was too late. “Would Melissa have some? Is she still in bed? Or did she make it to work?”
“She’s gone,” I said.
“My goodness. I’m impressed.” He poured himself the rest of the coffee, carefully, wrist wobbling. “What time did you get to bed?”
I considered just not telling him. He loved Melissa; it would break his heart. I could probably get away with it for a day or two, come up with reasons why she wasn’t home in the evenings—stocktaking, sick mother—and by that time I might have some clue what I was going to do about all of this . . . I didn’t have the energy. “No,” I said. “She’s gone gone. Permanently.”
“What?” Hugo’s head came around sharply and he stared at me. “Why?”
“It’s complicated.”
After a long moment he put down the coffeemaker, added a dash of milk to his cup and brought it to the table. He sat down opposite me—hands folded around the cup, dressing gown falling open to show flannel pajamas buttoned up wrong, unblinking gray eyes magnified by his glasses—and waited.
Once I started talking I couldn’t stop. It all came out, in a jumble—my memory of the night was pretty hazy, dislocated pieces resurfacing out of any order as I talked, but the gist of it came through clearly enough. The only thing I left out was that last step, that final revelation. Probably Hugo—steadily sipping his coffee, saying nothing—would figure it out, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it out loud.
“So”—I was babbling, I had said everything at least twice—“that was when they went home, or wherever, right after that? And I thought Melissa would be upstairs, but . . . I tried to ring her, I haven’t tried yet this morning, but now I don’t know if I even should—like obviously I want to fix things, but I mean, I don’t know what’s going to happen but maybe she’s actually better off not being around for it . . .”
I finally managed to shut up. In the immense silence—staring down into my untouched coffee—it dawned on me, too late, what a terrible, shitty thing I had done by throwing all this into Hugo’s lap. He only had a couple of months, couldn’t I have found a way not to fuck them up with my godawful mess? I couldn’t look at him; I was afraid I would see him broken, face stunned and crumpled, tears streaming. I kept my head down and scraped with my thumbnail at a nonexistent stain on the table: soft grayed wood, the place where the grain curved around a dark spot to make a shape like a wide-mouthed cartoon ghost. All the times I’d sat here, toast and jam, geography projects, drunken parties, and now this.
“Right,” Hugo said, putting down his cup with a bang. His voice startled me into looking up: it had the old fullness and authority I remembered from when I was a kid, oak-solid, the voice that had always stopped us in our tracks and put an instant end to our bickering or wrecking. “This has gone far enough.”
I couldn’t say anything. All of a sudden I was humiliatingly close to tears.
“Don’t waste another thought on it. I’ll sort it out.” He leaned a palm on the table and pushed himself to standing. “But first, we both need something to eat. We’re going to have an omelet—yes, yes you are, I know you don’t want it but you’ll thank me afterwards. We are going to enjoy it in peace. And then you’re going to go take a shower, and I’m going to deal with this mess before it gets completely out of hand.”
I knew it couldn’t be done, and yet a part of me couldn’t help believing him. Tall and shadow-faced against the flood of brightness through the windows, hand crooked around his cane, hair straggling on his shoulders and robe flowing, he looked like a figure from a tarot card, dense with omens. I still couldn’t talk. I wiped the heel of my hand across my eyes.
Hugo hobbled to the fridge and started taking things out: eggs, butter, milk. “With ham and cheese, I think, and spinach . . . Probably what you really need is a dirty great fry-up, but we don’t have the materials.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I really am.”
He ignored that. “Come here and chop this. I don’t trust my hand.”
I went obediently to the counter, found a knife and started on the ham. The painkillers were kicking in;