about leaving? After you got left the cottage? And all the other stuff? I mean, surely you don’t have to work, do you?’
Dido shrugs. ‘I suppose not. And there are times I’d just like to chuck it all in and spend all day at the stables with Spangles before he cops it. But, ultimately, I have nothing else. But you – now you have everything. Everything that kitchens can’t give you.’
Libby smiles. There is a truth to this.
It’s not just the money. It’s not just the money at all.
It’s the people whom she now belongs to, the family who’ve encircled her so completely. And it’s the person she discovered she was underneath all the neat piles and careful planning. She was never really that person. She’d made herself into that person to counterbalance her mother’s inconsistencies. To fit in at school. To fit in with a group of friends whose values she never really shared, not really, not deep down inside. There is more to her than arms’ length friendships and stupidly proscriptive Tinder requirements. She is the product of better people than her fantasy birth parents, the graphic designer and the fashion PR with the sports car and the tiny dogs. How unimaginative she’d been.
She presses refresh on her phone, absent-mindedly.
She looks again. A stupid number sits there. A number that makes no sense whatsoever. It has too many zeros, too many everythings. She turns her phone to face Dido. ‘Oh. My. God.’
Didi covers her face with her hands and gasps. Then she turns to face the front of the café. ‘Waiter,’ she says. ‘Two bottles of your finest Dom Pérignon. And thirteen lobsters. And make it snappy.’
There is no waiter of course and the people at the table next to them throw them a strange look.
‘My friend’, says Dido, ‘has just won the lottery.’
‘Oh,’ says the woman. ‘Lucky you!’
‘You know,’ says Dido, turning back to her. ‘You really don’t have to go back to work after this. It’s your birthday. And you’ve just been given eleventy squillion pounds. You could, if you wanted, take the rest of the day off.’
Libby smiles, screws up her paper napkin and drops it on the plastic tray. ‘No,’ she says. ‘No way. I’m no quitter. And besides, I’m pretty sure I left some paperwork slightly askew.’
Dido smiles at her. ‘Come on then,’ she said, ‘three and a half more hours of normality. Let’s get it over with, shall we?’
67
Lucy has the flat to herself for another hour. She uses it to have a bath, to paint her fingernails, to dry her hair with a dryer and make it sit neatly over her shoulders, to moisturise, to put on make-up. She still doesn’t take these things for granted. It has been a year since Henry found her in the house in Cheyne Walk, since he brought Serenity to them, since they were all reunited. For a year Lucy has lived with Henry in his immaculate flat in Marylebone, where she has slept on a double bed under soft cotton sheets and had nothing more to do with her days than walk the dog and prepare delicious meals. She and Clemency meet up once a month and drink champagne and talk about their children and music and Henry’s idiosyncrasies and anything, in fact, other than what happened to them both when they were young. They will never be as close as they once were, but they are still the best of friends.
Marco is thirteen now and enrolled at a trendy private school in Regent’s Park, which Henry has been paying for and where ‘everyone vapes and takes ket’ apparently. He has lost his French accent completely and, as he says, ‘I now identify as a Londoner.’
Stella is six and in year one of a nice primary school in Marylebone where she has two best friends who are both called Freya.
Yesterday Lucy took the tube to Chelsea and stood outside the house. The hoarding has been taken down and the for-sale sign outside has been swapped for a sold sign. Soon the house will be alive with the sound of drills and hammers as it is taken apart and put back together again to suit the tastes and needs of another family. Soon, someone else will be calling it home and they will never know, never suspect for even a moment the truth about what happened within those walls all those years ago, how four children were imprisoned and broken and then released into the