The Guilty Couple(6)

‘Remember what you promised me,’ Ayesha says as my fingers reach for the door handle. ‘You said you’d stay in the car.’

I press both hands between my knees but my right leg won’t stop jiggling. The heels of my trainers are pounding the footwell so violently I’m probably wearing a hole in the mat.

‘There she is!’ Now my hands are over my mouth. ‘Ayesha that’s her, with the blonde hair, with those two dark-haired girls.’

Ayesha leans forward in her seat, looking for her. Along with Nancy she’s Grace’s godmother but, because Dominic was an arsehole about letting her see Grace while I was in prison, she hasn’t seen Grace for over five years. Ayesha and I were both interns at Sotheby’s, the year before I met Dom, and we got on brilliantly right from the off. Ayesha left after six months to do a Master’s in business but, unlike most work friendships that wane and drift when you no longer spend eight hours a day together, ours went from strength to strength. We went out to bars and clubs, and to yoga and spin class to try and counteract the late-night bags of chips and the bottles of wine. We went speed dating together and left, laughing our heads off at how cringy it was, halfway through. After I started dating Dominic she was one of the first people I introduced him to. Her opinion mattered so much to me that I was nervous the whole way through dinner. Afterwards, when she told me she really liked him, I couldn’t have been more relieved.

The two dark-haired girls peel off after they’ve crossed the road and Grace pauses for a second, watching them go. She’s too far away for me to see the expression in her eyes but the set of her face makes her appear worried. Is she lonely, just living with Dom? Does her heart sink when it’s time to go home? Maybe she’s envious of her friends’ families? There’s so much about my daughter’s life I can only guess at, so much I don’t know.

For one terrible second I think she’s about to go after her friends, then she pulls her phone out of her jacket pocket, crams her earphones into her ears and walks down the street to where we’re parked.

I will time to slow down as she draws closer. I need to look at her, to take in every last detail, to keep me going until I see her again. Her hair’s longer than it was when she was a child, but she’s still got the same wild, corkscrew curls. Her skin looks pale, gone is the ruddy healthiness of a child who’d play outside at every given opportunity, and the soft roundness of her cheeks and jawline has almost faded away. She has high cheekbones like Dom, a smaller nose than either of us, full pink lips and my dark shadows beneath her eyes. She’s a beautiful twelve-year-old girl but she’s still my child, my confident, chatty seven-year-old, my giggly, silly three-year-old, the baby I held in my arms.

‘Liv?’ Ayesha’s voice is a background hum as I reach for the door catch. ‘Liv, don’t! Liv, oh for fuck’s sake no!’

Grace glances up from her phone, startled and unsure. There’s confusion in her eyes as she looks me up and down then wariness and a dawning recognition as her gaze rests on my face. My heart leaps. This is the moment I’ve spent five years dreaming about, when she throws herself into my arms and everything that’s happened is gone in an instant. Smithy was wrong. You can rewind time.

Smiling, I take a step closer, but the light dims in Grace’s eyes and I draw to a halt. Her lips have tightened and her expression has hardened. We stare at each other, so close physically, the closest I’ve been to her in years, but never further apart.

‘Gracie,’ her name leaves my lips on a frightened whisper. This isn’t how it was supposed to happen. I didn’t expect her to look so angry. ‘Gracie, I’ve missed you so much.’

She twists around to look behind her, to check her friends aren’t watching or to look for help? But the street is empty, all the other kids have dispersed.

Her gaze returns, warily, to me. ‘What happened to your eye?’

I touch a hand to the tender skin above my cheekbone. Before I left Ayesha’s I plastered concealer onto the purple/green bruising but I may as well have put Tippex on a mural for all the difference it made.

‘I knocked into something.’

My daughter’s eyes narrow suspiciously. ‘You look like you were in a fight.’

‘I got out of prison yesterday.’ The words come out in a rush. ‘I know I’m not supposed to see you like this, that I should wait for a visit with Granny and Grandad, but I couldn’t do that. I’ve missed you so much. I thought about you every single day I was away. The only thing that got me through it was the prospect of seeing you again.’

Grace recoils, shoulders hunched, head down as though every word I am saying is so repugnant, so cringeworthy, she just wants to disappear.

‘I know it’s a shock,’ I continue, ‘seeing me again, like this, but—’

‘You tried to kill Dad!’ The words explode out of her and her eyes, the palest of blue, just like Dominic’s, glint with anger.

‘I didn’t. I promise you. Someone made it look as though I did but I really, really didn’t.’

‘The jury thought you did. People don’t get sent to prison for something they didn’t do.’

It’s a phrase she’s used before, when she was seven, in the first call I made to her from prison. It sounded to me as though she was parroting someone else’s words, her grandparents’ perhaps, or Dom’s. Back then she accepted my explanation that sometimes mistakes are made and Mummy was trying very hard to get the judge to look at her case again. Seconds later we were talking about a dream she’d had the night before and the games she’d played at school with her friends.