Chapter 12
twelve
Dad’s new flat was slowly becoming familiar to me, although I couldn’t say I spent enough time there to call it a second home.
I followed him up the steps to his door, where he lived on the second floor of the building.
There was a wreath hanging there, right under the peephole, a painful reminder that this would be the first Christmas he was celebrating away from us.
He hadn’t brought the holidays up to me yet and I hadn’t mentioned it either.
I thought we were both dancing around the truth that we couldn’t say—there was no way we would be able to see each other on any major holiday without arousing too much suspicion.
Dad unlocked the door and held it open for me to enter first. Immediately, something about the place felt off, though I was sure not much could have changed in the few days since I’d been here.
It smelled different—not that it was necessarily bad before, but now it smelled artificially good, like there was a plug-in air freshener somewhere.
I was standing on a bright welcome mat that said “Our Happy Home” in cursive.
Small changes, but ones that I knew my dad couldn’t have been the one to make.
There were other ones too, like a little table by the door with a bowl on it, clearly meant for keys, even though my dad still dropped his on the counter like always, and a gold mirror on the opposite wall.
Hilary appeared out of nowhere, her smile bright and eager. “Imogen! Welcome!”
“Hey,” I said lamely, unable to muster up even a hint of the energy she’d shown me. I realized that I was still standing too close to the door for Dad to be able to close it so I took a step forward, but froze as Hilary started waving at me like I was about to step on a bomb.
“Woah, woah!” she said.
“What?” I looked to Dad for help, but he was staring at an email on his phone. Not even five minutes home and he was already back to work. I pushed down the sting of that and refocused on Hilary and her wide eyes.
“Take your shoes off,” Hilary said, pointing to my ankle boots as if they offended her. I stared at her. I had obviously been planning to take them off since they were a little muddy from the outside, but I wasn’t anywhere near stepping out of the foyer. She looked at Dad. “Shoes. Please.”
He sighed but kicked them off anyway, his thumbs still swiping over the screen of his phone as he muttered, “Yes, ma’am.”
He finally locked the screen and shoved the phone in his pocket before he walked in ahead of me.
I took off my shoes too, then lined his up since he’d left them in the middle of the hall.
Hilary was still hovering over me as I stood back up and she laughed, looking at me like we were sharing a joke.
“Honestly, I don’t know how your mom could stand you two stomping around in dirty shoes everywhere. ”
A sour taste immediately appeared in my mouth, like I’d bitten into a lemon.
Mum was a topic Dad and I largely avoided discussing, just like he was a topic I avoided at home.
If she was brought up, it was only in a practical sense, like “Where did you tell her you’re staying tonight?
” We never joked about her. We never talked about the affair.
Who the heck did this woman think she was?
“How was the school?” she asked me. “Cold out there, right? You should really wear tights under your skirt when it gets this chilly.”
“I’m fine,” I said. The school heating is always on in the winter, so tights got too warm in the winter. But more importantly, I’d been going to schools with uniforms for my entire life and didn’t need her telling me how to wear the uniform. Or telling me how to do anything, for that matter.
She frowned slightly, like I’d missed the point. “Still. You don’t want to get sick.”
I looked down at my bare legs, which had admittedly been looking a little blue when I was outside waiting for Dad to pick me up in the parking lot earlier.
Some girls brought sweatpants to pull on under the skirt as soon as they left school, but I usually preferred to just stick out the cold instead of carrying around an extra item of clothing.
She reached for my jacket, and I hesitated half a second before handing it over.
Every time I’d come over until now, I’d had to keep the coat in my room since Dad didn’t have hangers.
But now, Hilary slid open the closet door and put my coat on a hanger, lining it up with all the other jackets in there.
And there were a lot of them, even though I was pretty sure I’d only ever seen Dad wear the same one for my whole life.
I glanced around again as I stepped further inside, analyzing how it could look and feel so different in Dad’s flat since Hilary apparently moved in.
There were throw pillows on the couch now.
Candles on surfaces that used to be empty.
A basket of new, fluffy blankets instead of the one ratty one he’d been living with since I’d started coming over two months ago.
It was like in the span of four days, Hilary had come in and changed everything.
Hilary followed my gaze and smiled, pleased. “I’ve been trying to make it feel more homey,” she said. “It was so bare before.”
My dad cleared his throat. “It was fine.”
She shot him a look. “It was barely liveable. Anyway, dinner’s just about ready, so go wash your hands, okay, Imogen? Bathroom’s down the hall.”
She said it as if I’d never been here before.
I bit back my words of annoyance, something I was constantly doing to make sure Dad was happy, and walked down the hall.
Dad’s flat had two bedrooms, but he was using one of them as an office, and that was where I stayed.
I opened the door and looked around the room.
His desk was pushed against the corner of the room to make way for the mostly inflated air mattress peppered with squares of silver duct tape.
Dad said last weekend he’d replace it, but he clearly hadn’t yet.
A random dresser was shoved next to Dad’s desk, another new addition from last weekend.
I was impressed by how thoughtful he was to include a place for me to put my things until I pulled up in the drawer and found clothes that were absolutely not my size.
With a sigh, I tossed my bag next to the dresser and swapped my school sweater for a basic sweatshirt.
When I came back out, the kitchen lights were on full, too bright for the time of night. Dad was at the island counter tossing a salad and Hilary was stirring a pot on the stove.
“Did you wash with soap?” she called without turning around.
I reared back a moment, then composed myself before Dad could notice.
Did she think I was a toddler learning to wash my hands for the first time?
Honestly, it was a surprise she didn’t follow me into the bathroom and force me to sing the alphabet as I washed them to make sure I did it for long enough.
“Yes,” I said through gritted teeth. I turned my back on her. “Hey, Dad, is there any chance we can get a new air mattress tomorrow? I’m not sure this one’s gonna hold up very much longer.”
Before he can reply, Hilary cut in. “Oh there’s no need for that. We’re going to have to set up the Murphy bed tomorrow before our friends come on Saturday.”
I deflated a little at that. “Oh, is that whose clothes are in the dresser?”
I guess it was too much to expect that Dad would have put clothes in the dresser for me.
Normally, he was happy to buy me things, like the new iPad, but there was something about that stuff being here that made him more reluctant.
Besides, he was never one to buy clothes for me without me picking them out.
That would have had to be Hilary and heaven knew she wouldn’t go out of her way for me like that.
“Yep!” Hilary chirps, completely oblivious to my reaction to the clothes and the bed for her friends but not for me. “Feel free to put a pair of pajama pants or something of your own in the dresser if you need to. Just don’t forget to take them home with you before you go.”
“Right,” I said flatly.
“Want to help me?” Dad asked me.
Before I could answer, Hilary said, “She can set the table. I already put the plates out. Just be careful! They’re expensive.”
At least she thought I could be trusted with dishware.
Mostly. I picked up the stack of overly expensive plates—another new addition from Hilary—and set them out on the round table, though my eyes stayed on her as she turned to Dad with a smile and topped up his glass of wine.
He smiled right back at her, but I knew it couldn’t be genuine.
There was no way he was happy with a woman who was at most ten years older than me and obsessed with changing his flat to her style.
He couldn’t be happier here than he was with Mum—I just had to make him see it.
When we sat down to eat, it was obvious that Hilary had the image of a perfect family dinner in her head. She served each of us up, starting with Dad and working around to her own plate, then turned to me.
“So, how’s school?”
Yeah, I wasn’t playing this game. “Fine.”
“What classes are you liking this year?”
“She’s good at English,” Dad said. I looked up from my plate to find him smiling proudly at me. My lips tilted up in a small smile too at the compliment. “Always has been.”
Hilary nodded. “That makes sense. You seem like a reader.”
And just like that, the smile was gone. I slowly twirled my fork into the pasta. “Not really.”
She watched me take my first bite. “Careful, it’s hot.”
I swallowed. It was good. I hated that it was good. But I certainly wasn’t going to tell her that it was.
“What do you think? Hilary is a great cook, isn’t she?”
Hilary laughed and nudged his knee under the table. I looked down at my plate, pushing noodles into a neat pile. My appetite dulled.