“I think that can be arranged.” I picked her up to take her into the kitchen and put her on the worktop next to me, then started to root through the kitchen cupboards for supplies.
There were about a dozen eggs, fresh salad, mushrooms and cheese – everything I needed for a decent omelette and salad lunch. I prepped the salad, listening to Rose tell me about her friend Addy, and nursery. I learned about their reading corner and the forest school outside and was told all about James and how he’d showed everyone his willy. It took a few seconds to realise she was telling me about another child and not an adult I’d need to sever the limbs of.
“Mummy says a willy’s called a penis too.”
I thanked the world for having Claire as a sister; she’d prepared me for a plethora of weird conversations over the years and pretty much nothing could phase me.
“Your mummy’s right. It is.” I carefully chopped the onion for the omelette. “How are you going to have your bedroom painted?”
A safer topic of conversation was needed.
“I want it blue with a big foonicorn on the wall with a rainbow.” More detail was added about clouds and seahorses and a castle. Rose provided a soundtrack to my cooking, accepting a carton of juice and talking happily. I understood about forty percent of it, enough to get the gist of what she was saying.
Enough that I now had plans to help decorate her bedroom exactly as she’d described it.
“That looks good.”
We both looked to the doorway where Georgia stood, arms folded, leaning against the frame.
“How long have you been there?”
She grinned. “Long enough to hear Rose tell you how to do a fishtail braid and you correcting her.”
“Three sisters. You learn these things or bad things happen.” I lifted Rose off the counter, hoping that it wasn’t something Georgia was going to be cross at. “Go sit at the table.”
Rose pulled her face. “Can’t I watch TV?”
“No, table.” The first rule of Marie Callaghan – you ate at the table unless it was a special occasion.
She didn’t argue back.
I caught Georgia trying not to laugh.
Avoiding her eyes was easy. Being shy wasn’t a known facet of mine, but this was about as close to it as I’d come. I was in someone else’s house making lunch for them and their kid and probably so far out of my depth I was drowning.
“How was your meeting?”
She sat down at the table that I’d already set. “Good. I have some work to pass onto Payton.” She explained the lead. “And they agreed to settle most of their current account.”
“How much is that?” It was a big amount for work that had been billed already by me and one of the assistants. Georgia had picked it up to lead on.
“Nineteen thousand. They’ve had something else come up with a place on an industrial estate they want to sell, but it’s not straightforward, so I think they knew if they didn’t put some cash in, I’d say no.” She started eating, her eyes on Rose who had a smaller portion of what we had, with very little cheese. “Make sure you chew before you swallow.”
I chuckled.
“Claire says the same thing to Killian.”
Georgia laughed. She’d met Killian the week before. “It does stop you from choking, so good advice. Thank you for cooking, by the way.”
“No biggie.”
Silence fell like a weighted blanket. Rose looked sleepy as soon as she’d finished eating most of her lunch, which had killed her chatter, while Georgia looked lost in a sea of thoughts.
Every so often, I’d catch her looking at me, her lips pausing as if she was about to ask me something, then thinking better of it.
I wondered if I looked the same. I wanted to know about Rose’s father, about why she was single, how she felt about dating a colleague. And then I didn’t want to know any of that because I was concentrating on my career, and not on my colleague with the silky hair and the breasts I wanted to know better, because she had a daughter and a whole closet of complications.
And I was meant to be the poster boy for professionalism.
