Page 84 of All the Things We Never Knew

‘Will you?’

I grinned. ‘You bet I will.’

Leaving Lulu immobile on her stool at the kitchen counter, I hurried upstairs and flung open the front door. A boy stood there – maybe twenty years old, shaven-headed, his jaw pitted with acne scars. He was wearing low-slung jeans and a grey hoodie, and he had the kind of swagger I’d seen all too often in Accident & Emergency on Saturday nights.

I gave him a hard stare. ‘Can I help you?’

‘I’m looking for Lulu.’ His tone was belligerent. ‘You her mum?’

I said, ‘No. And if you’re Callum, I don’t think she wants to see you.’

‘She can tell me that herself, can’t she?’

‘She’s got better things to do with her time than talk to you,’ I told him coldly.

Then I heard the sound of Lulu’s trainers on the stairs behind me.

‘Actually’ – she appeared behind me, slightly out of breath, and I stepped aside – ‘I don’t have anything better to do right now.’

What? I thought. Don’t weaken now, girl.

But Lulu said, ‘Laurel’s right. I don’t want to see you, Callum. Not today or any other day.’

‘That’s not what you said the other night,’ he sneered.

‘Well, I’m saying it now. You’re a horrible person. You treated me like shit, and I deserve better. You might have unblocked me but I’m blocking you, and you’re staying blocked. And your car’s leaking oil all over the road, so I suggest you move it before I get it clamped.’

‘I…’ Callum began. Lulu and I stared at him in silence. Then he said, ‘Fine. Your loss.’

He turned and strutted back to his car, but slipped on some fallen leaves and would have fallen if he hadn’t clutched the wing mirror. Then he slammed into the driver’s seat and pulled away with a squeal of tyres which I hoped wasn’t loud enough to drown out the sound of Lulu’s and my laughter.

I was trembling slightly from adrenaline, but giddy with triumph – not because I’d stood up to some pathetic wannabe roadman, but because I’d stood up for Lulu.

‘God,’ she said, ‘what was I thinking? What a loser.’

‘I mean, I don’t like to say it,’ I said. ‘I’m sure he has good qualities. But he does look like a gerbil.’

We were still giggling when Anna arrived home twenty minutes later. She looked at us with curiosity but – I was relieved to notice – without actual hostility.

Lulu didn’t hang around long, though. It was like the strange closeness that had sprung up between her and me embarrassed her, because she waited until her mother had eaten a piece of cake and praised it, then drifted off upstairs to her room, saying, ‘Thanks, Laurel. Good chat. See you.’

‘What are you doing here?’ Anna asked, once the sound of her daughter’s footsteps had receded.

‘I came to see you. You weren’t here, so Lulu let me in.’ I debated filling Anna in on our encounter with Callum, but decided against it – it was up to Lulu whether to tell her mother. ‘We were just chatting.’

‘What were you chatting about?’ Almost automatically, Anna went to the fridge, opened a bottle of white wine and splashed it into two glasses. I hadn’t planned on drinking, but there seemed no way to refuse. The cold rims of our glasses brushed against each other.

‘Nothing much,’ I said. ‘I was just waiting for you to get back. How are you doing?’

‘I don’t know if you heard’ – her voice was full of weary sarcasm – ‘but my husband had an affair, and then he was diagnosed with cancer and died. My daughter’s been shagging some creep with a souped-up Vauxhall Corsa, and my son appears to have forgotten I exist. Today I found out that my late husband’s mother, who he told me had been dead twenty-seven years, isn’t. Apart from that, brilliant.’

The news I had been about to break to her about Joel felt almost insignificant in comparison to that. But even if I’d wanted to interrupt her to share it, I couldn’t have, because she carried on speaking as if I wasn’t there.

‘I thought,’ she said, ‘before Gray died, there was a change he wanted to make to his will. I thought it was something to do with you. I thought he was leaving you money, some cash to go with those rocks you were wearing in your ears the other night.’

‘What?’ My fingers moved involuntarily to brush one of my earlobes, although the crystal earrings were safe in their box at home. ‘They’re… I mean, they’re pretty. They were a gift from Gray – that’s the only reason they’re valuable. And if he’d left me money I’d have⁠—’

‘Those are one-carat D flawless diamonds, Laurel,’ she said. ‘They’re worth over four grand.’