“Actually,” said Tom, “can we split the ride with you?”
Peter madesurenoises, and Bridge and Tom, with another round of goodbye hugs and a heartfelt “I love you” from Bridge that I was, just then, not quite in a place to reciprocate, followed them out the front door into the waiting cab.
Which left me and Oliver alone in our house. Just me, him, aconversation we needed to have, and a lot of uneaten shish barak. With a despairing look at what was left of the food, Oliver slumped into a chair and put his head in his hands.
“This,” he said, “was a terrible evening.”
And my feeling-bad-ness didn’t know where to go because here was Oliver, the man I loved, clearly falling apart at the seams. But also everything that had been low-key bothering me pretty much since Jaz had arrived had now gone beyond high-key bothering me into actual fucking crisis. And, you know, maybe that was my fault. Maybe I should have said something more or differently or better. Only, chump that I was, I’d kind of been working on the assumption that, with time and patience and support and encouragement, Oliver would keep on acting like the man I loved. Not like a man who would throw a vulnerable teenager out of his house for doing teenage stuff.
“Look,” I said, “I’m sorry to do this now. Because, you’re right, this was a terrible evening. We’ve had a terrible evening. This is a terrible time to do anything. But…but I really need to know, did you mean what you said to Jaz?”
Except then I realised this wasn’t going to help anything. Because if he didn’t mean it, then it had just been an unbelievably cruel thing to say, and if he did…
Who was I kidding? Oliver always meant everything.
He looked up, all hollow and tormented. “She clearly has complex needs. We aren’t necessarily best placed to meet those needs.”
“And who is?”
“I don’t know,” he conceded. “Possibly she needs to be in a specialist home.”
“Because she’s traumatised?” I wasn’t sure when I’d picked up Jaz’s habit of weaponising her labels.
Oliver nodded. “Ultimately, yes. It isn’t a kindness to keep her in an environment she won’t thrive in.”
This was twisting my heart even more than I’d expected it to. “She’s not a fucking corgi, Oliver. Besides, what would her thriving actuallylook like?”
And it probably said something bad about where we’d got over the last couple of months that I assumed Oliver would shoot that down. When, instead, he seemed genuinely taken aback by the question. “I will admit, I hadn’t considered that in detail. But not like this.”
“Oh right. So thriving teenagers are like porn? You can’t say what they are, but you know them when you see them?”
Oliver fully scowled at me. “Don’t be cute, Lucien. This is important.”
I fully scowled back. “Iknowit’s fucking important and I wasn’t being cute. I was being pissed off. You’re not the only one who gets to have takes on important things.”
“Then”—one of his eyebrows twitched upwards—“what’syour take?”
And hearing my own words, repeated back to me in that superior tone, fucking broke me. Until that exact moment, I’d never doubted that no matter how much I joked about Oliver being cooler and smarter and more successful and just generally better than I was, he truly did see me as an equal. As a partner. As someone whose thoughts and beliefs andtakesmattered.
“My take,” I said, shocked at how icy I could apparently sound, “is that she’s fine. She’s not always happy, but why would she be? She’s been taken from her family and shunted from stranger to stranger, school to school, since she was twelve. My take is that now she’s here, she’s doing her homework, she’s cooking with us, she’s only got in one fight, she’s started learning guitar and is taking it seriously. My take is that Mum and Spud both love her—”
“They both love anybody,” cut in Oliver.
“That’s not a fucking failing,” I yelled.
“I never said it was.”
“Fucking hell, Oliver. This is not a debate. I’m trying to tell you how I feel, and I want you to just…I don’t know, fucking listen? Not cross-examine me. And I’m sorry if you think the fact that Mum and Spud both love Jaz isn’t admissible in court. But I love her too. And…” I broke off, discovering I was perilously close to tears and, while I was normally fine to cry in front of Oliver, now was not normally. “And,” I finished, “I love you. And I want to spend my life with you and have a family with you. But how can I when…when…”
Oliver’s eyes went their coldest, most ruined grey. “When what?”
“When…” I felt trapped. I felt like I was trapped in a cold, dark place and slowly running out of air. “When it’s like…God, saying ‘It’s like I don’t know you’ is such a fucking cliché, but…you come home from court with these stories about your clients and how even though they’ve broken the rules, they’re still human beings and…and I don’t get how you can have so much empathy for all those pickpockets and shoplifters and so little for our own fucking kid.”
This was going to be afirstlysituation. Oliver was going to sayfirstlyand then list a bunch of reasons why I was wrong, and a tiny little piece of me was going to hate him for it.
“Firstly,” he said, “Jasmine isn’t our child. She’s our foster child. She still has a mother who she should, if things go well, eventually be able to go back to. Secondly, yes, all those pickpockets and shoplifters as you call them are indeed human beings. My duty to them is to represent them at trial, and I do that. My duty to Jasmine is to…”
And for once in a lifetime of having an answer for everything, Oliver…didn’t.
