where Laurel hears him greeting his daughter with the words, “Good morning, my remarkable girl, and how are you today?”
She continues up the stairs and takes a long slow shower in her lover’s en-suite bathroom, feeling a peculiarity and wrongness that she cannot quite locate the cause of.
Later that day Laurel goes to Hanna’s flat to clean it. Other people might find the thirty pounds pinioned beneath a vase of flowers on the table slightly peculiar. Laurel is aware that being paid in cash to clean her daughter’s flat is not entirely normal, but all families have their idiosyncrasies and this is just one of theirs. As it is, every week she puts the thirty pounds into a special bank account that she will one day use to spoil her as-yet-unborn grandchildren with treats and days out.
She folds up the notes and slots them into her purse. Then she does the detective sweep of Hanna’s flat that she has begun to do since Hanna stopped sleeping here every night. She remains unconvinced by Hanna’s explanation of late nights and sleepovers, this sudden rush of parties and good times. That is simply not the daughter she knows. Hanna has never liked having fun.
The flowers are of particular interest: not a hastily bought bunch of Sainsbury’s tulips or Stargazer lilies, but a bouquet. Dusky roses, baby’s breath, lilac hyacinths, and eucalyptus. The stems are still spiraled together in the middle where the twine would have tied them together.
In the kitchen she takes out the cleaning products and eyes the work surfaces, looking for clues. Hanna was not home the night before, as evidenced once again by the lack of cereal bowl and makeup detritus. The problem, Laurel can see, is that if there is a man, then Hanna is spending all her time at his house so there will be no evidence to find at her house. She sighs and leans down to the swing bin to pull out the half-full bag, which, as always, weighs nothing, as Hanna has no life. She scrunches it down to tie the top in a knot and notices the crackle of cellophane. Quickly she puts her hand into the bag and locates the flower packaging. She pulls it out and unfurls it, and there is a tiny card taped to it, a message scrawled on it in scruffy florist’s handwriting:
Can’t wait to see you tomorrow. Please don’t be late!
I love you so much,
T x
Laurel holds the card between her thumb and forefinger and stares at it for a while. Then she shoves it back into the bin bag and ties a knot in it. There, she thinks, there it is. Hanna has moved on. Hanna has a man. But why, she wonders, is she not talking to me about it?
18
Laurel has not seen Paul since Ellie’s funeral. There they had stood side by side; Paul had not brought Bonny and had not even asked if he could.
Yes, he is a good man.
A good man in every way.
He had held her up that day when she felt her legs weaken slightly beneath her at the sight of the box going through the curtains to the sound of “Somewhere Only We Know” by Keane. He’d passed her cups of tea at his mother’s house afterward, and then found her in a corner of the garden and lured her back into the house with the promise of a large Baileys and ice, her all-time favorite treat. They’d sat together after everyone else had gone and rolled the ice around the insides of their glasses and made each other laugh, and Laurel’s feelings had warped and contorted and turned into something both light and dark, golden and gray. He hadn’t once checked his phone or worried about being late for Bonny and they’d left his mother’s house together at ten o’clock, weaving slightly toward the minicabs that rumbled and growled on the street outside. She let him hold her deep inside his arms, her face pressed hard against his chest, the clean, familiar smell of him, the softness of his old Jermyn Street shirt, and she’d almost, almost turned her face toward him and kissed him.
She’d woken the following day feeling as though her world had been upended and reordered in every conceivable way. And she hadn’t spoken to him since.
But now she feels as though all that ambiguity has melted away. She is a clean slate and she can face him once more. So when she gets back