‘I really hate to be the one to tell you, lovie, but he’s done a runner.’
Callie felt the world shift around her.
The words were slow coming out: ‘He can’t have gone. Why would he go?’
The look Brenda gave her was pitying and Callie flinched under it.
‘The most likely excuse is that he’s run because he’s guilty of whatever they are accusing him,’ Brenda said. ‘Which is why you and Poppy need to get out of here now with whatever you can. I don’t know what Jason was doing, but the game is up, Callie, and you need to be out of it.’
‘What do you meanwhat he was doing?’ said Callie fiercely.
‘For heaven’s sake, Callie, you must have figured it out now. I always had my suspicions. Nobody else was making money during the recession except your husband. Nobody else bounced back so quickly. Did you not find that weird?’
‘No!’
‘Come on,’ said Brenda. ‘You’re a clever woman. I thought you knew his business wasn’t entirely kosher. We can talk about this another time, but now, we need to get those girls home, get you and Poppy out of the house and ...’ Brenda stopped for a minute. ‘Could we take the Range Rover? It might be confiscated. Whose name is it in? Probably the company’s, so you can’t take it. Right, we need taxis to get the girls home or, better still, I’ll ring their parents.’
Callie watched, mute, as Brenda thought out loud, running through the various permutations and combinations of keeping her daughter out of this crisis.
‘I am not running,’ began Callie. ‘I am going to stay here and wait until Jason comes back from wherever he is and fixes it all—’
‘Fixes it? This won’t be fixed. Tomorrow morning, every newspaper in the country is going to be at your door wanting to know all about it,’ said Brenda harshly. ‘Wake up, Callie. I am your friend and I am telling you it’s all over. You have to get out. Now. For your sake and for Poppy’s.’
Poppy.
‘More brandy,’ said Callie, Brenda’s words beginning to penetrate. ‘I need another one.’
‘Not a good idea—’ began Brenda.
‘I don’t care,’ hissed Callie. ‘I need something.’
Brenda watched silently as Callie half filled the brandy glass and downed it, wincing as it burned.
Callie stood up and looked around her kitchen, the cosy kitchen that she’d insisted on decorating herself. The rest of the house was where Jason had supervised the interior décor, places that were fit for proving to people how rich, successful and gracious the Reynolds family were. It was nothing like the home she’d grown up in, a small terraced council house in Ballyglen, where the whole Sheridan family of four, and her aunt, had lived.
Callie felt an ache deep in her heart.
I wish my family were here. I wish my mother was here.
Sam
Early on the morning of her fortieth birthday, Sam Kennedy was woken up by the phone, and not by her beloved Baby Bean pressing a foot or an elbow into her bladder, which had been the case for the past few months.
She struggled out of her cosy cocoon of duvet, disentangling herself from Ted’s long warm leg which was comfortably entwined with her own, and answered.
‘Happy birthday, Samantha!’ said her mother.
‘Who’s phoning at this hour on a Saturday?’ groaned Ted, pulling his pillow over his sleek dark head, and then, remembering what day it was, pulling it off. ‘Happy fortieth birthday, honey,’ he said, putting an arm around his wife’s very pregnant body and kissing her gently on the shoulder through the curtain of her long tangle of untameable caramel curls. ‘Love you.’ He leaned down and kissed her bump, covered with an unsexy floral nightie. ‘Love you, Bean.’
Sam never stopped loving the gesture: Ted bending from his great height to kiss her and her belly with complete adoration. He was six foot two to Sam’s five foot three and their wedding photos had made her realise how incongruous they might have looked together had Sam not been addicted to very high heels. With a four-inch heel, her pocket Venus body in a simple lace dress had looked just right beside her long, lean husband. Up close, her head fitted perfectly against his broad chest and if he sometimes whirled her round with her feet off the floor, nobody noticed.
‘Love you, too,’ Sam murmured now.
‘Samantha, are you still there?’ Her mother’s voice sounded irritated at having been made to wait.
‘Yes, and thank you for calling, Mother,’ Sam said into the phone, not mentioning that pregnant women longed for their Saturday morning lie-in.
‘You sound odd. I hope you’re not getting maudlin about your age,’ her mother went on in the cool tones that commanded respect in St Margaret’s School for Girls, where she’d reigned as headmistress for thirty years. ‘Age is merely a number.’
