teeth on edge. Julie’s affection for Cordelia, the child mannequin who had once stood in the window of Sophy’s boutique, was just another problem to be tackled when life settled into a new normality, whenever that would be.
Was Luke sleeping, she wondered, or was he also lying awake and tormented by thoughts of their broken marriage? He had only ever laid his hands on her in tenderness and passion, yet when he walked from their home, she felt as if her body had been bruised beyond healing. He had never betrayed her with another woman yet when she uncovered his lies, she was as duped and humiliated as any wife who had ever been deceived by an unfaithful husband. He adored their two daughters yet he had recklessly steered their future onto the rocks.
She continued staring at the ceiling. Like palmistry, it seemed as if her two lives – the one that had been heedlessly destroyed, and the new one that was being forced on her – could be read in the lines. The crack that ran in a straight direction until it broke into a tangled network was the present. There had to be another line, a newer one, and she eventually found it. This one had the sharpness of a recent fracture; a quavering uncertainty in its run towards the centre of the ceiling. Her future. It hadn’t taken shape as yet, but the forward momentum was unstoppable, and the past, where happiness once reigned, was seen for what it was: a deluded ideal filled with false promises and empty kisses.
Chapter Three
Isobel
On the evening before he left them, her father mowed the front lawn for the last time. Isobel sat on the garden wall and watched him making lines of light and shade. Daisies spun in the air as the blades of the mower sliced through their fragile stems and the twilight air was filled with the scent of crushed grass. She wondered how something severed could smell so sweet.
He had been sitting tall and straight in an armchair on the day everything changed. He hardly spoke at all when Sophy ― sitting just as stiffly, but away from him, far, far away, her arms tucked against her waist, her fingers locked together ― said that they, their parents, no longer loved each other. They had made a decision to live separate lives.
Julie, huddled close to Isobel on the sofa, kept asking questions like, ‘Why can’t you just forgive and forget, the way you’re always asking me and Issy to do when we fight?’ She squeezed Isobel’s hand and said, ‘Tell them, Issy. Tell them it’s easy to say sorry.’
Isobel held her sister’s hand just as tightly but she didn’t plead with them. The sad, set expressions on their faces told her that nothing she or Julie said would change their minds.
‘But why… why are you leaving us?’ she had asked her father that night. Unable to sleep, she had gone downstairs to find Peeper. Her cat normally slept in the kitchen but she needed his fluffy warmth beside her. No longer sitting straight, her father was slumped over the kitchen table, his face in his hands.
‘Oh, my darling girl,’ he said when he saw her. He held out his arms to her and his mouth twisted in an attempt to smile. Ignoring him, she picked up Peeper, who nuzzled his nose into her neck and calmed her down. She was then able to sit down opposite him and listen as he explained what it was like to have a gambling addiction. That was what he called what he did, his terrible need to spend money and gamble his family’s happiness away.
She had always thought addiction was about drugs. It was about drinking too much or eating disorders. How was spending money an addiction? He said it was an addiction when the money didn’t belong to him. When winning was never enough to make him stop. Their mother had sold Kid’s Chic to help pay his debts and he no longer owned his business, Kingston Fountains, where he used to design incredible water fountains for gardens and parks.
He was going to a special place called The Oasis of Hope to be cured from his addiction. Afterwards, he would begin again, only in a new way, and be a better father to them.
Isobel had no memory of what she said to him. All she could remember afterwards was the hurt on his face, as if her words were bullets