CHAPTER 78
Two days later, mother and daughter holding two boxes of Dishes leftovers walk through their front door.
Dishes kept its Michelin star, and Simone returned to the kitchen yesterday.
Lucy is taking up her place at RADA next week, living in halls – somehow.
She hardly lost any time at all, despite their period in Texas feeling endless.
They returned to England almost as if they’d never left.
Changed, but only internally. Next week, Moody is flying over to sample their menu. Pro bono.
Damien is in bed already, the house shut up and dark but warm.
‘I’m going straight to bed,’ says Lucy. ‘I’m going to have the leftovers for breakfast.’
‘It’s beef carpaccio!’
‘Even better. With builder’s tea in the morning,’ Lucy says.
‘Night,’ Simone says, there in the kitchen, the tiles cool beneath her feet.
Somewhere one of their windows is open, blowing through October air, but they won’t close it.
Simone doesn’t feel any fear. Maybe because the air is cold and smoked and damp, not dry and hot and Texan, maybe because it’s their house, and nothing wicked ever happened here.
Maybe it’s just that they have had all the bad luck possible.
Or maybe it’s because they are free, because they are safe.
‘Sleep well,’ Lucy tells her, and then she leans forward, just slightly, places her hand around her mother’s wrist, then leaves.
And Simone nods, saying nothing in response.
Not needing to. Simone turns left at the top of the stairs and Lucy right, to her old childhood bedroom covered in film posters with curling edges, held up by old Blu-Tack.
She closes the door softly behind her, one click, and Simone thinks that, in a few short days, she will be gone.
Starting RADA late, but allowed to – mitigating circumstances – and rightly so.
Simone watches the closed door for several moments, until the strip of light underneath it goes from bright yellow to a dim orange, and then, finally, to black.