Chapter 10 #2
I was pretty confident the girls and I would get on fine this evening. After all, they seemed comfortable with me when we met on Rafe’s roof terrace. What I wasn’t prepared for, stupidly, was the overwhelming number of family photos involving Zach, the girls, and their late mother.
Claire.
I also wasn’t prepared for her to be quite so beautiful.
Which is stupid, because Zach is ridiculously attractive.
Obviously he would have had a hot wife. But she was gorgeous, with her blonde, shoulder-length hair, and the big brown eyes she handed down to her daughters, and a cracking smile.
The photos all seem candid. I don’t see a single posed professional shot.
They’re snaps from holidays and Christmas and what look like normal days in the park.
Normal until they stop forever.
Looking at the photos of them all, she seems so real. You’d never walk into this house and guess that the beautiful mummy in the family photos was gone, her body God knows where and her soul… I don’t know. Here?
God, is she watching us right now? Is she hovering here in the massive white kitchen, thinking who the hell is this girl and what is she doing with my kids?
‘I’m not after your husband,’ I attempt to telegraph silently to her. ‘Even though he’s hot AF. I’m just here to help him out, okay? Don’t come and, like, haunt me, or anything.’
It’s messing with my head. Not the prospect of her ghostly presence, but the fact that she was here one minute and gone the next. I mean, how the fuck are Zach and his two little daughters supposed to accept that? How are they supposed to live with it?
There must be a million ramifications for their family, big and small.
Who’s going to buy the girls their first bras?
Zach? Who’ll show them how to use a sanitary pad?
Talk them through how to insert a tampon?
I know there are all shapes and sizes of families out there, but to have had this—the fucking dream, the Happy Ever After we all aspire to—and then for it to be smashed to pieces in front of your eyes?
It’s unbearable, that’s what it is.
I watch Stella and Nancy in silent awe as they delve happily into my makeup bag. They’re like pigs in shit. Nancy lines up my foundations, counting them as she goes.
‘Why d’you need five?’ Stella demands.
‘Oh. Well.’ I point at each of them in term. ‘Um, this one is my everyday one. It’s light and dewy. This one is more matte—it’s a heavier coverage one, for when I have a breakout.’
‘What’s a breakout?’ Nancy wants to know.
‘Spots.’
She peers at my face. ‘You don’t have spots.’
‘No, not now I don’t. But I do sometimes, and this one helps to hide them. That one there’s a satiny finish for night-time, and this one isn’t really a foundation. It’s more of a tinted moisturiser.’
‘My mummy only wore makeup for work and parties,’ Nancy says matter-of-factly. ‘She didn’t wear it at the weekend.’
I swallow. It’s so wonderful to see them talking openly about their mum, to see all the photos around the house that remember her and celebrate her. But God does it tug at the heartstrings to hear these stunning little girls speak about her in the past tense.
It’s not fucking fair.
‘Well,’ I say brightly, ‘it looks like your mummy was very pretty, so I bet she didn’t need much makeup.’
‘You’re very pretty, too,’ Stella tells me.
I smile at her. ‘Thank you. And none of us should need makeup to feel pretty. We’re all great just as we are. But sometimes it’s fun to add a little sparkle. You know?’
I hold it together until it’s time to put them to bed. They sleep in the same room, in identical twin beds. Stella tells me that Nancy has a separate room, but that they’ve slept together since their mummy died.
‘That bed was supposed to be for when I had sleepovers.’ She points. ‘But it’s okay, because Nancy doesn’t want to be alone.’
I nod. I don’t trust myself to say anything. Of course she doesn’t fucking want to be alone. She’s lost one half of the adult team who she presumably thought were immortal.
‘But we always wake up in Daddy’s bed.’ Nancy giggles before clamping a little hand over her mouth, hiding the huge gap where her two front teeth used to be. ‘We go in there in the middle of the night.’
I tickle her and recover my power of speech enough to ask, ‘Do you, indeed?’
‘Yep. We make a Daddy sandwich. That’s what we call it. We’re the bread, and he’s the filling.’
‘I bet you’re the most wriggly bread ever,’ I tell them.
‘We’re definitely the kick-iest,’ Stella agrees.
I read them a story, Claris in Paris, which is about a Dior-and-Chanel-clad mouse and is so fabulously illustrated that I’m tempted to buy a copy for myself.
I spritz both their pillows with a bottle of Chanel No.
5 at their request. It was their mother’s perfume, and apparently her scent helps them sleep.
I mean, what am I supposed to do with that information?
How am I supposed to process it?
It fucking breaks me to see those two little girls snuggling down next to the scent of their late mother. To know that their comfort comes in the shape of olfactory memories and not their mum’s arms around them.
I can’t deal.
I just can’t.
After hugging them both as hard as I can, I head back downstairs. Ruth, the nanny, hasn’t made an appearance. Zach mentioned she had a self-contained flat on the top floor and would probably stay up there, which suits me. I need to be alone to get over this ache in my heart.
I make myself a mug of ginger tea in the immaculate kitchen (he definitely has a fleet of staff) and head through to the comfy sofa in the book-lined den, which is cosier than the enormous living room, where I collapse and attempt, unsuccessfully, to lose myself in a mindless stream of social media.
My head flops against the back of the sofa.
No wonder Zach is broken.