‘The chicken, lemon and feta pie?’ Rachel exclaimed. ‘That recipe is meant to be a family secret!’
‘If it helps,’ Heather said, ‘I struggle to fry an egg.’
‘Sorry,’ Tully said, ‘I’m still confused as to why you would want to go see our mum – your boyfriend’s current wife. It’s a bit weird, don’t you think?’
‘Tully –’ Rachel started.
Tully put down her glass – which was nearly empty – and shrugged. ‘I’m just saying, I don’t know why you’d want to.’ She looked at Heather.
‘I guess because I don’t have any family of my own . . .’
‘You want us to be your family?’ Tully finished.
‘Actually, yes,’ Heather said. She looked from Tully to Rachel and sighed. ‘I know how strange it must be, having your dad dating someone while your mum is still alive – not to mention someone so much younger. And I’m so sorry about it, honestly I am. But the fact is, I’m in love with your father. So, yes, I want to be part of his family. And, odd as it sounds, that includes your mum.’
There was something about the simplicity of it, the straightforwardness, that Rachel found compelling, if a little jarring. Even Tully was stunned silent by it. But despite the certainty with which Heather spoke, the hand holding the glass of wine was still shaking.
‘Well,’ Rachel said finally, ‘we want what Dad wants. And if Dad wants you – and he’s made it clear that he does – that means you’re family. Right, Tully?’
Tully shifted in her seat. Her head tilted forward ever so slightly and Rachel decided to take that as a nod.
‘Good,’ Rachel said. ‘Well, then, shall we eat in the courtyard?’
Rachel didn’t wait for a response; she just picked up the potato salad and carried it outside. The other two grabbed a dish each and followed her.
‘Whoops,’ Rachel said as she set down the salad. ‘Forgot the salad servers.’
She returned to the house for the servers, but though she scanned the bench, the table, even the dishwasher, they seemed to have disappeared.
13
HEATHER
You’re not following the rules, Heather, a little voice told her. Stephen had instructed her to talk to Tully about her little boys and to Rachel about baking, and so far she’d done neither. The wine was to blame. She hadn’t intended to drink today. Stephen had been so strange after finding the bottle of whisky under the sink, she’d been determined to prove he had nothing to worry about.
‘What I don’t understand,’ he’d said, ‘is why you would hide it?’
Habit was the answer. Growing up, if anyone left alcohol lying around, it was as good as gone in a matter of minutes. But she couldn’t say that to Stephen. After all, she understood how it must look.
‘I’m fine,’ she’d said to him. ‘In fact, I’m going to go off alcohol for a while.’
She’d brought a bottle of wine today as an offering, but she didn’t intend on drinking any. She amended this to ‘just one glass’， to be polite. Since then Rachel had determinedly kept her glass full, or Tully had. What was she supposed to do?
‘More potatoes?’ Rachel offered.
‘No, thank you,’ Heather said. ‘But they were lovely. All of this is lovely. I’m having a lovely time.’
She’d just said ‘lovely’ three times. She often said words like ‘lovely’ and ‘delightful’ and ‘gorgeous’ when she was around people like Tully and Rachel. The stupid thing was that Heather wasn’t sure if she was having a lovely time or not. On the one hand, she was sitting in a charming courtyard, sipping good wine and eating delicious food. On the other hand, she had a feeling she was on very tenuous ground with these women.
Rachel was easier to like, obviously. Though she was the younger of the sisters, she gave the impression of being older, wiser, calmer. Perhaps it was the fact that she kept her distance, watching from afar, remaining carefully neutral. It had been interesting to hear that she’d cut off all her hair as a teen. What had been more interesting was the flippant way that Tully mentioned it – much like the way Stephen mentioned the fact that Rachel hadn’t ever had a proper relationship. As though they were normal, if quirky, decisions that any person might make, rather than clear signposts of adolescent sexual assault. Growing up, Heather knew a handful of people who’d been sexually assaulted. Radical changes in appearance were commonplace, as were weight gain or loss, retreating from threatening environments and drug abuse. Heather supposed things like this didn’t happen very often to nice middle-class people, so they didn’t know the signs, but even so . . . it seemed a fairly large thing to miss.