“If you want Stella, you’ll find the biscuits,” Sebastian warned.
“Aren’t you the wedding planner?”
Sebastian shrugged. “I’m better with people than the actual planning side of things. That’s Ari’s department.”
Ari. At the woman’s name, Marnie felt that earlier dart of anger returning. “I need another cigarette,” she muttered.
Sebastian grinned at her as he handed over his pack. “I have to say, darling, it’s so refreshing to smoke with a woman who treats her body like a chimney, as I do mine.”
“Do you call Ari ‘darling’?” Marnie asked suddenly, staring at him intently.
“Yes,” Sebastian replied. “Although in her case I say it truthfully. Sheisa darling.”
“What about Reine?” Saying her granddaughter’s name caused a sudden lump in her throat. “Do you call her darling too?”
“No,” Sebastian replied. “I call her sunshine, and that’s the truth. She is my sunshine. She’s my girl.”
“But she’s not your girl. She’s just your niece. She’s some... some other man’s girl.”
Sebastian sat back in his armchair, considering Marnie carefully for a moment. “You sound like Ari. She tells herself that lie too.”
“What lie? Reine does have a father.”
“Actually,” Sebastian said, his earlier easiness withdrawn, “she has two in fact. Me and my husband.”
“You aren’t her father. Luis isn’t her father,” Marnie argued, feeling a strong sense of loyalty to her son that overrode her current anger with him. “Her father is my — I mean, this other man.”
“Tom Miller,” Sebastian mused, lighting another cigarette and drawing on it, long and pensive. “A fictional name for a fictional character, wouldn’t you say?”
“You think Ari is lying?”
“No. I told you — Ari is a darling. I think Ari was liedto. I think this Tom Miller chap took my sister for a fool and left her high, dry and pregnant. Ari tells herself he’s coming back for her... she actually believes she hasn’t been abandoned. But she has. He left her, and he’s not coming back. Not ever.”
“What if he does?” Marnie asked quietly.
“Unlikely.” Sebastian shrugged. “But if he does, and he wants Reine, he’ll have a fucking fight on his hands.”
Abruptly, thankfulness crossed Marnie’s mind as she remembered that she’d already hired the services of a lawyer inNew York who specialised in child custody battles. Andrew A. Andrews was the best in the business. She’d thought she’d be fighting Sasha, of course, but still. She was ready.
“Do you know what I remember the most when I think about Tom Miller?” Sebastian suddenly asked, and Marnie shook her head. “I remember when Ari was four months pregnant, poor as a church mouse and working as a cleaner. She was living in this filthy flat share in Brixton. She had nothing. Absolutely nothing. Luis and I tried to help, but she was determined to do it all herself. If Tom Miller couldn’t help her, no man was allowed to help her. Even me, her own brother.”
Momentarily, Marnie felt a flare of guilt, and another, much stronger flare of anger for Tom.
“One day,” Sebastian carried on, “Luis stays late at work on a dress, and she was crying her eyes out. She’d been for a scan, you see, and found out she was having a girl. What should have been a magical moment in her life was nothing but sadness to her, because this bloke, thisTom, had missed it.”
“Maybe he had his reasons for not—”
“No,” Sebastian snapped. “There’s not a single reason in the world good enough to miss something like that. There’s not a single reason in the world for leaving a girl like Ari in the position that he did.”
“You think so?” Marnie asked miserably.
“I wouldn’t let her leave after that night. Luis brought home dinner, determined to fatten her up—he’s a feeder, my Luis. He’s never had much success with me, because I like to keep my lines neat and clean, but with Ari, he found a willing victim. My God, if you ever saw that woman eat, you’d—”
“You wouldn’t let her leave?” Marnie interrupted.
“Well, we’d been planning on getting a cat, but in Ari we found the next best thing.”
Marnie paused. “I’m sorry, did you just say you were planning on getting a cat, but instead decided to take on a whole person?”
