Her sister
Perhaps it’s the curse of the Cowan siblings.
Doomed to be unlikeable, each in their own way.
Augie is infuriatingly aloof. Clara is as single-minded as a steamroller.
And Cee? People – men, mainly – call her cold.
Then they leave her out in it. In Copenhagen she was banished to a freezing courtyard to dissect partridge carcasses with numb, trembling fingers.
She could see the warm orange glow of the restaurant, diners closing their eyes over plates of the best food in the world.
She knew, even then, that she belonged inside.
Here she stands, in her own kitchen, in the restaurant that she built, if not with her own hands, then with her own force of will.
Those hands are burnt and scarred, nails brutally short and knuckles scrubbed dry.
But they’re steady, as she places them on the stainless-steel counter and bows her head to the silence.
Reservations have been dwindling. She’s been following the news, and she knows that they may not even be able to open tonight.
What will they do with all these ingredients?
Her mind begins to tally up the losses, but there is no time to dwell.
The harsh sound of a phone vibrating against metal brings her back.
It will be Harry, calling her home to help deal with a crisis.
One of the children sick, or injured, or throwing a tantrum too large for a single pair of hands.
It still baffles Cee, that she’s a parent, this same Cee whose dinners regularly consist of sriracha piped on to leftover roast potatoes straight from the fridge after a late shift.
When she’d finally opened the restaurant, when they’d started trying for a third because Cee couldn’t bear a house filled with only boys, it was Harry who’d packed in his job to become a house-proud househusband.
It tells you a lot about a man, to see his face when he watches a woman eat.
Other men were disgusted or intimidated when Cee would prise apart a chicken carcass with her bare hands, slurping bits of cartilage as she went.
Not Harry. He was just as hungry as her.
He loved that she was fierce. He’d once called her a tiger with a soft belly, tracing his fingers along the seam of her underwear as he’d said it.
She said she’d stab him with her chef’s knife if he ever called her belly soft again.
But she hadn’t moved his hand. This might surprise someone like Clara, who tends to forget that other people have their own interior lives.
She’d never imagine how voracious Cee’s appetite can be.
Silence. Cee washes the knife, then her hands. She tightens her ponytail with one elastic band, then another. The phone starts ringing again, and she already knows that he will answer it this time. Clara has no one else.
‘What’s wrong?’ Cee says, on the second ring.
Cee has never been one for going overboard.
She values simplicity, clean lines and sharp edges.
She’ll subtract one ingredient from every new dish she comes up with, then subtract one ingredient more.
You could say the same for siblings, and conversation.
There’s meaning in the words that aren’t said.
‘Wait,’ Cee says, in response to Clara’s silence. ‘Is something actually wrong?’
‘Can you come over?’ Clara says. Her voice is croaky.
‘Are you ill?’
‘Just come.’
And Cee doesn’t need to hear any more than that.
She moves at pace, sheathing her knives and disinfecting the surfaces, turning off the harsh strip lights and slamming the heavy metal door behind her.
In the taxi, she winds down the window, because it’s what she’s been told to do.
They say to wash your hands for thirty seconds at a time, a death sentence for her already-raw knuckles.
They say to be wary of people with coughs, to wear a mask, to not touch anything on the tube.
I have three children, she wants to say.
Licking railings is practically a vocation for them.
So she worries about her sons, and her restaurant, and her sister, and everything else.
Cee likes to be in control, and the entire world is spinning out of it.
The taxi moves quickly towards Clara’s rented flat, up Shaftesbury Avenue, past Tottenham Court Road and into Bloomsbury.
She stares out across empty streets, a city in the process of shutting down.
‘Hello?’ Cee says, into the Ring doorbell outside Clara’s flat in Islington. No answer. ‘Are you serious? You asked me to come.’
Cee rubs her thumb and forefinger together, wonders who else has pressed this doorbell.
She squirts some sanitiser into her hands, swears under her breath.
She hadn’t even realised her sister was back in town.
They’re both so stubborn, both so focused on their own things.
It’s only your third baby. It’s only your second film.
Clara has become more flighty and fickle than ever.
They’ve fought, about Clara’s self-sabotage, about Cee’s self-righteousness.
Cee feels as furious as anyone at Clara’s insistence on burning bridges just for something to do.
And yet, she feels guilty, too. With Seb, Clara had stabilised.
The three siblings had finally found some even ground.
Now Seb is gone, and the stabilisers are off, and Clara’s cries for help have once again been falling on deaf ears.
Cee should have listened. They’re Cowans, after all.
If the world doesn’t like them, they have to look out for each other.
A click, and the door to Clara’s building opens.
Cee steps inside, finds it chilly. The walls are bare.
The only other flat is dead silent. She climbs the stairs, sees that Clara’s door is already open.
Inside, another ghost town. Expensive art on the walls.
Furniture that came with the place. A kitchen that has never been used.
Cee traces a finger along the spotless hobs, peeks around the corner at Clara’s unmade bed.
‘Hello?’ she shouts.
A quiet reply from the en suite bathroom. ‘I’m in here.’
Cee follows her sister’s voice, preparing her scarf as an impromptu face-covering, worried that Clara is ill, not knowing what illness means right now and whether she’ll be alright, whether any of them are going to be alright.
The bathroom door is ajar, and Cee pushes it open with her foot.
Clara is on the floor. She’s wearing a creased set of silk pyjamas, and she’s sitting next to the toilet, folded in on herself, wet-eyed and wide-eyed and staring up at her sister like she doesn’t know what to do.
‘What is it?’ Cee says.
And that’s when she sees the pregnancy test.