courtesy call,” Eli says. “My company is opening a new unit down the street.”
“Oh?” Scarlet says, distracted, thinking she must have imagined it.
He nods, hesitating for a second or two. “It’s a branch of Starbucks.”
Scarlet drops his hand.
8:57 a.m.—Liyana
When Liyana sinks into a bathtub of hot, perfumed water, she feels something approaching happiness, if only for an hour. It doesn’t begin to touch the joy of the swimming pool, but then it doesn’t evoke the same sorrow. The wet heat of the bath soaks up the loneliness that has permeated her skin since her mother died. By rights, she shouldn’t feel so lonely, having a girlfriend, good friends, Aunt Nya. And yet, when her mother died, Liyana felt she lost a lot more than her only parent. It was as if Isisa Chiweshe, reluctant to let go, had snatched away an essential piece of her daughter and taken it with her into the afterlife, leaving Liyana eternally trying to find this missing piece. The mission being all the harder because she doesn’t know what she’s looking for.
Liyana slides under the water, watching bubbles of breath pop on the surface.
A knock on the door. A muffled voice. “May I come in?”
Liyana wraps fingers around the cool porcelain and pulls herself reluctantly from the warm water. Droplets glisten on her hair, three inches of Afro springing free into the air.
“Come in.”
The bathroom door creaks open and Aunt Nyasha shuffles across the heated marble floor, still in slippers and silk dressing gown, to perch on the edge of the loo. Her aunt, who—with her large eyes, full lips, and hair twisted into an intricate maze of cornrows, like an elaborate tattoo etched into her scalp—is undeniably radiant, is this morning dulled.
“What’s up?” Liyana asks, impatient to submerge herself again.
Nyasha studies her slippered feet. “There’s something . . .”
“Yes?”
“Well, vinye”—Nyasha fiddles with the cap on Liyana’s shampoo bottle—“I’m in . . . well . . . a bit of a bind.”
Liyana suppresses a sigh, longing for silence and stillness again. “Can’t it wait till breakfast? I won’t be long.”
Nyasha nods but doesn’t move.
“All right then.” Liyana sinks down under the water, her knees and nipples still exposed to the chill air.
Her aunt knocks the bottle off the edge of the bath. It rolls behind the loo.
Liyana rises. “Okay, what’s going on?”
“I’m . . . financially, we’re . . .”
“Oh, spit it out.”
Her aunt takes a deep breath. “We’re broke.”
Liyana frowns. “An interesting perspective—I think most people would argue we’re indecently rich.”
Nyasha gets down on her hands and knees, searching for the shampoo bottle.
“Nya?”
Her aunt looks up, bottle in hand.
“What exactly do you mean by broke?”
“It means we don’t have any money.”
Liyana narrows her eyes. “Yes, I know what it means. I just don’t know why you’re saying it.”
Nyasha sits back down on the loo, returning the bottle to the rim of the bath. “I’m saying it because my accountant called, and it seems to be true.”
“What? No, that can’t . . .” Liyana longs to submerge herself again, to hide beneath the still quiet of the water. “But how does that mean . . . ? We can’t be—this house alone must be worth a fortune.”
“Yes, it is.” Nyasha circles a slippered foot. “Which is why I, um, remortgaged it a while ago.”
“You what? Why?”
“Well, it seems that we . . . Well, we’ve been . . . living a little beyond our means.”
“Oh?” Liyana is tempted to object to her aunt’s use of the plural but decides to let it go. “Go on.”
Her aunt doesn’t look up. “We’re, um, in a bit of debt.”
“How much?”
Her aunt, always so sculpted, so poised—a rock smoothed into shape by the ocean over a thousand years—looks as if she’s suddenly crumbling. She mumbles.
“Nya?”
Finally, Nyasha meets Liyana’s eye. “Once we sell the house . . . After that, it’ll be a hair under, um . . . six hundred and eighty-six thousand pounds, or thereabouts.”
Liyana sits up so fast that the bathroom floor is sluiced with bathwater. She looks at her aunt, unable to respond.
“I’m sorry, vinye.” Nyasha studies her feet again. “I—I went a little off the rails when he who shall not be named left me for that . . . infant. I might have developed, well, it seems I sort of . . .”
“What? Spit it out!”
Nya coughs. “Well, I suppose I channelled my feelings, suppressed my feelings, with a bit of”—she tightens her dressing gown—“A gambling habit.” A flush of shame colours her cheeks.