Chapter 3: Nobody Sent Him
I didn’t tell anyone.
That’s the part people won’t understand. I had four days and a phone full of numbers and I didn’t call one of them. I ate breakfast. I answered the florist about the ribbon. I told my aunt that yes, the car would be there at three.
Wednesday I lay in the bath until the water went cold and made a list in my head of every single thing he’d ever done for me, and I went through it item by item, and I couldn’t find one — not one — that a paid man wouldn’t have done better.
That’s what it does to you. It doesn’t take the future. It goes backwards and takes everything you already had.
*He held your hair back in that bathroom in Lisbon.*
*He was on the clock.*
I got out of the bath and dried my hair and put on lipstick to walk to the corner shop, because if I looked like a person I could keep being one.
—
Thursday, six o’clock. Sixty people at my father’s long table.
I wore the green dress because Damien liked it and I wanted to see what liking looked like now that I knew what it cost.
“There she is,” my father said, and stood, and everyone turned. “There’s my girl.”
He kissed both my cheeks. His hands were warm. He smelled the way he has smelled since I was four years old, cigars and that soap they send him from London, and my body was *glad to see him*. That’s what I’ll never get over. My body was glad.
“You’re thin,” he said.
“I’m nervous.”
“Nerves.” He waved it off at the whole table, performing. “She was the same before her exams. Sick for a week and then top of the class.”
Laughter. Damien’s hand found the small of my back.
“Hey,” he said, low, just for me. “You look unbelievable.”
“Do I.”
“Sweetheart, you look like the reason people write songs.”
*Sweetheart.* Four times before the starters came. I counted. I don’t know why I counted. Once you start you can’t stop.
I put my hand on his knee under the table, and I said it lightly, the way you say something you don’t care about.
“I met someone who used to work for Papa. In town.”
I was watching his hands, not his face. I’d decided that in the bath.
His thumb kept moving on my shoulder. One stroke. Two. Perfectly even.
“Yeah? Which one, there’s about nine hundred.”
“Big man. Scar through his eyebrow.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell.” He reached past me for the water jug and filled my glass first, then his. “Do you want the bread or is that a war crime tonight?”
Nothing.
Not a flicker, not a swallow, not a half-second where the machine showed. He filled my glass first. He always fills my glass first.
Down the table, my father was watching us over the top of his wine.
He raised the glass an inch. To Damien. Not to me.
—
Then the speeches.
His brother did four minutes about Ibiza after all. My aunt cried. Somebody’s husband said something about the Moreau name and the room said *hear hear* like it was a church.
And then my father stood up and put his hand on the back of Damien’s neck.
That same place.
I looked at my plate and breathed through my nose and I thought: *if you make a single sound now, he wins.* Because that’s what it had turned into by then. Not heartbreak. A game with two players and only one of them knew they were playing.
“When my daughter was a child,” my father said, “I gave her everything money can buy. And I never once managed to give her the thing she wanted, which was to be left alone.”
Laughter. Warm. Real.
“And then a boy turned up at her mother’s funeral with two coffees. Nobody sent him.”
I felt Damien’s hand tighten on my knee.
Just once. Just a little.
*There.*
“Nobody sent him,” my father said again, and looked straight at me, and smiled the smile he uses for photographs. “And that’s how I knew.”
Sixty people applauded. I applauded.
Then somebody handed me the microphone.
—
I want to describe what standing up felt like, but there isn’t a word for it in ordinary language. My legs did it. My mouth was completely dry, the way it is at the dentist. The room went slightly further away, like it does on a plane when the pressure changes.
And then I heard my own voice, and it was fine. It was warm. It was *charming.*
“I’m supposed to thank everyone,” I said. “So — thank you all for coming, and thank you to my father, who has never in his life let anyone else pay for anything.”
Big laugh. He liked that one. He put his hand on his chest.
“People keep telling me I’m lucky.” I looked at Damien. He looked back at me with his whole face open, and God help me, he was beautiful. “And they’re right. Nobody arranged this. Nobody chose it for me. In a family like mine, that’s the only thing worth having.”
The room made that soft sound rooms make.
Damien’s eyes went wet.
Actually wet. I watched it happen from ninety centimetres away.
“To the only real thing I have,” I said, and lifted my glass.
He put his hand over his mouth.
Sixty people said it back to me.
—
I got through the coffee. I got through the cake nobody ate. In the hallway with the coats I stood with my forehead against the cold mirror for maybe twenty seconds and then went and found my aunt and talked about ribbon.
Damien drove us home. He held my hand on the gearstick at every red light. He said my speech had ruined him. He said he’d had to think about tax to stop himself crying in front of my uncle.
At the door he kissed me and said, “Two days.”
“Two days.”
“Sweetheart.” He pressed his mouth to my forehead and left it there. “You’re the only real thing I have.”
I said, “I know.”
—
He was asleep by eleven.
I sat on the bathroom floor with the door shut and the fan on, which is loud, and I called the number on the card that had no name on it.
Kane picked up on the second ring. He didn’t say hello.
“You went to the dinner.”
“I gave a speech.”
Three full seconds of nothing.
“Okay,” he said, and I heard him move, heard him sit down somewhere. “Then you should have the rest of it.”
“There’s more than the payments.”
“There’s page one.”
“What’s on page one.”
“There’s a second signature.” He said it flatly, the way you’d read a train time. “Not your father’s.”
“Whose?”
“Not on the phone.”
“Kane—”
“Friday. I’ll have all twelve pages Friday.” A pause, and then something in his voice moved half a step, the way it had in the rain. “Isla. When you see it, don’t be alone.”
He hung up before I could answer.
I sat on the tiles with the fan going and my husband-in-two-days breathing on the other side of the wall.
And I thought about the seating chart.
I’d changed it that morning. One line, on the plan that goes to the coordinator at eight, the one nobody checks twice because I never change anything.
Table one. My father’s table. Between my aunt and the empty chair for my mother.
*K. Volkov.*
Saturday, four o’clock. Three hundred people, a string quartet, and a man in the front row who could end my whole family with twelve pages of paper.
And when they asked me if I took him, I was going to say yes.