“What about your dad, now you know who he is? Are you going to get to know him?”
I shook my head. “No more than what I do now. We’ve met a few times and it was fine. He had no idea I’d been born else he said he would’ve stepped in and I think he would. He’s a decent bloke. But we’ve both got our own lives.”
“You want to invite him to the wedding?”
I shook my head and glared at her, but I was smiling. “I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about that and I haven’t made my mind up. What about you? How was growing up as Sophie Slater?”
“Easier than what you had but not great, I suppose. My mum didn’t give a shit as long as I stayed out of her way when she had boyfriends round. I was her pretty daughter and that was it. She once told me that there was no point going to college – I should just be a pretty face.” There was no bitterness to her tone, as if she had completely accepted it.
“What about your dad?”
“He was okay. My parents split when I was about three. I saw my dad a fair bit until he remarried and then I think it was just easier to let us drift. I was left to my own devices and when I was eighteen my mum kicked me out. Her boyfriend at the time was moving in and she didn’t like the way he was looking at me. To be fair, I didn’t like the way he was looking at me either, so the move out was by mutual agreement.”
I suffocated the urge to find out his name and address, go round there and force feed him his balls.
“You learned to survive”
“I already knew how. I don’t think my mum had ever been to one parents’ evening at school and by the time I was thirteen I had my key to the door and knew where the emergency cash was in case we were out of food.” She smiled, but there was no warmth to it, just acceptance. “It was how it was and other people have it worse. It’s made me a bit more ruthless than I should be, and sometimes I’m too practical and unemotional, but, hey. We are what we are.”
I nodded and started to search for a safer topic. I could tell her that she impressed me, that I hated her parents for not seeing her as more than how she looked, but then we wouldn’t be enemies anymore and I needed us to be enemies.
“I should call a taxi and go home to change. Turning up at work like this is not the impression I like to create.” She slid off the stool. “I’d clean up seeing that you cooked, but I’m going to leave imagining you in a little apron, loading the dishwasher.”
“Whatever turns you on.”
She didn’t respond, just laughed, and went to find her phone.
What she didn’t say was that this wasn’t going to happen again.
That made me glad.
15
Sophie
There was nothing quite like a Callaghan Sunday lunch.
Experience had taught me well: have a decent breakfast even though you knew you were going to be stuffed with a variety of attempts to outdo each other and drink more sparkly stuff than it was possible to predict. This would line your stomach. Also, don’t sit next to Seph; he would top your glass up when you weren’t looking; and stay away from whatever Claire had cooked.
I arrived at Max and Victoria’s half an hour before I knew most people were arriving. In previous days, when there had been no small children around, we’d gone to one of the many restaurants in Borough where they had bottomless Sunday brunches. Two small people and another who would arrive at some point soon meant that Max and Vic’s house was easier and no one was going to be bothered if Eliza, Claire and Killian’s daughter, decided she had to have a ride on Horsey Seph’s shoulders – now.
“Morning.” Victoria answered the door in jeans and a shirt, her glasses pushed high on her nose and her hair in a messy bun on top of her head. She rocked the librarian look effortlessly, something I knew Max was a sucker for. This outfit suggested she’d been working on him to get her way for something I wasn’t going to ask about.
“Happy Sunday.” I handed a bottle of champagne over to her. “Now let me in. It’s bloody freezing.”
Winter was about to bounce right in and I wasn’t prepared. I liked summer and warmth, although the idea of being by the thermal springs in Iceland right now was very appealing.
Victoria’s house had been her grandfather’s and where she’d grown up after losing both of her parents in a car crash. After her grandfather had died, she’d been left without access to any inheritance due to her older half-brother being a turd, for want of a more accurate word. Or maybe not; turd was pretty accurate.
Max in an act of either generosity or stalker-like behaviour, had ended up buying the house. Fortunately for all of us, Vic had appreciated the gesture and hadn’t run a mile, promptly moving in.
“New picture?” I looked up at a framed scene of somewhere that looked familiar but I couldn’t quite place it.
“Yeah, turns out Max has talented cousins. Catrin is an artist – she’s relocating to London to set up a gallery.” Victoria looked at the picture. “It’s Max’s childhood home.”
“I thought I recognised it.”
“She offered me a portrait of Max. I told her I saw enough of him.” Victoria smiled a little too sweetly. “Glass of fizz?”
