Rowan shuddered. ‘Rather you than me.’ They started walking up the mews. ‘I expect a full debrief tomorrow.’
Ten minutes later, he found Sage in the kitchen with Mary and Ian, who was sat at the kitchen table with bike parts spread out on an old newspaper and a perplexed expression on his face. The back door was open, Blossom was lying in a patch of sun in the garden, all four legs in the air like a tipped cow, and a spirited discussion was taking place about whether they should eat outside.
Suddenly Will was ravenous. ‘What’s for dinner?’
‘Soy and honey-glazed salmon with new potatoes and a salad,’ Mary said, taking a vegetable knife out of the drawer. ‘You can start chopping up the tomatoes and cucumbers if you want to make yourself useful.’
Sage was staring at her phone; whatever the emergency that had required Will’s attention, it seemed to have been forgotten. ‘It’s so annoying,’ she said. ‘When I take a pic of me in a flower crown, I get several hundred likes, I even get a couple of booking enquiries. But when I take a picture of me and Blossom in matching flowers crowns, that shit goes viral. Look!’
The picture of Blossom wearing a headpiece of cream and pink sweet peas and peonies was so cute Will was surprised that it hadn’t broken the internet. Even so . . .
‘I hope you’re not exploiting Blossom for likes,’ he said to Sage sternly, but Sage just waved a languid hand in his face.
‘She should earn her keep somehow,’ she said before launching into a spiel about how she’d spent the day working with a designer on the Bloom & Family new-look packaging. ‘We like the logo. That whole art deco thirties thing is so on-trend, but it also needs updating a little, don’t you think, Mum?’
‘As long as the new logo incorporates a drawing of Blossom in a flower crown, then I’m happy,’ Mary said. ‘And it needs to look good on the ‘Gram.’
‘Well, that goes without saying.’
Will paused from taking the salad stuff out of the fridge to look pointedly at his youngest sister and his mother. Since when did Mary start referring to Instagram as ‘the ‘Gram’, and why were they now having a very loud, very showy chat about social media and influencers, and creating bespoke experiences for people through the medium of floristry? Sage had just uttered the sentence, ‘Making memories with marigolds,’ and was pointedly ignoring Will who was now rolling his eyes.
‘So, anyway, Mum, I was thinking we could be doing amazing things with the shop Instagram.’
‘We’ve got the Facebook page,’ Ian pointed out.
It was Sage’s turn to roll her eyes. ‘Nobody uses Facebook anymore, Dad, only old people. No disrespect.’
‘Yet I feel disrespected,’ Ian said, bopping Sage gently over the head with the oily rag he was using to clean his bike innards.
‘The thing is,’ Mary said, ‘we really need to exploit our social media channels. We have less than seven hundred followers, but Sage has . . . How many followers do you have, Sage?’
‘She has loads,’ Will said, because he now knew what this emergency was about. ‘Over ten thousand.’ He put down the cucumber and knife and turned around. ‘I take it this isn’t about our social media channels but about Sage not wanting to do a degree anymore.’
‘Very interesting you should say that, Will.’ Mary looked up from where she was scrubbing the new potatoes. ‘Now that you bring it up, did you know how many extra hits we got when Sage hosted that flower-crown workshop for influencers? Maybe you could do one of your spreadsheets to see how much extra revenue she’s bringing in as she captures the millennial market.’
‘Sage is getting a degree. End of,’ Will said firmly and, he hoped, definitively.
‘It’s not end of,’ Sage said just as firmly, because she’d never had to spend her formative years walking on eggshells, which also meant that she never shied away from an argument. ‘You can’t actually physically force me to go to university if I don’t want to. But I’d much rather that you were cool with me choosing a different path, than not being cool with it.’
Will shook his head. ‘You were dead set on being a lawyer.’
‘I was sixteen! I watched a lot of Suits the summer after my GCSEs and I shouldn’t be making career decisions based on that.’ Now Sage threw an imploring look at Ian, who shrugged helplessly. He was a man torn between the three great loves of his life: his wife, his daughter and the bike parts in front of him, which needed his immediate intention.
‘Well, ultimately it has to be Sage’s decision, doesn’t it?’ Ian didn’t even look up from his bike innards.
‘And also, I’ll be saving nine grand a year in tuition, not to mention living expenses,’ Sage pointed out. She now had her hands on her hips and was bobbing her head from side to side in a way that all her family and friends dreaded.
‘That is true,’ Ian now chimed in. ‘Going to university is so expensive and we don’t want Sage to be saddled with debt for years.’
Will had had enough. ‘Obviously, I’m going to pay for your tuition and your living expenses,’ he said tightly, an orange pepper clutched so hard in his hand that it was almost pulp. ‘I set up a trust for you on the day you were born.’
‘You didn’t have to do that, Will . . .’ Mary said, her face flushed.
‘I did it because I have . . . had a good job,’ Will continued, putting down the knife before he ended up chopping off one of his fingers. ‘And after you’ve done your degree, you’ll be able to get a really good job too, you’ll earn lots of money. And do you know what that means?’
Sage wilted in the face of Will’s righteousness. ‘Um. No. What does it mean?’
‘It means that you’ll be financially independent,’ Will told her in a choked voice, because he didn’t feel that far from tears. ‘You won’t be reliant on anyone else for money. You’ll never be forced to stay with someone who makes you unhappy or, worse, hurts you, simply because you can’t afford to leave. And that is why you’re going to university.’
‘Oh, Will . . .’
‘Dude . . .’
‘Now come on, son . . .’
All three of them spoke at once. Will would have bet that all of them were on the verge of tears too.
No matter that it was so long ago, that his name was never mentioned, Peter Hamilton still made his presence felt. Even in Sage’s life, though she’d grown up knowing that she was loved and cherished by both her parents, not to mention her half-siblings.
It was Sage who reached Will first so she could throw her arms around him. ‘You never have to worry about that,’ she said, her voice thick and trembling.
‘Well, I do worry about it. I’ll always worry about it,’ Will said, rubbing soothing circles on Sage’s back with the hand that was still clutching the now entirely squashed pepper.
‘You don’t, because if I ever found myself in that situation, I know I could call you or Dad or Mum or even Rowan though she says I’m a brat, and you’d come and get me,’ Sage insisted. ‘It would be all right.’
Mary wasn’t quite done either. ‘I know I made mistakes in the past, but I found a good man second time around and we raised Sage not to take shit from anyone. Though maybe we were a little too successful,’ she added with a watery smile.