coat, which he handed to me without a word.
I pulled myself into a sitting position and wriggled into it. ‘Thank you.’
He sat beside me. In a T-shirt. I tried not to study him, to search his face for similarities to Patrick, to think about the secret Ginny and Patrick had kept from me for all these years.
‘I don’t think Phoebe meant for so many people to come. It was sort of one of those things where she invited a few people and then they wanted to bring plus-ones and it got a bit out of hand.’
For a brief moment, I just basked in the rare sensation of someone defending Phoebe. It was tempting to dismiss it under the banner of the whole ‘teenage inability to predict what a consequence might be’, but I couldn’t let myself. I had to accept that my daughter was on the verge of getting into big trouble that might be beyond my capability of fixing. What if she got pregnant and wanted to keep the baby? What if she didn’t and had to go through an abortion? What if she got addicted to cocaine? What would that do to her brain? What would be next? Heroin? And these were tip-of-the-iceberg worries whirring round and round my brain, stoking up a sense of impending disaster as they went.
I turned to Victor. ‘Tonight’s not just a one-off, is it though? We’ve had the shoplifting, the car accident, never mind the video that went viral round the school last year.’
I watched him out of the corner of my eye. He displayed no curiosity on that front, so someone had obviously filled him in.
‘I don’t think I can pretend any more that we haven’t got a huge problem on our hands.’ I sighed.
I was finding it hard to speak to him without the image of Patrick and Ginny in bed together clouding my thinking. I tried to focus on the practical problem of what we did with the news that Patrick was Victor’s dad. Gather the whole family together and announce it casually over the Crunchy Nut Cornflakes just before school? Let Patrick take Victor away on his own so I didn’t have to be party to the father/son reunion? I conjured up a vision of myself at home, with Phoebe nagging to be allowed to go to a party, while Patrick clinked champagne glasses with Victor, promising to make up for lost time, stepping forward into a relationship I’d never share in the same way. A relationship that would always remind me that the two people who loved me most had slept together, lied – at least by omission – then produced a legacy that there was no escaping, no bundling back into the ‘yeah we made a mistake but that was years ago and we never need to consider it again’ cupboard.
A burst of pain shot through me. Could I be big enough to get past this? What if I couldn’t? A picture of our cottage with a For Sale sign poking out beyond the old-fashioned tea roses by the gate flashed into my head. Throwing Patrick out wasn’t going to improve anything with Phoebe. Nor was springing a half-brother on her, when she was already a rebel without a cause. God knows how bad it could get with a cause.
Victor had Ginny’s gift for sitting waiting for the other person to say more than they’d intended. I wasn’t falling for that one. And even though I wanted to rant and curse about how she’d stitched me up good and proper, I was relieved to discover I wasn’t such a horrible person that I felt her son should have to hear it.
I thought of all the times Ginny had come to stay here with Victor, the holidays we’d had camping in France, the hundreds of times I’d happily crashed off to bed, leaving Patrick and Ginny drinking wine and chatting downstairs. Had she been biding her time waiting to tell him? Secretly hoping to lure him away? Sitting there jealous of everything I had? I couldn’t make sense of it. Couldn’t understand what Ginny’s thought process might have been. The temptation to turn to Victor and say, ‘Did your mother ever mention Patrick as an old boyfriend?’ hovered so far over the edge of my lips that I barely dared breathe in case I blew the words out.
Victor cracked his knuckles. ‘Loads of girls at my old school were a bit wild, but their parents didn’t care,