“Quite.”
“Okay,” I say. “I’m upstairs if you need me.”
I pick up my tray from the floor behind me as Louise shuffles off, purple velvet skirt skimming the carpet.
“And Emmie?” she calls out.
I stop on the stairs. “Yes?”
“You have a package in the porch.”
* * *
“Emmie! Oh, Emmie, how are you?”
Marie’s smiling, beautiful face fills the screen, the phone shaking in my hand. “Oh. Hi, Marie.”
“Luke is in the shower. He is just coming out!” Then her face leans from the shot, and I hear her call out something to him in French. “Emmie is on the phone, my love.” She looks back at the screen, at me, white, straight-toothed smile ever fixed. “He will not be long. Are you okay?”
I remember when I met Marie for the first time. It was in the winter of 2014, at a wine bar—all exposed brick and low lighting—and I remember how badly Lucas had wanted me to like her. “She’s seriously great,” he kept saying in the taxi on the way there. “I think you’ll really get on. She’s bubbly, you know? Really laid-back, really warm.” Lucas had had many girlfriends, most of which were so short-lived I’d never met them. I was sure I’d dislike her. I was living with Adam at the time, happy, I thought, but I know now, living in total denial. Denial of the butterflies I’d get every time Lucas would put his arm around me, talk into my ear over the loud music of a bar, breath against my neck, every time he’d fall drunkenly asleep beside me, and I’d wake and watch his eyelashes flicker against his cheeks. But he was right. She was great. We got on instantly. We clicked, as they say. And I’d thought, Well, that’s that, then, isn’t it? and I ignored those butterflies so expertly, they almost disappeared altogether. Lucas and Marie broke up four times in an on-off, disjointed three and a half years, after that. The final time because Marie was sure he had cheated with Australian Ivy on the business trip after she texted him something flirty, and Lucas was tired of the accusations.
Marie gazes back at me now, smiling, but the corners of her brown eyes crinkle ever so slightly with puzzlement.
“Yes, I’m fine,” I tell her. “Look, if it’s a bad time, I can call again later—”
“No, no, absolutely not. It is fine. We can chat until he’s out, no? Tell me all about this book you have bought. Luke tells me you are the perfect best woman already.”
“B-Book?” My mouth is dry, my hands still shaking, the parcel from Louise’s porch spilled out beside me on the bed.
“He said you have a book you are using to help with suits and speeches and—”
“Oh. Oh yes, my best man book.”
“Yes!” Marie smiles a beaming smile and nods into the camera, and I can see from my face in the tiny postage stamp of a window above her bright eyes and smooth skin, that I look ashen and drained. It’s like Beyoncé is FaceTiming Marley’s Ghost. “Did I tell you, Emmie,” Marie says, “that my girlfriend is taking a bridesmaid class? Can you believe there is such a thing?”
I’m not sure what I was expecting there to be in the parcel. Something I forgot I won on eBay. Perhaps a redirection from the flat or the old landlord, a collection of old posts or something. But I wasn’t expecting this—these. Seven of them. Marie chatters away, and I catch a glimpse of one of the envelopes in my lap, and my stomach lurches all over again, the way it does when you’re teetering at the top of a roller coaster. His writing. This is his writing. I know now that he writes his Es like back to front threes, in mixed capital letters and lowercase. I brush a finger over one. France. To think these came all the way from France, somewhere. Saint-Malo, maybe. I wonder if he looks like Jean. I wonder if he leaves the letter H off the beginning of English words in his French accent, like Jean does. ’Oliday ’Orrible.
“Oh! I leave you now,” says Marie, her gaze fixed off camera. “My turn to shower.” She turns back to the screen and smiles widely. “So lovely to speak to you, Emmie.”
“You too,” I say quickly, desperate for the sight of Lucas to slide onto the screen. He’ll make sense of it. He’ll help, as he always does, to settle the dread, the unease in my stomach.
He appears, shiny-skinned, wet-headed. “Hey,” he says, swiping a hand through his hair, screen wobbling as he settles on the sofa. “Sorry. I was in the shower.”
“That’s okay.”
Lucas stops, takes in my face. “Em, what’s wrong?”
I hesitate, look down at the fan of envelopes in my lap. I look back up at him, an ocean away, and I wish so much he was right here, in this room, beside me.
“I got a parcel today,” I tell him, my voice tiny. “And… it was full of cards. Birthday cards. To me.”
Lucas stares into the screen, his eyebrows knitted together. “Right? Who from?”
“My dad.”
Lucas doesn’t react straightaway. He just stares into the screen, frozen, a bit like I was when I opened the first one. Unmoving. Not breathing. “Y-Your… dad?”
I look down into my lap at the scatter of them. Seven. Seven children’s birthday cards, every envelope opened, no address on the front, just my name. I hold one up to the camera. There’s a pink elephant on the front of this one, its trunk curling into a number two.
“There’re seven of them, Luke. And the handwriting on the parcel; it’s Mum’s.”
Lucas brings a hand to his forehead, lips parted. “Shit, so… she’s had these, what, all along?”
“I don’t know.”
“And decides to send them to you now? Why?”
I think back to what she said at the festival. The sharpness to her words, the finality of them. That if it was what I wanted—finding my dad—then she knew I no longer needed her. “Okay,” I told her. “Okay.”
My hands, clammy and cold, tremble, and my throat constricts as if it’s being squeezed. I can’t speak. I look down into my lap. “Daughter. You are 7 today!” stares back at me, and a picture of my seven-year-old self, obsessed with rabbits and hair clips and collecting key rings, flickers into my mind, like a video springing to life. She wanted her dad so desperately, that little girl. She dreamed of him, drew pictures of him, pretended men who smiled at her and her mum in supermarkets were him.
“Shit, Em. I’m—are you okay?”
“I don’t know,” I manage, my words mere squeaks, and the tears come easily. No warning. “She said he didn’t know about me, Luke. For my whole life, she told me he… She…” I bring my hands to my forehead, cold palms cooling my hot skin. I open my mouth to speak, but Lucas is nodding. He already knows everything I want to say. “I know,” he says softly. “I know, Emmie.”
Tears keep coming, and I hide my face in my hands as they fall. All I can hear is his voice from my phone propped up in front of me in the folds of my duvet, the whooshing of blood in my ears.
“I’m sorry, Em. It’s such a lot to take in. But listen, this could be the start of something, couldn’t it? We know now that your mum knows more than she let on. Em? Em, are you okay?” And when I look up again, I see Lucas, those familiar, soft gray eyes on me, narrowing with worry. Then I see Marie in the background, frozen, a thick, burgundy dressing gown tied at the waist. The three of us, staring back at one another.