‘It’s not just the walks, she goes straight to her room afterwards. And she’s been late home from work some nights and won’t tell me where she’s been.’
‘Mum, she’s not a child. She shouldn’t have to explain herself every time she’s a couple of hours late home. Maybe she’s finally getting on with the girls from work?’
Mum tutted. ‘I doubt it, Ava. Do you think she’s having one-night stands again?’
‘I don’t know, Mum. She’s an adult, so yeah, probably.’
I didn’t think all of us babying Cassie was the best thing, and my parents certainly didn’t need to know the details of her sex life.
‘All I’m saying is, please consider your sister in all of this,’ said Mum. ‘Because do you really think it’s going to last with this bloke Marcus? He’s a millionaire, from what Dad says.’
‘His finances are none of my business,’ I said.
‘And he’ll have his pick of women, won’t he? Plus he always seems to be travelling, so where’s the future in that?’ said Mum, hammering home her point – i.e. that he wasn’t going to stick around either, like Charlie hadn’t. As if I didn’t already know that.
I turned back to the salad, heaping it into a bowl, not caring how it looked, even though I knew there’d probably be some comment about shoddy presentation later.
‘What are you trying to say exactly, Mum?’ I said, irritated now. I couldn’t bite my tongue any longer.
‘That it’s not all about you, Ava.’
I actually laughed, I couldn’t help it. As if I’d ever thought it was. I picked up the bowl, needing to get away before I said something I would regret.
‘Let’s get out into the garden and try to enjoy the day, shall we?’ I said, zipping past Mum before she could ask me any more questions or say anything else to annoy me. I didn’t want to spiral into a bad mood.
I pushed through into the garden, the uninspiring square piece of grass surrounded by sparse little flower beds that Dad half-heartedly dug over once a year. Luckily, the roses must have been of a particularly hardy variety – they had to be to survive the onslaught of weeds that were visibly poking through the earth. And they had the audacity to comment onmypresentation skills.
‘Salad’s up!’ I trilled.
‘Yum,’ said Cassie, looking up from the book she was reading. She had her feet on one of the chairs and looked happy and relaxed in a way I didn’t feel now, and probably wouldn’t until I was back on my sofa in London.
Meanwhile, Dad was barely visible through the plumes of thick white smoke he was generating as he prodded heavy-handedly at the hot coals. A cloud of it was heading straight for next door’s washing and it didn’t appear to occur to Dad that maybe he should have suggested they take their washing in before he fired it up.
Surprisingly, the afternoon was a relative success. Cassie had picked at her food a bit, which usually had the effect of putting me off mine, but somehow I had the biggest appetite today and tucked into a burger, two sausages and a piece of chicken seasoned with jerk powder, Dad’s summer speciality. Mum opened a bottle of prosecco and, after a glass and a half each, we actually had a bit of a laugh. Dad asked me a couple of questions about the tennis and seemed impressed with the knowledge I was gleaning, and he saidhow well Marcus had done in Rome – he’d reached the semi-finals, beaten by the world number four in three very close sets.
‘Clay is his least favourite surface,’ I said, pleased with myself for remembering.
‘You can tell,’ said Dad.
‘Did he have any kick-offs in Rome? That’s all I’m interested in, it’s hilarious,’ said Cassie flippantly, scrolling through her phone, which had been beeping constantly throughout the meal.
‘Not that I know of,’ I said, although I hadn’t been following the footage avidly. It would have meant signing up to Sky Sports, which I wasn’t prepared to do because it cost an absolute fortune. Also, I thought it might be a bit obsessive – as it was, he kept popping into my mind’s eye at extremely unhelpful times. I didn’t think watching him lunge around the court all sweaty and smeared with dusty red clay was in any way going to stop me noticing how gut-wrenchingly attractive he was.
I had a Eurostar to catch in the morning, which got me neatly out of having to stay the night in Reading. Cassie had disappeared up to her room pretty swiftly after lunch anyway, and by the time I’d cleared everything away while Mum and Dad watchedThe Chaseit was gone four and time to head back. I was still umming and aahing about what to pack – was Paris more or less dressy than Monte Carlo? I wasn’t staying as long this time, either, as Amanda Eddington quite rightly didn’t think the budget could stretch to putting me up for two weeks in the hope that Marcus would make the final. I’d be there for his first-round match, and the second if he made it that far, which, judging by his performance in Rome and Madrid, he had a good chance of doing. According to Dean, it depended on who he got in the draw, which was being decided this afternoon, apparently, in a ceremony at L’Orangerie de Roland-Garros (no idea what that was, but it sounded perfectly lovely). I could have travelled a dayearlier if I’d wanted, but I’d chosen not to because it was Cassie’s birthday and I wanted to spend the day with her. Although since she’d spent most of it either staring at her phone screen or locked in her room, I felt slightly put out about that decision now, especially as Dean was pushing for Marcus and me to get ourselves photographed together at the earliest opportunity because according to him, things had gone a bit quiet on the ‘romance’ front. Marcus hadn’t been in London at all since I’d seen him in Monaco, and apparently the press was likely to assume we were no longer together. Meanwhile, Charlie had continued to post photos of himself with his new girlfriend – whose identity was still a complete mystery – and I couldn’t help being gutted that he was doing the same things with her on a Sunday that he used to do with me. Zoe had instructed me to mute his account immediately, and I kept saying I would, but I also had a masochistic need to know exactly what he was doing and with whom so that I could justifiably wallow in misery about it afterwards. Nobody I knew had heard from him, and we’d never really had mutual friends in the way that some couples did – they were firmly either in his camp or mine – so there was no information to be wheedled out of people that way.
I popped up to see Cassie before I left, already prepping myself to play down my upcoming trip. Paris in the spring sounded undeniably dreamy at face value, but it was also work, as I kept having to remind myself, particularly because sometimes it didn’t feel like it.
I knocked on Cassie’s door, my fingers already wrapped around the handle.
‘Come in!’ called Cassie.
She was sitting on her bed with her phone next to her. The TV wasn’t on, so she must have been scrolling. I hoped she wasn’t obsessing over influencers again.
‘Just came to say bye. I’m heading off in a minute,’ I said.
I sat on the edge of her bed, looking around the room. When we were younger, early-to-mid-teens, perhaps, I’d spent hours in here, slouched on a bean bag on the floor, doing my homework there, making the excuse that it helped to have background noise. Really, it was that she’d always be having a bad time at school and I hadn’t wanted her to feel alone and thought it might help to have me there. The problem was, she had become kind of dependent on me and when I did actually have to concentrate – in the run-up to my GCSEs, for example – Cassie accused me of not caring about her anymore. She was only thirteen or so, I got it, and in the end I’d relented and had sacked off the library to resume my position on the bean bag, but I sometimes wondered why Mum hadn’t offered to sit with Cassie instead, so that I could have done my revision elsewhere. It had crossed my mind once or twice that maybe – subconsciously, obviously, because she wasn’t a malicious person – Mum didn’t actually want me to do well in my exams. She’d made myriad comments about ‘just passing’ being enough, and not needing to get As, and I’d nodded along thinking: Iwantto do my best, though. I want to aim for As, because why wouldn’t I?
‘Looking forward to Paris?’ asked Cassie.
