“Marie’s bought you a hand-carved avocado,” he laughed, and I admit, it did make me smile. Then he’d taken a breath down the line. “Anything?” is all he’d asked, and despite myself, despite promising myself I would try so hard to keep them dammed, I’d started crying, enveloped in my duvet, curtains closed, at past noon.
He’d sighed. “But we talked. And he was quiet, yeah, but he listened, and I thought—I thought once he cooled off, once he got there, to Mark’s, he’d text. Call. I’m sorry, Em.”
“He’s not been online once,” I’d said through the tears. “He’s definitely there, right?”
“Yeah. I mean, I know he called Mum,” he said. “And he will call, Emmie. I know El, and I know he will. He’s just getting his head together.”
Eliot had left after he came to my hotel room, and I had been sure to grab Lucas, at the hotel breakfast buffet, moments later, on his own. The color had drained from his face and he’d whisked outside to call him. They’d talked. But he’d said he needed space. Then Amanda, unaware and oblivious, had told Lucas a few days later that he’d had flown out to Canada.
“Probably needs to get away from Ana, throw himself into his work,” she’d said to Lucas. “For a therapist, she’s acting frightfully scorned. Your dad reckons she’ll boil the cats given half a chance.”
And I can’t bear to really think about it. Canada. I feel a surge of panic soar through my chest at the thought of being so many miles and oceans away from him. Perhaps that’s why he hasn’t been on WhatsApp or on Instagram. I remember what he’d said about Mark’s place. About how after his divorce, he’d canceled all outstanding work over here and got on a plane.
“It’s the sort of place you go to reset. Switch off from everything for a while. Mend.”
And the thought of him needing to mend, because of me, breaks my heart.
Steve undoes a button on his blazer now, and sits back in the chair, shirt buttons stretching against a rounded tummy. “I stayed with Louise in my twenties. Lodged here, like you,” he says. “And I came back a few years ago while Jude and I were renovating the house. He stayed with his mum.”
“You invited her for Christmas,” I say, and he smiles. “And she mentioned you visited. An old tenant, she said, and I teased her, pretended to die of shock at the sight of two mugs washed up, instead of one.”
“Yes,” he chuckles. “Louise kept to herself, that’s one way of putting it. But she was fiercely strong and fiercely kind too.”
“Yes,” I say. “She really was.”
He clears his throat and pulls out a handful of paper, stapled at the corner. I take it and look down at them in my hands. “Right,” he says. “So, this is Louise’s last will and testament. You’ll see here that this is a document stating your name at the top.”
“Okay.”
“And then below, you’ll see there is a sentence that begins that in the event of Louise’s death, the property of Two Fishers Way…”
I blink to focus on the neat, typed words on the page.
“Why am I… why am I on this?”
He smiles, hands clasping together. He takes a breath. “She’s left the house to you, Emmeline. It’s yours.”
“W-What? No,” I say. “No, that’s—that’s… no—”
“Yes. Yes. It’s yours.”
I can’t speak. I can’t move. I am rigid in this chair, the blood flooding to my feet, the color I know, without even looking into a mirror, has drained from my face. This house. This beautiful Victorian house, with the gardens front and back. A house like those I would walk past on the way to school, dreaming I’d have one day, to raise a family inside, like Georgia’s, like the kids at school, paddling pools in the garden, dinners eaten at kitchen tables. This three-bed house with flowers in the windows.
Steve talks again, but his voice sounds as though it’s underwater.
“I understand this is a shock,” he says, but he cannot hide his amusement at my reaction as he carries on with the formalities, about what will happen next, and I try desperately to take in the words so they feel real. But it still feels utterly unfeasible. I have a house. I have a house in my name. A house. A home. I look around the lounge, my eyes lingering on all of her things, and I cry, silently, on the armchair. Because I want to put my arms around her. I want to tell her thank you. I want to hear her raspy voice say, “That’s quite all right, Emmie. Now, come on. No need to be so wet.”
Steve explains the formalities to me, the processes, the things that will happen next, but I can hardly take it in, my hands shaking, my teeth chattering—the shock, Steve says—and in the end, he takes himself off to the kitchen and makes me a sugary tea, and stays, waiting to see that I finish it all.
“I’ll call in a few days,” he says as he unlocks his car. “Let it all sink in.” Then he opens the car door. “Almost forgot,” he says, reaching inside. He hands me a plain, white, sealed envelope. “This is for you,” he says. Then he brandishes a plastic carrier bag. “And these are for an Eliot Barnes. From Louise. Her crossword books. She said he was always good at the obscure music ones.”
* * *
Dear Emmie Blue,
A nice three-bed semi, a family, and someone to love you. You have all three now, if you just stop and look.
All my love,
Louise
“It smells like a teenage boy in here.”
“Great. Amazing. Thanks.”
“Like old washing and—”
“Disappointment,” Fox adds, and his hand gently squeezes my shoulder from behind me as I stand in the doorway looking into Louise’s dark, still-cluttered lounge. “I mean, I never thought I’d say this, Emmie, but even Rosie’s place is cleaner than this.”
I look up at him. “So, you’ve seen her place, now, have you?”
Fox clears his throat. “Never you mind the things I’ve seen. You need to turn your attention”—Fox grabs my head with two hands and angles it up and down the hallway, once into the living room again, then to the kitchen overflowing with dirty plates—“to your living quarters.”
“I mean, he speaks like a dick, but he’s right, Emmie,” says Rosie, coming to stand next to me, rain mac still on. “It’s a mess in here. I know you cleared a lot of Louise’s stuff out, but this is a job bigger than you, I reckon. And it’s time you let other people help. Like us. Your mates. Let us help you.”
“Yes,” says Fox. “But first, you need to go and get in that shower.”
I am relieved to see them today, barging through the hallway, bags of groceries at their sides. I have been off work with a cold, but Rosie has diagnosed it a broken heart.
“But I can’t breathe through my nose,” I’d told her in protest on the phone this morning.
“Nose. Heart. It’s all the same, Emmie. I got diarrhea when Alan dumped me. Shit my life away. And this is what this is. It’s normal. But you’ve got to let us look after you. Can we come round later? Fox and me.”