Fancy dinner plans long abandoned, she’s in the passenger seat of my car, hugging two steaming pizza boxes to her chest, sneaking tiny corners of crusts every thirty seconds when she thinks I’m not looking.
Her miserable music plays through the speakers, her thigh drumming beneath my hand. The darkness inside me has shrunk enough to let me take a full inhale.
“Saw that,” I say, as she sneaks a piece of pepperoni from my pizza and eats it.
“Saw what?”
“You’re stealing my toppings.”
She frowns over at me, face illuminated by the red light we’re stopped at. She’s ethereal. “You really are getting old. Let’s book you in for an eye test.”
I squint at her. “Who said that?”
She giggles as the light turns green, humming softly as I steer us through the driving rain and busy evening traffic to my father’s house in Kensington. It’s a five-bedroom house at the end of a terrace on a well-kept road, furnished as tackily as you’d expect from a billionaire CEO who thinks gray crushed velvet is still on trend.
I park on the street, glancing around as I do. I have zero doubt that my father would love to get his hands on Ophelia. The street is quiet, neatly manicured hedges perfectly still. No sign of anything amiss.
I walk over to open the car door for Ophelia, taking the boxes from her lap. She’s quiet as we walk up to the front door, as she always is whenever she’s taking in how people like me live. I know she’s disgusted by the excess of it all.
“Another spare house,” she mutters, as I turn the key in the lock and enter the security code into the pad. “It’s like real-life Monopoly for you people.”
“And you’re the best Chance card I ever drew.”
She rolls her eyes, but her face flushes pink. “All right, Corbeau. Calm down.”
The house is cold and still, and I try to remember the last time the eight of us stayed here. Paris, we’ve spent a lot of time in, but London was a place we stopped visiting when my dad stopped caring about being a parent.
“Show me your bedroom!” she says, excitedly. “Have you got posters up? Embarrassing childhood pictures?”
I laugh, but it’s slightly strained. “It’s not that sort of home, love.”It wasn’t that sort of childhood.
I don’t bother with a tour, nor does she ask for one. She follows me up the stairs and into the bedroom I usually sleep in. The walls are white, the bathroom is marble. The bookshelves are full of those clothbound coffee table books that no one would ever read.Luxury Handbag Collections of the Nineties.That kind of thing. There’s not a photo, poster, toy, or splash of color in the whole house. “Oh.”
“Yeah.”
She flops onto the bed, taking her pizza from me. “We can stick your drawings up.”
I lie down beside her, flipping the lid of my pizza box. It looks like a mouse has been at it. “Your drawing is going in my office, where I can stare at it all day.”
She folds a slice in half and eats it in one bite.That’s my girl. “Sounds inappropriate for a corporate environment.”
“So is having phone sex with you while I’m sitting at my desk.”
She turns bright red. “Oops.”
“Yeah,oops.”
We lie on the bed, sprawled out over the duvet while making light work of two extra-large pizzas.
I pull my phone from my pocket, catching up on the sibling group chat. Mia has very thoroughly documented the baking process for her pistachio cookies, complete with a selfie of her and Evie at the end, cheeks full like hamsters.
Mia
You’re missing out, Alex
I look at the girl beside me, hair still messy from our time in the hall, a smudge of pizza sauce on her pink bottom lip.
I think I’ll manage.
