She pulled out her phone to search for a health food shop, but Hector was pointing up at the gigantic yellow “M” illuminated on the billboard above their heads.
“Can I have a McDonald’s?”
“Come on, buddy, you know Mummy doesn’t like us eating fast food.”
“No fast food?” Dylan scrunched up his nose. “What, never?”
“My sister has very strict rules on healthy living.”
“But Mummy’s not here.”
“Hex...”
“I won’t tell her you let me have one, I swear. Please, Auntie Libby,pleeeease...”
She looked at the boy’s pleading face. “All right, just this once.”
“Yes!” Hector leaped up in the air. “Are you coming too, Dylan?”
Libby opened her mouth to say he wasn’t, but Dylan was already nodding at Hector. The three of them walked down to McDonald’s, where Libby ordered a Happy Meal for Hector and a Chicken McNuggets meal for herself. Dylan bought a coffee, and they found a table upstairs looking out over the bustling traffic on Shaftesbury Avenue.
Hector stuffed chips into his mouth, moaning with pleasure. “This is amazing plunk food, isn’t it?” he said to Dylan.
“Careful or you’ll make yourself sick, mate.”
“But it’ssooogood.”
“My sister’s going to kill me,” Libby said, but she couldn’t help smiling at Hector’s delighted face.
“Surely she won’t mind him having it once?” Dylan said.
“Oh, believe me, she will. But it’s fine; I feel it’s my duty as the wayward auntie to occasionally break the rules.”
“I imagine you’re a pretty cool aunt.”
Libby almost choked on a chip. She glanced at Dylan, but he was looking out the window.
“I’m not sure my sister thinks so,” she said, “especially now we’re living under the same roof.”
“Tell me about it,” Dylan said darkly. Libby waited for him to elaborate, but he took a sip of coffee. “So, what do you do for a living, then, when you’re not illegally feeding junk food to small children?”
Libby ate a bite of a nugget to give herself time to prepare an answer. Somehow sayingI run the business side of my partner’s gardening firm, but at the moment he’s weighing up whether he wants to be with me, so I’m currently unemployedseemed overly complicated.
“I’m taking a temporary career break,” she said, feeling pleased with her concise answer.
“Libby sells tacky gardens to people with more money than sense,” Hector said to Dylan. “That’s what my mummy says.”
“Does she, now?” Libby said. “What else does Mummy say about my work?”
“That you never should have given up doctoring school. She and Granny talk about it sometimes, and Granny gets all red in the face and cross.”
Libby felt as if she’d been stung. Dylan must have sensed it, because he turned to Hector.
“Did you get a toy with your meal?”
Hector started showing him some small plastic thing, and Libby slumped back in her seat. Did her family really still talk about her dropping out of medical school all these years later? It had been a huge drama at the time, full of anger and recriminations. Never mind that Libby had never wanted to study medicine in the first place and hated every minute of the two and a half years she’d done. In her parents’ eyes, it had been a personal rejection, a repudiation of everything they’d ever dreamed of for their daughter. But still, Libby had assumed that those wounds had healed over the past decade, thather family now realized that quitting a degree she hated was ultimately in Libby’s best interest. Apparently not.
“Are you okay?”
