Chapter 2: Sweetheart, I’m Hiding by the Coats
Kane picked me up at five.
He didn’t ask if I was sure. He handed me a black jacket and said, “No jewellery,” and I took my ring off and put it in the cup holder, and neither of us looked at it for the next forty minutes.
“Does he know you’re—”
“No.”
That was all of it. What was there to say?
The sky had been going the wrong colour since four — that flat green-grey it gets when the air stops moving, when you can taste the rain an hour before it comes. The car smelled like cold coffee.
My father’s place sits behind eleven hundred metres of hedge, and the gates have no name on them, because everyone who needs to come here already knows. Kane didn’t use the gates. He parked in a service lane behind the orangery and walked me up through the wet grass to a gap in the yew where you can see the whole front of the house and the whole gravel turn, and he handed me a small pair of binoculars like he was passing a saltshaker.
“Ten past nine,” he said. “He’s early. He’s always early.”
The car was already there.
Grey. Dented rear arch, from the bollard outside our building. Damien’s.
I felt that in my knees.
“Bachelor party’s at the Hôtel Beaux,” I said. “Eight thirty. Twenty-two people. His brother booked it in January.”
“Twenty-two people will have a lovely evening.”
Then the front door opened.
My father came out first, in his cardigan, the one with the burn hole he won’t throw away. And then Damien came out behind him, in the blue shirt I ironed on Thursday, and my father put a hand on the back of his neck — on the *back of his neck*, that same place, that same exact place — and Damien laughed.
And then my father gave him an envelope, and Damien folded it once and put it in his inside pocket without looking at it. Without looking at it. Like a man who has done that before. Like a man who knows what’s in it.
I took my phone out.
I don’t know why. Something in me was still standing up, still arguing, still saying *there’s an explanation, there’s a reason, ask him and he’ll say it and it’ll be so simple you’ll feel sick about tonight.*
I called him.
Through the glass, four hundred metres away, I watched him take the phone out of the pocket he’d just put the envelope in. I watched him hold up one finger to my father — *one second* — and turn, and walk three steps away across the gravel, and put his free hand over his other ear.
“Hey. Sweetheart.”
Music behind him. Real music. Someone shouting in the background, laughing.
He was standing alone under the portico light in total silence, and my father was watching him, arms folded, patient.
“Where are you?” I said.
“Beaux. It’s a disaster. Marcus has got a *karaoke machine*, Isla, an actual—” He turned as he said it, and I saw his face turn with the words, and his mouth made them, and the sound came out of my phone three-quarters of a second late, like a badly dubbed film. “I’m hiding by the coats. Are you okay? You sound funny.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not. Talk to me.”
“I’m tired.”
“Go to bed. Don’t wait up, I’ll be disgusting and loud.” A pause. On the gravel, he lifted his hand and rubbed his eyes, and my father said something to him, and he nodded. “Hey. You’re the only real thing I have. Nine days.”
“Nine days,” I said.
“Love you.”
He hung up.
He went back up the steps. My father held the door for him. It closed.
I was still holding the phone to my ear.
Damien.
Damien and my father.
Together.
I want to be honest about what happened in my body, because everyone lies about this part. I didn’t cry. I didn’t make a sound. My mouth filled with water and my ears went hot and full, and my hands stopped being mine — that specific numbness in the fingertips, like when you’ve slept on your arm — and I very carefully put the phone in my pocket because I knew I was going to drop it.
Kane didn’t say *I told you.*
He didn’t say anything. But he moved — a half-step in, one hand coming up level with my elbow, not touching, just there, the way you hold your palm under a glass someone else is carrying. Then he stopped himself and put the hand back in his pocket, and looked at the house instead of at me.
“How long,” I said.
“Forty-one months.”
“How much.”
He told me.
It was less than I thought. That’s what got me. It was less than my father spent on the boat.
The first drop hit the back of my hand. Then the hedge started hissing, and the gravel started jumping, and the whole green-grey sky came down at once — that hard, warm summer rain that soaks you in nine seconds — and I stood in it and let it flatten my hair to my head and didn’t move, and somewhere behind those windows my fiancé was drinking my father’s whisky and checking the time so he’d get home late enough to be believable.
I put my ring back on in the car.
Wet fingers. Took three tries.
Because the rehearsal dinner was Thursday. Sixty people, my father at the head of the table, Damien on my left with his hand on my knee.
And I was going to have to stand up and give a speech.
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