The Mother-in-Law(80)

“What is it, darling?” I ask him.

He closes his eyes, shakes his head. “Can we talk inside?”

We go into the den and Ollie declines my offer for tea or coffee. Instead he drops onto the sofa. I sit opposite him and his face drops into my lap. I put a hand into the thick dark hair he didn’t get from me or Tom, and run my fingers through it like I used to when he was a little boy. Now, he is a forty-eight-year-old little boy.

“What is it?” I repeat.

“My business is going under. We’re not going to make our loan repayment,” he says. “And the bank is calling in our debt.”

My hand freezes in his hair. “Oh no. Ollie . . . I had no idea.”

“Honestly neither did I. I’ve been working my ass off for this business for years, and I can’t seem to make any headway. I honestly don’t know where the money goes.”

“Probably into Eamon’s pocket,” I mutter. I’ve never thought of it before, but suddenly it seems like the obvious answer.

Ollie stares at me.

“I might be wrong,” I say, “but I’m betting I’m not.”

Ollie blinks into the middle distance, perhaps processing this. Then he sits up. “No. Eamon wouldn’t—”

“Wouldn’t what? Go to any length to line his pockets?”

Ollie shakes his head. “God, I don’t know. I haven’t even spoken to him properly in months.”

“Have you tried?”

“Of course I have. He says everything is fine and we can talk later.”

“You need to insist.”

He laughs blackly. “Even if I did, Mum, there’s nothing to talk about now. It’s over. The business is worthless.”

He presses his fingers into his eyes sockets. I’ve never seen him look more broken.

“Not if you make your loan payment,” I say, after a moment or two.

Ollie frowns. “But . . . how . . . ?”

“I might be able to come on board as a silent partner. At least, I might, if Eamon had nothing to do with it. As a matter of fact, I have an idea for your business. It would be a bit of a departure from what you’re doing now.”

“What kind of . . . departure?”

When I tell Ollie my idea, he looks so surprised and impressed I have to try hard not to be offended. That’s right, I want to say. Your father wasn’t the only one with business ideas. He rests his chin in his hand, taking it all in and he reminds me so much of Tom, I find it impossible to believe they weren’t biologically related. We live on, I realize. We live on through our children.

“You know what,” he says finally. “That is a business I could really throw myself into.”





58: LUCY


THE PRESENT

The phone is ringing in the background again. The darn thing won’t stop. But neither Ollie nor I look at it, or even acknowledge it.

“You asked Diana for money? For your business?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Ollie pinches the top of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “You said it was a deal breaker.”

I blink at him. “What?”

“A deal breaker. You said that. If I ever asked Mum for money. I couldn’t lose you on top of everything else.”

I sigh. “Jesus, Ollie. You’re not going to lose me.” I close my eyes.

“The weirdest thing was that she agreed,” he says. “I never expected her to.”

“Then why did you ask?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I . . . just wanted to talk to my mum. You probably won’t believe this, but she could be . . . very wise.”

I chuckle a little. “Actually I do believe that.”

The landline phone stops ringing and for a moment we are surrounded by pure silence. But it lasts only a second or two before Ollie’s mobile starts up. I open my eyes. I want to throw it against the wall.

“She was different,” Ollie says, frowning as if recalling it. “She didn’t tell me to make my own way, or to figure it out myself. She told me she had my back. She said we’d pay off Eamon and go into business together.”

“She wanted to go into business with you?”

“She had a really interesting idea actually. A recruitment agency for highly skilled refugees. Engineers, doctors, IT professionals. A full-service agency that helped to get candidates’ qualifications recognized in Australia and giving them all the tools they needed to transition into good jobs, across all fields. It was a really good idea. She thought you might want to be involved too.”

“She did?”

“A family business, she said.” Ollie’s chin puckers. “But then she killed herself. Why would she say all of that . . . and then kill herself, less than an hour later?”

Obviously I have no idea. When Diana told me she’d changed her mind about killing herself, I’d believed her. Why would she say that if it wasn’t true? And even if she had changed her mind back again, it didn’t explain the letter in the drawer, or the thread in her hands. It didn’t explain the missing pillow.

“There’s only one explanation I can think of,” I say to Ollie. “Someone must have gotten there after you left.”