I just . . . didn’t know.’ How was I supposed to know? begged those blue eyes.
‘Right,’ Rachel said, lost for anything else to say. Thankfully, the front door opened again then and in came Mabel, with a ton of make-up on (banned at school), her wrists jangling with bracelets (banned at school) and her skirt hitched up to mid-thigh level (banned at school). ‘Hi, love,’ Rachel said, wondering whether or not she had the stamina to take her daughter up on any of these crimes. ‘Did you have a good day?’
Mabel stared at her. ‘Oh my God, Mum, you sound like Stephen Hawking,’ she said, reaching for her phone. ‘Hey, can I take a photo of you to put on Instagram?’
Rachel was not used to being an invalid. All her life she’d been healthy and strong, sleeping well, eating well, loving to run, swim and dance. Growing up without a mum for years had taught her to be independent, to look after herself and others. She’d been so terrified of the same fate befalling her children that she’d done her utmost to stay fit for their sakes as much as her own. It was only really when she’d gone through childbirth and the immediate aftermath that she’d had the experience of being looked after, and even then, she’d insisted on getting up and carrying on as soon as possible. No need for any assistance, thank you very much.
Back in the hospital, she’d felt similarly keen to escape. Of course she’d be fine, of course she would manage, did they not realize who they were talking to? But it only took a few hours of being at home for her to reconsider that actually, much as she hated to admit it, things were going to be pretty difficult for some time. Taking a shower, for instance, when you had one arm in plaster that you had to keep completely dry. Trying to help your kid with homework when your brain was so fogged by the mega-strength painkillers, it was all you could do to keep your eyes open. Buying food from the supermarket when your car had been towed away (Becca was on the case), you’d had to cancel all your credit cards (ditto) and couldn’t actually face going out in public . . . Not to mention the fact that she had client appointments to keep, and bills to pay. The next six weeks of enforced inaction were already looming in a scarily daunting way. What was she going to do? Oh, how she wished none of this had happened, that she’d never met Violet Pewsey and never boarded the train to Manchester in search of the truth!
She was just having a little moment of panic in her bedroom that evening, having said goodnight to Luke, when Becca knocked on the door, the phone in her hand. ‘For you,’ she said. ‘Someone called Hayley George, about tomorrow?’
God, yes, lovely Hayley, one of her new clients. Her smiling face swung into Rachel’s mind and she hesitated, at a loss for what to do. ‘Can I ring her back in five minutes?’ she asked in a low voice, and Becca nodded and withdrew again.
This was the downside of not working for a big company, of course. No sick pay, no team of staff to pick up the slack when necessary, no-one available to stand in for her. She was going to have to cancel her clients, one by one, because none of them would want to wait six weeks until she was fit enough for another appointment. It seemed such a shame, though, when she’d managed to build up a decent list, when she was just starting to feel that she might be getting somewhere. If only there was some way around it!
There came another gentle knock at the door. Becca again. ‘I’ve written down her number – or I can phone her back and pass on a message, if that’s easier,’ she said. ‘And . . . Look, tell me to bugger off if you want, but . . . are you sure you’ll be all right if I go tomorrow? I know they said to hang around just for twenty-four hours, but . . .’ She shrugged. ‘The thing is, I lost my job last week, so if you want me to stay here another few days, that’s fine. I can take the kids to school for you, do the cooking, basically step into your shoes as best I can.’ She gave an awkward smile. ‘I promise I’ve learned my lesson on the peanut front, too.’
Rachel considered the offer. As angry as she’d felt with Becca over the last seven months, there was no getting away from the fact that her stepsister had been pretty heroic in recent days, stepping in at the drop of a hat, keeping the home fires burning in Rachel’s absence. ‘How come you lost your job?’ she asked while she tried to decide.
‘Um . . . Well, to be honest, I was meant to be working the night I came over here,’ Becca confessed, scuffing a foot around on the carpet as if she was a child. ‘I made an excuse to my boss, but he saw through me and gave me the boot.’
‘Oh God. Sorry.’ Rachel hadn’t even thought about the consequences of Becca having to uproot herself following Sara’s phone call, putting her own life on hold.
‘It’s all right. It was a shit job, anyway. But I don’t have to rush back, that’s what I’m trying to say. And I’ve spoken to quite a few of your clients already, so if you want me to ring around the others for you, or . . . or whatever, then just say.’ She paused. ‘It’s been nice spending time with the kids, they’re really brilliant. And maybe you and I could . . .’ Another awkward shrug. ‘Could get to know each other again?’
Hmm. Rachel wasn’t so sure about that – Like you got to know my husband, you mean? I don’t think so – but one of Becca’s earlier comments had come back to her, about how she could step into Rachel’s shoes. It was a long shot, but maybe, just maybe, it was worth a try. There was only one way to find out. She took a deep breath. ‘Can I ask you a favour?’