Page 78 of Just for the Season

‘Good,’ she says in clipped tones when I ask her how her evening with Libby was.

Sam chatters all the way home while Ruby maintains complete silence.

As soon as we get inside, I tell Sam that he can go on the PlayStation for half an hour, and then I turn to Ruby.

‘Are you okay?’ I ask. ‘Has something happened?’

‘Has something happened?’ she repeats, her voice terrifyingly frosty. ‘I think I should be asking you that question.’

‘Oh?’ I ask cautiously.

‘You and Frankie. It was supposed to be a fake relationship.’

Oh God. She must have seen something. Or heard something. Or known something. No wonder she’s upset; she should have found out from me, not from someone else.

‘Yes?’ I say cautiously, deciding that I should wait to hear what she knows before leaping in.

‘Libby and I have been talking. Libby thinks that you and Frankie aren’t just friends and that your relationship doesn’t look that fake any more.’ She has her head tilted to one side and her lips pursed. She doesn’t just look angry, she looks as though she’s testing me, as though she knows more than she’s saying, maybe wondering whether I’m going to lie to her.

‘I…’ I am not going to lie to my daughter. This is not, however, how I wanted to tell her about my relationship with Frankie.

Not least because Frankie and I haven’t actually discussed it yet.

‘Yes?’ Ruby is terrifying.

I can’t lie to her. I cannot do that. It would be wrong. And, even if she doesn’t in fact have any concrete evidence of where our relationship has progressed to, if she subsequently found out that I’d lied it would surely make things worse.

‘Frankie and I haven’t actually discussed this yet,’ I begin.

‘Yet?’

I nod.

‘But Libby says you stayed the night.’

God. She does know. For a mad moment I consider pretending that I just fell asleep on Frankie’s sofa watching TV, and then I remember that lying to Ruby is a really bad idea, because there’s every chance she’ll find out the truth and I don’t think outright lying to your children is a great thing to do if you want to maintain their trust in you.

‘Yes,’ I say.

‘So… you slept with her?’ Ruby’s voice is unbearably sharp.

I nod again, trying not to visibly wince. Now I’m thinking it might have been better if I had lied to her.

‘So your relationship is real.’

‘Well… we haven’t actually discussed that yet. But…’ This time I do wince. ‘I would like it to be, yes, and I think Frankie would too.’

‘Have you said I love you to each other?’ Ruby asks.

I would never in a million years have imagined being grilled like this about my personal life by my fourteen-year-old daughter and it is truly excruciating.

I’m beginning to think that lying would have been much better. But I’ve started down the honesty path and I feel that I have to continue now.

So I say, ‘Yes.’

‘Right. So Mum moved to Germany and behind her back you’ve started sleeping with someone else and telling her that you love her.’

I’m stunned that that’s her take on this, and, in a way, I’m kind of glad that this is a misapprehension about things between me and her mother. Maybe this will be relatively easy to clear up.