Chapter 9: The Morning After
I slept four hours and woke before five.
The house was dark and quiet.
I made tea and sat at the kitchen table without turning on the lights, just the grey early morning coming through the window, and thought about what Emory had said before he and Jessamine left.
*There are things that are going to have to change.*
It was not enough.
I knew that.
It was the beginning of a conversation that would take months, possibly years, and might not go the way any of us needed it to.
But it was the first thing he had said all week that had not been coached.
Verity had stayed the night.
She was in the spare room, and when I heard her door open at half past six I put another cup on.
She came into the kitchen in her socks and her mother's old cardigan — she had worn that cardigan since university, the dark green one with the fraying left cuff — and she sat down across from me and wrapped both hands around the mug.
"Did you sleep?" I asked.
"A little." She looked into the mug.
"Daniel and I talked for a long time after you went to bed."
"How is he?"
"Embarrassed.
Mainly that he ever agreed to meet her at all." She shook her head.
"He kept saying he should have told me immediately."
"He was trying to protect you."
"I know." She was quiet for a moment.
"Mum.
Do you think Emory will actually do anything?
Or was last night just — talking?"
I thought about that carefully.
"I think your brother saw things last night that he can't unsee.
The same way I saw things at the party that I couldn't unsee." I paused.
"Whether he acts on them, I don't know yet.
But I don't think he can go back to not knowing."
Verity nodded slowly.
"She's still there," she said.
"In his house.
Tonight she'll still be there."
"Yes."
"And she might talk him around again."
"She might try," I said.
"But Emory watched that video six times last night, Verity.
He said so himself.
Six times before he could make himself come here.
That's not a man who doesn't know what he saw."
She looked up.
Her eyes were tired but steadier than I had expected.
"The texts she threatened me with," she said.
"The ones she claimed were from Daniel."
"Yes."
"Do you think she actually has something?
Or was she bluffing?"
"I think she's capable of either." I set my cup down.
"I also think that if she had something real, she would have used it instead of threatening to use it."
Verity was quiet.
"I keep thinking," she said finally, "about what she said last night.
About never getting an engagement party." She traced the rim of the mug with one finger.
"I feel like I should have noticed.
That we should have noticed."
"We didn't know what we weren't being told."
"Still."
"Verity." I waited until she looked at me.
"Understanding why someone does something painful doesn't make the pain smaller.
And it doesn't make what she did to you acceptable.
You are allowed to be hurt and angry and to need things to actually change.
Those two things can exist at the same time."
She was quiet for a long time.
Then she said, "I still want the wedding."
Something loosened in my chest.
"Good," I said.
"I want it with string lights and a cake and — I want another chocolate fountain." Her mouth curved slightly.
"A better one.
One nobody can reach."
A small laugh came out of me before I could stop it.
She smiled properly at that, and for a moment she looked very young — twenty-seven and also seventeen and also about seven years old in the back garden asking me if the roses were going to be all right after a frost.
They always were.
I had always told her so.
"There will be another party," I said.
"We'll do it properly."
She reached across the table and covered my hand with hers.
The fraying cuff of the cardigan fell over our fingers.
"Thank you," she said.
"For not going quiet."
I squeezed her hand and didn't say anything.
May you like
Because she knew.
She had always known.
