‘Please forgive me, Lexi,’ I beg. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you. I got a shock. You know how much I love you—’
I’m saying this to her back but she refuses to turn around.
I decide that the best thing I can do is go downstairs.
‘Oh God, oh God, oh God,’ I whisper to myself as I take each step.
You really screwed that up,Mildred says.
I don’t answer. If Mildred were not in my head, were notme, I would rip her out and dismember her for stating the bloody obvious.
Liam is still sitting in the kitchen, reading.
‘Liam: bed,’ I snap.
‘But it’s not time.’
‘Liam, just go to bed, right?’
‘OK,’ he says crossly and hugging his book to him, he turns and stomps upstairs.
Great. I should put myself up for Mother of the Year. That’s two of my three children I’ve upset.
Cheap? I called my beautiful Lexi cheap – what kind of a mother am I? So I open the fridge, find an opened bottle of white wine, wrench the cork out of it and pour some into one of thosefilament-thin enormous glasses that they only half fill in expensive restaurants.
I really don’t drink during the week because it’s a slippery slope and besides, I like my tea at night. Jasmine, proper jasmine.
But this is perfect for now. I curl up on the couch in the tiny study and wonder how I am ever going to make up for this. Where do we go from here and how do I get my Lexi back? Damn you, Elisa, I think, damn you to hell for coming into all our lives and screwing it up again.
You need to think of an alibi, says Mildred helpfully. Unhelpfully.
And a way to kill her. Remember all those thrillers you read when you were younger,pre-kids?Ground-up glass? Digitalis? An injection containing air to hit her lungs? Arsenic? Only fifty per cent of the population can smell arsenic, you know.
Thank you, Miss Marple, I say. No to glass. Where do you get digitalis? How, precisely, am I supposed to inject the stupid cow, and arsenic, really?
One of us needs to think straight, and where were you when I was running my mouth off?
Inner voices interrupt after the fact,Mildred explains unhelpfully.
As if I didn’t know.
Mildred, I need help and so help me God, I will do mindfulness all the time and you’ll be out of a job!
Mildred is silent.
Tell Dan immediately, she proffers. So I do.
Dan is clearly having aworld-class discussion over the dinner table with a group of economists, so he doesn’t answer my text till very late, when I am just slipping into Zimovane world.
I’ll talk to Lexi tomorrow, Freya – I totally get what happened. We’ll fix it.
We’ll fix it, I think sleepily. I do love that man. Me and him against the world.
17
‘Normal’ is just a setting on the dryer
We are all late to school the next day. My head hurts from the combination of two giant glasses of white wine and from the tension surrounding me and Lexi, who is refusing to speak to me.
