“Which I do every night.”
“Because he’s your son.” Rachel lowered her voice, conscious that Nathan was probably upstairs. “Is he asleep?”
“Yes.” Meghan gave her a sudden, fierce look. “All I’m asking is that you listen for him, okay, Rachel? You’d be home anyway.”
“What if I had plans?”
“Then ask Lily! I haven’t gone out except to work in years. You know that. Why can’t you let me have a little fun?”
Her emotions, already raw from her conversation with Claire, felt even more scraped. “Do you see me having a little fun?” Rachel demanded.
“You go to the pub quiz every week.”
Except this week, because she’d been too overwhelmed. It felt as if nothing in her life was going well. With a sigh, Rachel waved Meghan towards the door. “Fine. Go out. Enjoy yourself.”
“You said that with so much heartfelt emotion,” Meghan answered, and Rachel rolled her eyes.
“At least I said it.”
The house felt very quiet and empty without Meghan, even though Rachel knew Lily and Nathan were both upstairs and her mother was asleep in the downstairs bedroom. She went into the kitchen, heartened to see that it was actually mostly clean, if she didn’t count the grease splatters across the stovetop. Both Lily and Meghan’s attempts at tidying were lackadaisical at best. They never could have taken over Mum’s housecleaning business.
She switched on the kettle and sat at the little metal table in the dark, her chin propped on her hands. The only sound was the hiss of the kettle and then the creak of the stairs. The moment was almost peaceful, despite the tumult of the day’s encounters:Claire, Meghan, even Henry Price’s bathroom. Rachel let out a gusty sigh.
“Rachel?”
Rachel glanced up to see Lily standing in the doorway, her slight form illuminated by the hall light. They hadn’t really talked since the bust-up about Lily’s cartoons, and now Rachel felt her chest expand with a maternal mix of love and guilt. Standing there, Lily still looked little, almost as little as she’d been in primary school, when Rachel had sat next to her and helped her sound out words in her reading book. When she’d stood by the school gate to make sure Lily had a friend to walk into school with, had given the stink eye to a Year Three she’d seen was a bully.
“Hey, Lil.” Rachel managed a tired smile and went to the kettle, which had switched off. “Tea?”
“All right.” Lily took a step into the darkened kitchen, her head ducked low. “Test me on my biology?”
It was, Rachel knew, a peace offering. She nodded, her back to Lily, and then, emotion getting the better of her, she sniffed. “Of course I will,” she said, her voice a little thick. “Anytime.”
By the middle of the week Rachel felt as if her equilibrium was mostly restored. She wasn’t snarling at everyone at least. She’d kept herself from snipping at Meghan when she came in at an almost-respectable one o’clock in the morning, and had even gotten up early to give Nathan his breakfast.
She’d spent three days with her head down cleaning, and as she arrived at Four Gables, she breathed a sigh of relief that Andrew West was gone and Claire was at work. She wasn’t ready to face either of them yet, or perhaps ever. She was able to clean the huge house without any interruption, although in actuality there wasn’t much to do. Claire did her own dishes and, by the looks of it, the bathroom too. The house looked practically pristine.
By the time she arrived at Emily Hart’s on Wednesday afternoon, she was as much in need of a cuppa as the harassed mother.
“Riley and Rogan are up to their usual tricks, I see,” Rachel said cheerfully as she nodded at the streaks of marker on the walls.
“They’ve discovered felt tips,” Emily said as she sank into a chair at the kitchen table. “No matter where I put the box of them, those two manage to find them.”
“I just found them,” Rachel remarked. She’d been putting away the loaf going stale that Emily had left out on the counter and retrieved the box of markers from the bread bin. “I’ll put them up here, shall I?” She slid the box onto the top of the fridge and then switched on the kettle.
“You look tired,” she said as she handed Emily her mug and leaned against the counter with her own. “Are the twins sleeping?” She could hear them chattering to themselves in the next room, over the musical din of the Chuggington theme song on the telly.
“They are,” Emily admitted. “I don’t really have an excuse—”
“The twins are an excuse in and of themselves. You’ll probably be knackered for the next five years.”
“Or longer,” Emily said on a sigh. “Tom’s been talking about having another.”
“Easy for him, isn’t it?” Rachel had met Emily’s husband on a few occasions, a cheerful, blunt-faced man who left his dirty socks in the hall.
“We always wanted a big family,” Emily said, but she didn’t sound convinced.
“Things change, though. Do you still want a big family? The twins aren’t even two yet.”
