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“No, I think I’ll take the Valentino. I can bring it out with me when I’m done. Thank you, though.”
“Of course.”
FOUR
Lance
I don’t remove my shoes as I enter my childhood home. There’s a level of nostalgia that hits me whenever I come here, although with that comes rage.
“Who’s pissed you off this time?” Chloe snorts as she passes me in the hall. She doesn’t stop to say hello, regardless of the fact it’s been two months since I’ve been here.
“Rent’s due,” I tell her. She doesn’t reply and snakes off into the lounge.
My childhood home is nice. In a decent neighbourhood which is safe and mostly quiet. The only drama to have rocked Saints Lane in the last two decades was the death and then collapse of the Sullivan name—courtesy of the four selfish, money-hungry women who live in number sixteen.
“Lance, honey, is that you?”
I make my way into the kitchen and find my mother standing at the breakfast bar, trying to decanter some kind of pinkish liquid into a clear bottle. “What are you doing?”
“I smashed the bottle. Did you bring the rent?”
I eye the mess she’s making and shake my head, the fire I felt ignite in Scarlet’s dressing room roaring to life again. I get to the point. “You need to get a job, Mum. You all do. I worked when I was at uni, and there’s no reason the girls can’t as well.”
My mother chuckles, not pausing her task. “Now, those weren’t the rules we agreed on. Quit being the big I am. It doesn’t work with us. There’s leftover pizza in the oven if you want it.”
“Rules? I’m not twenty years old anymore, Vanessa!”
She puts down the plastic bottle and eyes me. “Vanessa? Really. Fuck you, Lance.”
“I’ll support you. I’ll stick to every stipulation and rule, but you’ll get a job. You all will.”
“No.” She picks back up the bottle and continues.
My blood boils. “Then I’m done. I won’t help you if you can’t help yourself.”
Her eyes snap up. “Help me? Help me! You think you’re helping me? You’re nothing but a self-centred cold man who I barely recognise anymore. You think you would be where you are now if I hadn’t let you leave? Let you sell your father’s bike? If I didn’t let you bugger off to university and abandon us all here?”
“It beat not having a roof over your head, surely? None of us would be where we are now if you hadn’t lost every penny Dad ever made!” I spit the words and mean every single one of them.
“How dare you!”
“Get a job.” I slam the rent down on the table, the thud making my chest ache. “Get a fucking job, Mum.” I step back as her face grows guilty. She knows what she’s done. “At least try.”
I back out of the kitchen and walk into the lounge, finding both Nessa Anne and Chloe on the sofa watching TV. “It’s three thirty on a Friday in the peak of summer. Why are you sitting indoors?”
“To piss you off, Lance,” Nessa Anne retorts. “We live for it. You’re the centre of our world. The core of this perfect little family.”
I roll my eyes at her and look at Chloe. She doesn’t even acknowledge me.
“Have you been out with any of your friends recently?” I ask Nessa Anne.
She shakes her head, not bothering to cut her eyes away from the TV.
When I left for university, I also left behind my sisters. They won’t ever forgive me for that, not when Mum was at the peak of her depression. The alternative was too messed up for me to comprehend at the time, and I knew if I could get myself through uni, securing the house with the little money we had left before losing it, I could make everything okay. I’d put them through college, uni—buy them their first homes. I never considered them not wanting those things, and when I came home from my first year to silence, I knew having to do this for them would come at a cost. I didn’t just lose my Dad; I lost everyone and everything that mattered.
Molly was the only one I could convince to study, but I know she isn’t interested in continuing next year and skips classes.
“You could just wire the money like you normally do, you know. You don’t have to save face by showing up here. Or just have me do it like that time you had a ‘cold’ and couldn’t crawl out of your penthouse apartment and to your one-thousand-pound laptop to pay us the pittance you toss us.”
