favourite. A horrible combination of soaring relief and bleak misery meant that this was now out of her hands.
Three sharp raps on the front window made her jump.
‘Knock, knock!’ It was Johnny.
She hadn’t been doing anything bad, but she was shaking as she went to the front door.
‘God bless all here.’ Johnny pretended to remove a cap, mimicking an old-fashioned farmer.
‘Hi … ah, hello. What’s up?’
‘Can we talk a bit of business?’ He went to the living room. ‘Small bit of business. Tiny. Nearly invisible.’ He seemed slightly manic. ‘About the Airbnb thing. I know, Cara, you offer to do this out of the goodness of your heart and I pester you on your weekend away.’
‘No good deed goes unpunished,’ she managed to say.
‘That’s it. So look, just a simple change: instead of the income going straight into our current account, can it go into a new account? I’ve already opened it, all the info here.’ He slid the pages towards her.
She scanned it. The account was in Johnny’s name alone. Every other account, every other bill she’d seen, was jointly shared between Johnny and Jessie.
‘Will the mortgage be paid out of this same account?’ That made sense, to keep the whole enterprise self-contained.
‘Ah, no. Who knows how this Airbnb thing will work out? What if there isn’t enough income to cover the mortgage every month?’
The mortgage was tiny. Airbnb in central Dublin was booming.
‘Let’s try it this way,’ he said. ‘At least for a while.’
Cara was still grappling to understand: the mortgage on Johnny’s apartment was to be paid from the account he shared with his wife, but the income was to go into a new account that was solely in his name? Maybe Johnny picked up on her confusion. ‘It’s actually for Jessie.’
That made zero sense.
‘Just in case,’ he said.
Just in case of what?
FORTY-THREE
The house was ridiculous. New, really upscale, like a gaff in a movie. Everything was blue or creamy-coloured and full-on discreet luxury. What if they spilt something?
The kitchen. Jesus. A high-spec wonderland with an icemaker, a boiling-water tap, a literal Gaggia coffee machine that you’d see in an authentic Italian coffee bar …
It was too much.
Liam baggsed the master bedroom, an expanse of white and dove-grey. Nell stood anxiously at the doorway, eyeing the walk-in wardrobe and massive bathroom. ‘Shouldn’t we give it to Ferdia? Jessie’s paying for this, and he’s her son?’
‘Him? He’s only a kid!’
‘Ooookay.’ This room was bigger than the others. She could annex a corner for her work and still leave plenty of space for Liam. ‘Is it okay if I use the dressing table to draw at?’
‘Sure,’ he said.
She hefted in her box of tools and materials and laid out the crude little models she’d hastily fashioned from MDF. This presentation on Monday would be the shoddiest she’d ever done …
‘You coming for a swim?’
She looked at him steadily. ‘Working. Enjoy your swim.’
With an over-elaborate quizzical look, he left and she exhaled. Right, let’s do this. She sat cross-legged, focusing on the challenges of the job, but just as her head began to burrow a pathway into them, Jessie arrived, glass of wine in hand. She stood up. ‘Jessie. I’m so sorry about Ferdia –’
‘Stop. Who wants to be hanging around a station, waiting for an Irish train? Ed has gone for them. All grand.’
‘If you’re sure? And, really, Jessie …’ She was incoherent with gratitude and mortification. ‘This house. There was no need, we could have slept in a tent.’
‘Ha-ha, you young people. No, we need a bolthole. This weekend is going to be brutal.’
‘You mean Canice and Rose?’
‘Yeah, but especially Rose. She’s always making out that I had Johnny on the go at the same time as Rory. Which I totally hadn’t!’
‘Of course.’ It was none of Nell’s business.
However, she liked Jessie. She was a bit insane, her and her extravagance, and they didn’t have much in common, but she was basically sound.
‘No, seriously, Nell. I really totally didn’t. I’m a stone-cold Goody-Two-Shoes. Even if I’d fancied Johnny, which I didn’t, I’d have been too repressed to do anything about it. But if I said to Rose, “Actually I didn’t even notice Johnny when Rory was alive because I was so in love with Rory”, she wouldn’t like that either. She told me she wasn’t happy that Johnny was my second choice.’
Nell nodded as sympathetically as she could. Jessie, caught up in righteous defensiveness, barely noticed. ‘You can’t fecking win with Rose. Don’t even try, Nell, that’s my