I give Frances a subtle once-over. She’s very pretty, dark-haired, but dangerously thin and pale. Her silk blouse and pencil skirt give me major lawyer vibes. I bet she does something really fucking dull, like—what’s that word for property law?
Oh yes.
Conveyancing.
I bet she does conveyancing.
I can feel her low energy from here. Dear God, I sound like my mum. I suspect Frances could do with some Vitality with Verity, or at least some Vitamin D. Or a few good orgasms.
She holds her untouched breadstick aloft as she gives me a far less subtle once-over than the one I gave her.
‘Do you have a child here?’ I ask to break the awkward silence.
‘One. Dippy—Serendipity. She’s eight.’
‘Ahh,’ I say politely. Dippy? Fucking hell. Poor kid. ‘It sounds like they’re having fun.’ I jerk my head in the direction of the happy shrieks.
She acknowledges my vacuous comment with the tight smile it probably deserves. ‘You and Zach look… sweet together.’
‘Thank you,’ I say, wondering why I feel like there’s something else coming. Probably because, used a certain way, sweet can be the most passive-aggressive word ever. And everything about this woman screams passive-aggressive. ‘He’s amazing.’
She nods. ‘Yes he is.’ Her tone is sharp, as if we’re not both already on the same page.
‘And you were good friends with Claire?’ I say. Acknowledging Zach’s late wife, and her friend, seems like the right thing to do here.
Her face loses some of its pinched look. ‘Yes. We met the first week of uni, and we were inseparable.’
‘That’s amazing,’ I say. ‘Where were you guys at uni?’
‘Cambridge,’ she replies stiffly.
Excellent. My boyfriend’s late wife was a fucking genius.
‘I’m so sorry for your loss,’ I say softly. ‘I can’t imagine how hard it’s been for all of you. It sounds like Claire was an all-round incredible person.’
‘She was.’ Her guard is back up. ‘She was one of those people, you know? Just so special. It’s so unfair she’s gone when there are so many sub-par people left.’
I appreciate her general sentiment more than I appreciate the glare she sends in my direction. ‘None of it’s fair,’ I tell her.
‘Still, it worked out well for you.’ She cocks her head in Zach’s direction, and my jaw practically hits the floor.
‘Excuse me?’ I ask. Please don’t say what I think you’re about to say.
‘Well,’ she huffs, ‘if Claire hadn’t died, you wouldn’t have been able to make a move on Zach.’ There’s a loaded pause. ‘Or maybe you would.’
Okay. Now not only is my jaw on the actual floor, but my right fist is fucking twitching. You did not just say that, bitch.
‘I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that,’ I tell her in my firmest do not fuck with me voice. ‘Because that is massively, massively insulting. Obviously, I’m devastated your friend died, because Zach and the girls deserve none of this. Okay? But we happen to have found each other, and the only people whose blessing he needs to move on with his life are his daughters. No one else.’
She opens her mouth to speak, and I hold up a hand. ‘Nope. And for you to even insinuate that I would have made a play for him if he’d still been married is the height of disrespect to both me and Zach.’
‘Oh, please,’ she says, rolling her eyes. This woman is fucking shameless, and not in a healthy, Alchemy-like way. More like in an entitled, stick-up-her-arse way. ‘Look at you. The guy didn’t stand a chance. But you don’t have what he needs in a partner. You’re a beautiful distraction. A little plaything, nothing more.’
In horror, I feel my eyes prick with tears, because fuck did she just hit me where it hurt. She’s only just homed in on the exact fucking word that started this entire thing between me and Zach.
I wanted him to use me to ease his own pain.
I wanted him to treat me like a plaything. Which he did, to our mutual gratification, until it became clear we were more than that.
Equally horrifying is that my ability to serve her up a suitably vicious retort has completely abandoned me right now. I know I’ll think of something truly excellent to say to her later, when I’m standing in front of my bathroom mirror, but right now I’ve got nothing.
I hate it when that happens.
‘You may think you make him happy,’ she hisses, ‘but I bet what he’s got with you is more like oblivion than a deep, lasting happiness.’
Oblivion’s definitely another word he’s used with me. Where the fuck is she getting this shit from? Is she psychic? She definitely doesn’t have the emotional intelligence to be psychic.
‘I mean, come on,’ she continues. ‘What do you think’s going to happen? He’s going to ask you to marry him and be the girls’ stepmother? You’re a baby—you have no idea what you’re doing.
‘Stella’s got her Eleven Plus exams coming up—you think the nanny’s equipped to deal with that?’ She takes my speechlessness as a no. ‘Of course she doesn’t. But Stella’s super bright. If she wants a chance at St Paul’s Girls or Godolphin, she needs someone helping her out with her tuition every evening. Zach doesn’t have that kind of bandwidth. Claire would have been all over it, and all over all the other stuff Stella should be doing to help her stand out through the admissions process. These schools are intensely competitive, you know.
‘And Nancy’s speech therapy’s been slipping too. She’ll have that lisp for life if Zach doesn’t pull his finger out and get those therapy sessions back up and running. He needs a grownup—a proper partner who can pull her weight in the household and knows how all this stuff works.’
It’s the self-conscious hair flick and the slight flush on her pale cheeks that have a lightbulb going off in my head.
OMFG.
She’s got her eye on him.
Holy fucking crap. Didn’t she just say she was his wife’s best friend?
I raise my eyebrows, because this bitch has just vaulted over the fucking line, and she’s about to get the full Madeleine Weir treatment. Weirdly, it’s her suggestion that Nancy is in any way substandard and needs to be knocked into shape according to some kind of insane West London standard that gets my goat more than any slurs on my suitability. What a fucking witch. Nancy is seven, for God’s sake. Don’t lots of seven-year-olds have lisps?
I put down my bellini and cross my arms. ‘Someone like you, you mean?’ I say.
Her flush deepens. ‘Not necessarily,’ she says in a fluster. ‘But neither does he need some gold-digging little whore who works at a sex club trying to get her claws into him without giving a toss about what’s best for him and the girls.’
Oh lady.
You are messing with the wrong fucking person.
This ends now.
‘I do social media for them,’ I say, my voice steely AF. ‘I’m not a sex worker, and if I was, it would be precisely none of your business. I also have not one but two trust funds, thanks to my parents’ messy marital situation, so get this straight. I’m independently wealthy, and I’m not interested in Zach’s big, fat bank balance.’ I lean in and deliver my parting shot. ‘I’m only interested in his big. Fat. Cock. Got it?’
I shoot her my most seductive, slutty smile, grab my bellini and sashay away before I detour to the loos.
I think I’m going to throw up.
I do actually throw up. I heave and heave until the toilet bowl is full of perfectly good bellini and parma ham. What a fucking waste.
Jesus fuck. My skin is clammy, and it feels like it’s crawling. As if that woman’s descent from plain insipid to passive-aggressive to actually aggressive has smeared its toxicity all over me.
When I stagger out of the stall, my reflection in the mirror does me no favours. I’m almost as pale as that witch Frances under my coral blush. The vigorous retching has made my mascara smudge, and there are dark circles under my eyes.
I set to work repairing the damage by wetting some loo roll under the tap. My handbag today is an iconic but useless tiny Chanel wallet-on-chain, so wet loo roll is the best I can do. It feels suitably cheap and nasty given how shitty Frances just made me feel.
My body’s still in shock from the hardcore vom.
My brain is still in shock from the hardcore attack on my character.
And somewhere that feels suspiciously like my heart is not just in shock but in actual pain. Because as ridiculous as some of her slurs were, accusing me of being a gold-digger, for instance, others hit their malicious target perfectly.
I’m a plaything.
Yeah, I make him happy when I’m riding his dick (happy is an understatement, by the way), but I won’t make him happy long term.
I have no experience tutoring kids for the Eleven Plus. I’m not interested in ferrying them around London for their fucking ridiculous tutoring and speech therapy and all that bullshit. To be honest, Frances sounds like she’s the most joyless type of mother possible if those are her priorities. Poor little Dippy, or whatever the fuck she’s called.
Imagine someone like her thinking she could make Zach happy, with her total lack of charisma and her helicopter parenting. From where I’m standing, Zach has done an unbelievably good job of maintaining an air of joy and light in his little family, however unspeakable the tragedy they’ve endured. Someone like her would suck the lifeblood out of it.
But maybe there’s a happy medium. Somewhere between me and Frances. Someone who could love him and help him with the heavy lifting.
Someone more like Claire, who’s dazzlingly beautiful and equally skilled at riding the man’s cock and raising his kids.
Because, let’s face it. That’s what he needs, right? I mean, who am I even kidding? For all the conversations we’ve had about us getting ‘serious’, whatever that means, and him letting the girls know we’re ‘dating’ (again, whatever that means), and for all the effort he’s made to make me feel welcome today, we’ve never had an actual proper conversation about the future.
And that’s because we both know there isn’t one. Not really. He doesn’t want a vacuous twenty-three-year-old raising his kids any more than I want to swap cocktail hour with Belle for witching hour with kids. I want my own babies. I want to come at motherhood gradually, to learn my babies from the moment I conceive them, rather than trying to inflict myself on a dead woman’s beautiful, bereaved little girls, no matter how easy it feels to be with them.
Because it is easy. And that’s the weird thing—it feels too easy, almost. Aside from a little light roasting about his age, they didn’t give their dad any trouble about him dating me. They’ve accepted me from the word go. I genuinely enjoy hanging out with them, and I genuinely feel like I have a lot in common with them. Being with them is no chore. None at all.
But that’s not parenting. I’m bright enough to know that. I’ve been doing the easy stuff, the fun stuff that an aunt or a babysitter gets to do. I haven’t done any of the heavy lifting, and I can’t imagine Zach entrusting me with any of that.
Not that I want to.
But it would be nice to know he considered me capable.
I mean, I haven’t even spent the night yet. That could be a total shitshow. I know he’s been easing me, and them, in gently, but maybe this tiny, baby relationship of ours is far more ring-fenced than even I thought it would be.
I’ve always known what I am to Zach. I’m more than a plaything, but I really don’t think I’m any more than a palate cleanser. Someone who was there at the right time to help him restore his confidence, his levity. And I think I’ve done that. He’s blossomed under my lavish, consistent attention. Zach isn’t the haunted guy I eye-fucked on Rafe’s balcony. Not anymore. And that’s a great gift to have given him.
But I have a horrible, horrible feeling this relationship of ours has an expiry date. And that date is probably around the time someone like Frances bends his ear and slips their poison in one too many times.
Once I’ve pulled myself together and manically chewed some gum, I reapply some lip gloss. I toss my hair over my shoulders, I stick my tits out, and I go looking for my boyfriend, who looks so fucking hot today, by the way, that I could weep. He’s hot and amazing and good. He is such a fucking decent guy, and that’s the hardest thing of all.
That’s the shittiest, most heartbreaking part, because I’ve never wanted to make someone happy like I want to make Zach French happy. But maybe there’s only a particular type of happiness I can give him, and maybe it’s not actually happiness at all.
Maybe it’s oblivion.
I press myself into his side and tuck my hand through the crook of his arm. He smiles down at me, and I know if I could bask in the warmth of that smile for the rest of my life, I’d be the happiest woman on earth.
‘You okay?’ he asks.
I squeeze his bicep tight and flash him my most dazzling smile.
‘I’m fantastic,’ I lie.
I don’t leave his side for the rest of the afternoon. Because if we have an expiration date, if this perfect, easy, glorious, Technicolor thing we have is temporary, I’m making every minute count.
