“Lily?” Rachel poked her head into her sister’s bedroom. Lily was lying on her stomach on her bed, music blaring, a sketch pad in front of her.
She looked up warily. “Yeah?”
Rachel leaned against the doorframe, trying to summon the energy for what had the potential to be another difficult conversation. “Hey, your parent-teacher conference was yesterday. Why didn’t you remind me?”
Guilt flashed across her sister’s face. “You seemed tired.”
“I still wanted to go,” Rachel said. She studied Lily’s face; her sister looked as if she was hiding something. Rachel recognized the downcast gaze, the bit lip, from when Lily had been small. But this wasn’t a case of sneaking a sweet. “Did you tell me about the conference in the first place?” she asked carefully.
“No,” Lily said after a second’s pause. “I didn’t want to.”
“Lily.” Rachel tried to keep the hurt from her voice. “Why not?”
“Because I knew what the teachers were going to say. You didn’t need to hear it.”
“Maybe I should be the one to make that decision. And I am going to hear it, because your biology teacher called me this afternoon. I want to be involved, Lily.”
Lily’s face took on a closed, pinched look. “What did she say?”
“Just that I missed the conference. I’m seeing her tomorrow afternoon. And I’ll see the others too, if you give me their details.” Besides biology, Lily took further maths and business studies. She’d dropped Design and Technology after she’d completed her AS level.
Wordlessly, Lily wrote some names down on her sketch pad, tore off the strip of paper, and handed it to Rachel. “Their e-mail addresses are on the school Web site.”
“Thank you,” Rachel said, wishing this wasn’t such a battle. Didn’t Lily realize how lucky she was? How much opportunity she had? She knew Lily wouldn’t appreciate her reminders, and so she said nothing.
The smell of burning sausages brought her back downstairs. She had just taken them out of the oven—blackened on one side, raw on the other—when the front doorbell rang.
With a groan Rachel dumped the tray of sausages onto the stovetop and went to the door.
Her mouth opened in shock and no words came out when she saw Andrew West standing there, his expression as serious as ever.
“Hello, Rachel,” he said. “Can we talk?”
Chapter eight
Claire
After throwing on her clothes and grabbing a banana, Claire bolted out of the house and sprinted down the lane towards the village shop. She was going to be at least twenty minutes late for her first day of work. She’d probably be fired.
She weaved between the trickle of late commuters heading for the station and squeezed past a farmer coming out of the shop with a loaf of bread under one arm and then stood in front of the till, panting, disheveled, and twenty-five minutes late.
“Sorry.”
Dan Trenton didn’t even look up from the till. “You’re late.”
“I know. I overslept. I didn’t hear the alarm.” She’d slept on her good ear, which she hardly ever did, but the persistent pattering of the rain last night had bothered her, and if she slept that way, she couldn’t hear anything, including the alarm. Somehow she didn’t think Dan was interested in her excuses. “I’m really sorry. It will never happen again.”
Finally he closed the drawer of the cash register and looked up, his expression as unwelcoming as ever. “You can start on the newspapers.”
“The newspapers?”
He nodded towards the empty rack to the right of the counter. Several stacks of freshly printed and delivered newspapers were pushed up against the wall, each one bound with plastic cord. “They need to go on the shelves. The Telegraph at the top, the Times underneath, then the Guardian and the local papers at the bottom. Think you can manage that?”
“Telegraph, Times, Guardian, local. Yes. Right.”
Dan handed her a pair of scissors. “To cut the cords,” he explained when she looked at him blankly.
“Okay. Thanks.” He’d turned away even though no one had entered the shop, and so Claire went to work.
