People LIke Her(62)

What strikes me most strongly, having seen what an energetic kid she is, how much she loves running around and shouting and jumping off things, is how boring she must find all this Mamabare stuff. The photo shoots. Pretending to be playing. Pretending to have fun. Being dragged around to all these events, half of them way past her bedtime. And what is it going to be like when she grows up, when she looks back at her childhood? What is she going to remember—what actually happened, or the version of what happened that Emmy posts online?

When I used to say things like that, Grace would always screw up her face and say I was being old-fashioned.

Doreen. That’s the name of the nanny. She has seen me around enough—in the park, on the bus, once on the street outside the house—for us to get to the nodding stage with each other. A couple of times we have said good morning. Once we found ourselves sitting next to each other on a bench by the pond. Coco was feeding the ducks, laughing, shrieking when they started crowding up too close, waddling up over the lip of the pond and closing in on her to get the bread that she had dropped.

“How old?” I asked.

She told me.

“Granddaughter?”

She shook her head.

“Not one of mine,” she said. “Just one I look after.”

She does not get to see her own grandchildren as much as she would like, she told me. Two of them were up in Manchester, one over near Norwich. What about me?

I told her I did not get to see my little granddaughter as much as I would like either. Or my daughter, for that matter.

We commiserated.

“Coco,” she called. “Not so close to the edge.”

Coco looked back and nodded to show she had understood.

“Okay!” she shouted.

Doreen gave her a thumbs-up.

“Sweet little girl,” I commented.

I am not sure whether Coco recognized me or not. If she did, she didn’t say anything. But there was definitely a moment when her gaze rested on me and a little frown passed across her face as if she was trying to place me, trying to remember where we had encountered each other before. Then a duck nuzzled at the back of her coat and gave her a start, and she jumped away, shrieking.

It’s all in place now. Everything I need is at the house; everything has been tested, double-tested, checked. I have taken down the FOR SALE sign, just in case, stowed it around the side of the house, by the bins. I have made sure there is enough in the fridge for me, stuff that won’t go off, plenty of UHT milk and coffee in the pantry. I have made the necessary calculations. I have gone through the stages in my head. I have asked myself if I am really capable of this, if I am really up to it, and I have thought about Grace and I have thought about Ailsa and I have found my answer.

Now all I need is the right moment.

Emmy

It’s a textbook Mail on Sunday sting.

A call at nine thirty on a Saturday night laying out the bare bones of a front-page story about you and asking for a response. Not that they actually want it—it’s more of a courtesy call, really, letting you know that your face will be splashed all over a tabloid the next morning. There is no damage limitation to be done by that point, no time to kill the story before the sordid little thing goes to press. I know this from experience, thanks to an airbrushing scandal in my magazine days when a slapdash art director, in the process of artificially shaving a few inches off a Hollywood actress, accidentally gave her an extra elbow.

I can see that something is seriously wrong the second Dan answers the phone. A cheery “Hello?” is followed by a much more serious “Yes.”

Who? I mouth with a raised eyebrow.

He ignores me.

“I see,” he says into the receiver.

His expression is stern, his eyebrows almost touching. I nudge him, but he turns his back on me.

“What is it, Dan, for fuck’s sake?” I hiss.

He waves my words away with the back of his hand. He was sitting down, but now he’s standing, the hand that is not holding the phone covering his ear.

“Yes, I’m still here. I’m listening.”

Our eyes meet in the mirror.

“No,” he says, holding my gaze. “No, I have nothing to say, nothing to say to you at all. Except . . . leave my family alone.”

Then he throws the phone down on the bed so hard it bounces and goes spinning off into the corner of the room.

“Dan?”

He turns, and I honestly don’t think I have ever seen him look like this before.

“Let me get this right, Emmy,” he says, his voice barely above a whisper. “You get an email from your best friend, a girl you’ve known since school, maid of honor at our wedding, about losing three babies. Three. You don’t call her back. You don’t even send her a text. You offer her less time, less support, than you would a total stranger online. And then, for the sake of a job presenting a documentary on a topic about which you know precisely nothing, you steal her story, her actual life, and pass it off as your own? Our own?”

Dan breaks off, shaking his head. “Who the fuck even are you, Emmy?”

My mouth opens. That’s not what I did. At least that’s not what I meant to do. It was an audition. I was acting. Nobody was meant to see it apart from them. How the hell has it made its way out into the world? How the fuck has Polly seen it? Who gave it to her? That’s what I want to say. I just can’t make the words come out.