Chapter Thirty-Two #2
I wait, leg jigging, for half an hour, but my phone screen remains black and it is with resignation that I navigate to a delivery app and order duck breasts (the centerpiece for a recipe J supposedly loves) and cake mix.
I don’t feel that confident in my meat cookery, but I like the precision of baking.
If you follow the recipe to the letter, nine times out of ten it’s going to turn out all right.
When they arrive, I unpack the groceries on the counter and get to work.
I marinate the duck breast, trying to touch the meat as little as possible.
That slimy cool of flesh against my fingers turns my stomach.
I mix the ingredients for the cake, pour the batter into a tin, and put it in the oven to cook.
I’m prepared by the time I hear the door slam.
The cake has turned out well. Beautifully risen with a nice golden crust. All that’s left is to pan-fry the duck when Jack is ready to eat.
I’ve put on Alice’s apron and, as a final little touch, smeared my cheek with flour.
It’s the sort of sickeningly twee imperfection that I imagine made Alice so desirable.
But it’s not Jack who enters the kitchen.
I turn at the sound of the door, then freeze.
The woman who enters is tall, middle-aged, and austere.
She has a haughty stare, the straight back of the English upper classes that probably goes some way to explaining the stick-up-the-arse idiom.
I recognize her instantly. It’s Jack’s mother, Catherine. When she sees me, she stops dead.
“Who are you?” The clipped, irritated tone is not lost on me.
I am ill-prepared for this stumbling block.
This outfit—the apron, the flour—was not intended for a female gaze.
Women are always so much better at seeing through a facade than men, who often only see what they want to.
It’s why Mum is always so difficult to dupe.
I swipe at the flour on my cheek, but I can see from the way her perfectly plucked eyebrow lifts an inch that she has clocked the action. The apron will have to stay.
Never mind. I’ll just have to make the best of it. I stride forward, wiping my hands, and take her thin, icy cold fingers in mine.
“I’m Iris. So lovely to meet you.” I find myself mirroring her accent. Posh, lengthening my vowels, snipping the consonants. I’ve not had a lot of experience with people of this social stature, but I do know that—for them—like calls to like.
“Has Jack hired a cook?”
I feel my jaw set. Clearly, the accent needs work.
“No. I’m a…” I sense that I perhaps should not reveal the true nature of my relationship with Jack—not that I don’t want to, but because Catherine could cause problems for us later down the line.
She clearly remains a significant force in his life, and I’ll need to get her onside.
“Friend of Jack’s. We met at the grief group.
And you must be his mum. You look so similar! ”
The charm offensive seems to work. Or, at the very least, to assuage her suspicions, because her shoulders drop. “How is he? I haven’t heard from him in two days.”
There’s a chip of anxiety in her voice that I intend to exploit.
I touch her lightly on the arm—to show that I’m not a threat, that I’m just as concerned for his well-being as she is.
I lower my voice. “Between you and me, I don’t think he’s doing that well,” I say.
“I suspect that he’s drinking again, to be perfectly frank. ”
She closes her eyes briefly, looking pained. “I knew it,” she says. “He always goes off-grid when he drinks. It was just like this with Alice. We had to send him to rehab, you know. After Alice went into remission and she didn’t need him so much anymore.”
I drop the act instantly, hands falling to my sides. “Remission?”
The word sticks in my throat. Remission is something Matt used to mention frequently, first with a hopeful inflection to his voice, and then, as the weeks passed, with increasing despondency.
Finally, he stopped alluding to it at all.
And yet I’m sure Jack said Alice died of cancer.
She could have developed it again, but he’s never mentioned anything about remission.
There is no time to probe further, however, because a distant echo in the hallway indicates that the man himself has come home. I check the clock on the wall. He’s late. Nearly forty-five minutes late.
He comes straight through to the kitchen, and I stare at him, open-mouthed.
I can’t help it. He looks awful. Worse, somehow, than he did this morning.
Rumpled and creased, gray-faced, years older.
And there is something about his eyes: something wild and panicked.
Like a deer that has spotted the rifle aimed at its heart.
He stops dead when he sees us and doesn’t speak for a moment, like he is trying to recalibrate.
Seconds pass, and all he does is stare, that wild look still in his eye.
I wonder if something happened to him on his commute home, and I’m about to ask, when, with visible effort, he seems to gather himself. He clears his throat.
“What are you doing here?” he barks at his mother, who shrinks next to me.
“I haven’t heard from you,” she says, almost tremulously. Entirely different from the woman who demanded to know who I was not five minutes ago. She sounds timid in his presence.
“What have I told you about just turning up out of the blue? If you can’t respect my boundaries, I’m going to have to take the key back.” It’s a tone I haven’t heard from him before. Harder, more abrupt than it was even this morning.
“Jack,” she says, and there is a horrible, pleading note to the word. “Darling. I think we need to talk about getting you back to rehab.”
“I’m fine, Mum,” he says, and he shoots a vicious glare in my direction that would shrink a lesser woman than me. I pretend it has had the desired effect. I back into the counter until I feel it press against my spine.
“We’re just worried about you, Jack,” I say. I make my voice small and timid to match his mother’s. Two women who only want what’s best for him.
“Weren’t very worried about me last night, were you?”
I falter. I’d hoped he wouldn’t bring it up. I see Catherine shoot a quizzical glance in my direction. Time for damage control.
“I didn’t…I didn’t know how bad it was. I thought you could just have a glass. I’m sorry. That was my mistake.”
“Well, neither of you needs to worry. I’m going to a meeting this evening.”
“Do you think it’s perhaps past that point, darling?” If I didn’t know better, I’d say Catherine sounded scared.
“No. I can get a handle on this,” he says shortly. “Without you two twittering in my ear.”
“OK.” She doesn’t sound convinced. “It’s just, your father would have—”
“Don’t talk to me about that man. Leave, please. Now.”
She doesn’t need to be asked twice. She collects her bag, which she had set on the counter, and scurries out, leaving me and Jack staring at each other across the kitchen.