The Dilemma(39)

‘She’ll still have a phone signal,’ Livia says. ‘It feels wrong not to call, to say thank you.’

‘Dad’s right,’ Josh says. ‘We’ll hear from her tomorrow, when she gets back from her weekend away.’ He drops his arms from our shoulders and I feel suddenly cold. ‘Right, I’ll leave you to it. I’ve got things to do.’

He leaves and there’s only me and Livia. Is this the place to tell her, here on the lawn, in front of the photos of Marnie? Or should I take her into the house?

‘By the way, your mum phoned,’ Livia says.

‘Did she? When?’

‘While you were in the shower.’

‘What did she want?’

‘Just to wish me a happy birthday.’ She pauses. ‘I thought it might be Marnie phoning. Isn’t it lovely, what she’s done?’

‘Yes,’ I say, glad I hadn’t heard the phone ring, that I was spared the crushing disappointment of it not being Marnie.

‘I could stand here all evening looking at these photos but I’d better go and get ready.’ She starts to move away and I catch hold of her hand again.

‘Livia, wait—’

But she gives me a kiss and pulls away, her mind already elsewhere.

She gets as far as the steps before she realises.

‘Sorry!’ she says, turning around and laughing. ‘Did you want to tell me something?’

I look at her, her hair burnished by the sun, her face flushed with excitement, and all I can think is that this might be the last time she’ll ever be truly happy. In the future, the very distant future – if Marnie isn’t alright – there might be moments when she forgets. But for the rest of the time, for every second of every minute of every hour, for every hour of every day for the rest of her life, Livia will feel the desperate pain of grief. As she stands there waiting for my answer, all I can think is that these might be her last few moments of happiness.

So, I prolong them a bit. I take my time answering, stretching out the seconds.

‘Adam! Can it wait?’

Her words echo in my ears. Can it wait? I draw in my breath, overwhelmed by a sudden thought. What if – what if I only tell her once the party is over? I don’t have official confirmation that Marnie was on the flight, and there’s a fair chance that she wasn’t. What if I tell Livia that Marnie might never be coming home, that we might never see her again – and then, a few hours later, she walks through the door? I’ll have caused Livia unimaginable pain and anguish for nothing. And if she doesn’t walk through the door, if the very worst has happened —

‘Adam!’ Waiting for my reply, Livia becomes impatient.

I take a steadying breath. If the very worst has happened, then it won’t make any difference to Marnie whether I tell Livia now or not. If Livia can have another few hours of happiness, then surely that’s the greatest gift I can give her?

‘It can wait!’ I call. And she blows me a kiss and runs down the steps towards the house.

She deserves so much to be happy.





Livia


I take the towel from my head and shake out my wet hair. As I reach for a comb, I catch sight of myself in the full-length mirror and move to stand in front of it, running a critical eye over my body. I’m in my underwear, so I can see that watching what I ate has got rid of the extra pounds that crept up on me over the years. It wasn’t that hard. I lost my appetite the moment I found out about Marnie and Rob.

The level of deception that he, and Marnie, have stooped to is bewildering. A couple of days after I saw Rob naked in the hotel room, when I was still piecing everything together, a couple of days before he and Cleo were due home, I had a conversation with Jess.

‘Didn’t Cleo mind Rob going to Hong Kong with her?’ I asked, remembering that she hadn’t wanted Cleo to travel on her own. I hoped she hadn’t noticed that I’d almost choked on his name. What I’d discovered weighed so heavily on me that I could hardly bear to be around Jess, and I was glad I could escape to work during the day, that Adam was with us in the evenings, and that she’d soon be going back to her own house.

Jess threw back her head and laughed. ‘Yes, of course she did! No self-respecting nineteen-year-old wants their dad chaperoning them when they go to see their best friend. But Rob insisted that Cleo wasn’t going without him. I tried to persuade him to let her go on her own but he wouldn’t budge, saying it wasn’t safe. Cleo was furious and said there was no way that he was going with her and that she’d pay for the ticket herself. But Marnie told her that if it was the only way they were going to be able to see each other, it was best to accept Rob as part of the package.’

To know that Marnie was part of the deceit crushed me even more. It made me question everything she’d told me about her time in Hong Kong. I could think about nothing else and when I remembered how depressed she’d been when she first arrived there, I also remembered how she’d suddenly perked up in December. And then I remembered Rob’s big trip away, supposedly to the Singapore office of his company. We were all so impressed that he was going somewhere more exotic than Darlington that nobody thought to wonder why he’d suddenly been sent to the Singapore, not even Nelson, because it wouldn’t have occurred to any of us that he could possibly be lying. We were best friends, family. People don’t lie to their families.