She presses refresh again.
Three hundred and nine pounds.
She checks her email, in case there’s been some kind of notification of something having gone wrong. But there’s nothing.
The money will go three ways once the inheritance tax has been taken care of. She’d offered to forgo any of the inheritance. It’s not her house. She’s not their sibling. But they’d insisted. She’d said, ‘I don’t need a third. A few thousand will be fine.’ But still they’d insisted. ‘You’re their granddaughter,’ Lucy had said. ‘You have as much right to it as we do.’
At 1 p.m. she and Dido leave the showroom.
‘I’m afraid it’s still sandwiches.’
‘Good,’ she says. ‘I’m in the mood for sandwiches.’
They go to the café in the park and take a table outside in the sunshine.
‘I can’t believe you’re leaving,’ says Dido. ‘It’s going to be so, well, I was going to say quiet, you’ve never been exactly loud, but it’s going to be so … utterly devoid of Libby without you. And your lovely hair. And your neat piles.’
‘My neat piles?’
‘Yes, your …’ She mimes a squared-off pile of paper with her hands. ‘You know. All the corners aligned.’ She smiles. ‘I’m going to miss you. That’s all.’
Libby glances at her and says, ‘Didn’t you ever think about leaving? After you got left the cottage? And all the other stuff? I mean, surely you don’t have to work, do you?’
Dido shrugs. ‘I suppose not. And there are times I’d just like to chuck it all in and spend all day at the stables with Spangles before he cops it. But, ultimately, I have nothing else. But you – now you have everything. Everything that kitchens can’t give you.’
Libby smiles. There is a truth to this.
It’s not just the money. It’s not just the money at all.
It’s the people whom she now belongs to, the family who’ve encircled her so completely. And it’s the person she discovered she was underneath all the neat piles and careful planning. She was never really that person. She’d made herself into that person to counterbalance her mother’s inconsistencies. To fit in at school. To fit in with a group of friends whose values she never really shared, not really, not deep down inside. There is more to her than arms’ length friendships and stupidly proscriptive Tinder requirements. She is the product of better people than her fantasy birth parents, the graphic designer and the fashion PR with the sports car and the tiny dogs. How unimaginative she’d been.
She presses refresh on her phone, absent-mindedly.
She looks again. A stupid number sits there. A number that makes no sense whatsoever. It has too many zeros, too many everythings. She turns her phone to face Dido. ‘Oh. My. God.’
Didi covers her face with her hands and gasps. Then she turns to face the front of the café. ‘Waiter,’ she says. ‘Two bottles of your finest Dom Pérignon. And thirteen lobsters. And make it snappy.’
There is no waiter of course and the people at the table next to them throw them a strange look.
‘My friend’， says Dido, ‘has just won the lottery.’
‘Oh,’ says the woman. ‘Lucky you!’
‘You know,’ says Dido, turning back to her. ‘You really don’t have to go back to work after this. It’s your birthday. And you’ve just been given eleventy squillion pounds. You could, if you wanted, take the rest of the day off.’
Libby smiles, screws up her paper napkin and drops it on the plastic tray. ‘No,’ she says. ‘No way. I’m no quitter. And besides, I’m pretty sure I left some paperwork slightly askew.’