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Shay picked up her bag, then Les held up her hand, stalled her.
‘I have something for you,’ she said, reaching into her own bag, then sliding an envelope across the table.
Shay opened it to find a cheque.
‘I want you to have this,’ she said. ‘From my winnings. I was always going to treat you, in case you thought I wouldn’t. It would have been wrong not to.’
Ten thousand pounds. It might as well have read thirty pieces of silver. Shay put it back down on the table.
‘I hope your money makes you really happy, Les. Good luck.’
Shay left then. Les could pick up the bill. She hoped the waiter would get a tip out of that twelve million, but sadly, somehow she doubted it.
Chapter 49
That weekend, Courtney and Sunny moved into their apartment and set up their office. Luckily Mort was on hand to act as referee when needed, but he reckoned he wouldn’t have to blow his whistle as much as predicted. They might row about washing up and tights hanging over radiators, but workwise, they were a perfect combo, both clever adults with skills they were keen to capitalise on. They were a few years off their first Lamborghinis, but they had a couple of clients to start the ball rolling, energy, talent and finally job satisfaction. Shay’s chicks had left the nest again and this time their wings looked strong enough to fly.
As for the nest itself, a young couple with a baby on the way had bought it to fill with their own adventures. They’d mark on the side of the wall the height of their children, as Shay had, until she’d had to get a chair to stand on to record it. They’d paint rooms in their choice of colours, knock walls down, make it their own. They’d wanted to move quickly so they could be settled in for Christmas. Shay cleaned it from top to bottom for them so they’d walk in to polished woodwork and shiny surfaces, paying forwardthe kindness the previous owners had paid her. On her last afternoon in the house Shay walked around it, remembering the years she was content in here, the Christmas days when the kids still believed in Santa and their joy at finding the piles of presents under the tree; seeing them crash into the kitchen in their school uniforms starving for fish fingers. The girly evenings she had with Tanya and Les, a Chinese banquet and gin. They had laughed until they cried together, and sometimes they’d cried until they laughed.
She missed Tan, and she also crazily missed Les. Their friendship could never be repaired, not after that level of duplicity, but it had been long and good for so many years, or so she’d thought. She sat for a while at the kitchen table that she was leaving for the new occupants, and let herself grieve for the end of an era, for when she was a daughter juggling her parents’ needs and a mother worrying how she was ever going to knock up a Florence Nightingale outfit for the morning, because Courtney had forgotten to tell her about Victorian Day at school. It was amazing what you could do with an old black curtain, a white sheet and a shower cap at the eleventh hour. Part of her missed the mayhem, being a filling in the middle of the sandwich, feeling the squash of family tight against her.
The furniture was all gone, Courtney and Sunny had taken bits to start them off: their old beds, sofa, drawers, spare TV. Bruce didn’t want anything – but why would he, living in a mansion. Morton was storing some pieces for her in one of his outbuildings; the rest was picked up by the Heart Foundation van. There were just a few boxes of stuff left that would fit easily in her car.
She didn’t expect any visitors, least of all her soon-to-beex-husband. It was odd that he’d knock on the door, wait for admittance like a vampire who couldn’t enter without permission. Odd and dangerous, not the same as seeing him across a crowded restaurant. The house wastheirs, the ghosts of their shared life swirling around them at a time when she felt at her most vulnerable, unsure, adrift.
‘Hi,’ Bruce said, his shoulders jerking with nerves. ‘I wondered if you had a minute.’
Shay stood aside to let him pass.
‘Blimey,’ he said, looking up and around. ‘Takes me back to us moving in.’ His voice was echoey, bouncing off the walls. ‘Do you remember?’
Of course she did, she’d been seven months pregnant with Sunny and her nest-building hormones were cranked up to the max. There was a lot of house for their money, but it had needed so much doing to it, which was reflected in the price they’d paid. And they’d done it all. She, mostly.
She poured him a glass of cherryade from the bottle she’d opened. They’d drunk it on their first night in the house, used it to toast their new life. She’d bought some for old times’ sake, to drink on her last night in it.
‘So, how are you? How are the kids?’ he asked, taking a seat at the table.
‘I’m okay, and you can always ask the kids how they are.’
‘Do they want to talk to me?’
‘Of course,’ she answered. ‘It may surprise you to know that they’ve worked out you’re not perfect. But you’re their father. It’s never too late to try and get close to them. They’re not that hard to understand if you make the effort.’
He took a drink from the glass, a long one and then put it down on the table with his customary heavy-handedness as if he’d misjudged the distance. He looked like a manwith a lot to say and no idea of where to start. Eventually he bumbled his way in.
‘There’s no easy… proper… Look, Shay, I don’t want to throw away twenty-four years of marriage over a daft mistake.’ He held his hand up to fend off any response she might make to that. ‘I know this is more than a daft mistake, but if there’s any way we can… start again, well, that’s what we’ll have to chalk it up to – a mistake. I don’t know what I was thinking.’
She let that settle into her brain.
‘Okay,’ she said, which wasn’t an outright no, and gave him hope.
‘We have two children between us and we’ll be grandparents one day. What we had worked for so long, and every road has a blip in it. And sometimes you need to step out of something before you realise how comfortable it is. The grass wasn’t as green as I thought it was. In fact it was blue. You don’t see perspective when you’re stood right next to it.’
She let him get to the end of his Bluffer’s Guide to Idioms, waiting for ‘Sorry seems to be the hardest word’ to come out. She took a sip of the cherryade and let it slide down her throat.
‘Not going too well with Les then?’
‘I cocked up…’
