One Small Mistake(3)
I’ll be fine.
I falter; maybe leading him right to my front door is a mistake. But then, he probably already knows where I live; several times, I’ve seen him in the park across from my house. I could turn around, go to a public place, a bar, ask Jack to meet me there. As soon as he sets eyes on me, he’ll know something is wrong and then I’ll either have to explain or lie. Besides, I’m closer to home now than I am to town.
I look back, just a flash – the man’s still behind me. He’s speeding up now. Not quite jogging but too fast to call it a walk. I rush out to cross the road, not wanting to stop in case he catches up. A car blares its horn as it swerves to avoid me. My pulse kicks and blood rushes through my ears. I stumble onto the pavement and round the corner into my street. I’ll be safer inside than I will out here, pounding the pavement. So, I jog up the stone steps, unlock the door with shaking hands and slam it shut behind me, pressing my back against the sun-warmed wood.
Safe.
Chapter Two
28 Days Before
Elodie Fray
My sister lives in a two-storey Georgian house with feature fireplaces, detailed cornicing and eggshell-painted shutters. It’s beautiful, there’s no denying that. It reeks of grandeur and money. Ada’s home is in a part of town that beguiled us as children. We used to walk slowly down Peach Avenue after school, watching girls our age step out of expensive cars in their private school uniforms, their slick ponytails swishing as they glided down the winding drive and into their big houses, followed by parents dressed in diamonds and pearls and thick, gold watches. Ada would point to the men with their crisp shirts and polished shoes and broad, white smiles and say, ‘That’s the kind of guy I’m going to marry when I grow up.’ And she did. For my sister, her accountant husband, Ethan, has a bank balance big enough that it’s a better lubricant than anything Durex could ever make.
Weaving between the many cars parked on the driveway, I hear laughter and music and taste the smokiness of the BBQ drifting over the fence. I didn’t bring anything to Ada’s last gathering and she made a snide comment about party etiquette, so I stayed up last night to make a summer fruit crumble. Balancing the glass dish on my hip, I use the big brass knocker. Nervously, I wait. It’s silly, there’s not going to be anyone here I don’t already know, but seeing my family is painful. My parents don’t agree with my decision to give up a marketing career. They think chasing my dream of being a writer is irresponsible folly. They don’t understand that securing an agent, especially one as talented as Lara, is like taming a mystical beast.
The front door opens, and Ethan greets me, a glass of red in one hand. ‘Elodie,’ he says brightly. ‘Come in, come in. Join the party.’
My sister’s husband is loved by the entire family and though we get along, I feel that where he is a dog person, I am like a cat being shoved in his lap.
He leads me through to the garden. For a moment I stand motionless, taking it all in. My sister doesn’t do anything by halves. There are two large silk-white tepees, adorned with bunting and fairy lights, and above them, pastel paper decorations hang from tree branches, dancing slightly in the summer breeze; to my left is a bank of wooden tables where cheese boards and colourful bowls of salads and desserts jostle for room; to my right is the sizzling BBQ. As I carry my dessert over to the artfully displayed pavlovas and Victoria sponges, I notice the fences have been repainted in navy, and the summer house in a dusky pink. This party is Pinterest-perfect. Beautiful, expensive people wearing beautiful, expensive things.
I grab a drink and spot my parents sitting together on the swing seat across the lawn. There’s an intimacy in the way they look at each other which is special after thirty-five years. Dad has his arm slung casually around Mum’s shoulders, a bottle of cider dangling between his fingers. She relaxes against him and sips her wine. He whispers something to her, his eyes crinkling at their corners. She blushes and gently slaps his leg in mock reproach. As a teenager, I’d have gagged, but as a twenty-eight-year-old woman, I feel a sliver of envy. I want what they have, that easy, long-lasting love. Maybe I’ve already had it. For the first time in days, I think about Noah. Him sliding between my legs, whispering he loved me beneath the sheets of a hotel bedroom in Copenhagen where he’d whisked me away for a surprise weekend; him lying too still in a hospital bed, tubes and wires snaking in and out of his skin, shallow breathing through broken ribs.
Pushing the memory of him to the bottom of myself, I look over at my parents again; Mum’s eyes light up, so do Dad’s, but they don’t see me – Ada is the focus of their pride. My sister is standing with a group of women who could all be clones of one another: floral maxi dresses, chunky heels, hair sweeping just above their collarbones in ‘effortless’ beachy waves that probably took an hour to perfect. Ada throws her head back and laughs. Forever the Queen Bee.
Everyone says it’s obvious we’re sisters; even Mum gets confused when she looks at old baby photos. We have the same high cheekbones, square chin and long lashes, but my lips are bee-stung, fuller than hers, my eyes green instead of grey, and where my hair is honey, hers is caramel. She’s older than me by four years and taller than me by three inches. And though she didn’t finish her A-levels, much less go to university, she married rich, and her reward is the beautiful house, the shiny car and the picture-perfect husband. My parents laid out two paths for me: one with university, a career and an exciting life in the city; another with marriage, a mortgage and babies. Since straying from the path I’d started on, I’m nothing to them but a situation to be fixed. So while my sister’s ability to bag the right man is celebrated, my achievements are ignored like cracked brooches at the bottom of a bargain bin. But if I could just get my name onto the front cover of a book, maybe Mum and Dad would look at me the way they look at her.