CHAPTER 6- HOME

The text was thirty minutes old, and I was still checking my mirrors.

Every pair of headlights looked the same. Every car that turned when I turned was following me, until it turned off and left me alone. By the third red light, I couldn't tell the difference between being hunted and being abandoned.

The pin drop said the sender was close.

Close meant nothing. Everyone was close now.

I had four options, and I'd eliminated three. Hotels took cards I couldn't use. Georgina's couch was a trap I'd already slept beside once. The Roland house was locked from the inside.

Which left the last door on earth I wanted to knock on.

My mother's gate opened before I reached it. The guard had been watching for me, which meant someone had told him I might come.

Everyone was always prepared. Everyone except me.

The Lionel house did what it always did. It looked warm from the driveway and refrigerated once you were through it.

Mrs Avery was waiting in the hall. She'd kept house here since before I was born and been more of a mother to me than the woman upstairs.

"Miss Lauren." She took my bags before I could argue, and her eyes went over my face once, quick and professional. Whatever she saw made her mouth go thin. "You'll want tea. I'll bring it up myself."

It wasn't a question. It was the closest thing to shelter anyone had offered me in three days.

My mother was in the drawing room, writing at the desk by the window, something that required her full attention until I was three steps into the room. She finished the line. Blotted it. Looked up.

"Sit," she said.

I stayed standing. Standing was the only thing I had left that was mine.

"Suit yourself." She folded her hands. "Tell me what you did."

"Nothing."

"Lauren."

"I did nothing, Mother. That's the entire—"

"Then tell me what they say you did. It's the same conversation. It just spares us the indignity of the performance."

There it was. No, are you all right? No, where have you been sleeping? The first word out of her hadn't been my name. It had been did.

"You've spoken to Beatrice."

"I've spoken to everyone. Someone had to." She recalibrated, the way she did in board meetings. "The Roland alliance took nine years to build. Do you understand what this—"

"I have cancer."

The room didn't change. That's what I noticed. The clock ticked. The fire did what fires do.

"How long have you known?"

Not are you afraid. Not what do the doctors say.

"Months."

"Does the press know?"

And there it was. The whole woman in one sentence.

Matilda came in without knocking, the way she'd done since we were children, because doors in this house had never applied to her. Cream dress. She always wore cream; now it photographed as innocence.

"Lauren." She kissed the air beside my cheek. "You look awful."

"Thank you."

"I didn't mean—"

"Yes, you did."

She smiled, because being caught cruel had never once cost her anything in this house, and sat in the chair across from me. My chair. The one by the fire that had been mine since I was nine.

"The foundation board asked after you," she said. "I told them you were resting."

"You told them nothing, because you didn't know. Nobody knew. Nobody asked."

"Nobody could ask, could you? You never told anyone anything. You just went off and did whatever you were doing with that doctor, and now we're all supposed to—"

"Matilda." Catherine didn't raise her voice. She never raised her voice. "That's enough."

Matilda stopped. Not because she'd been scolded. Because she'd been permitted to stop.

I looked at my mother and did the arithmetic I'd been avoiding since I walked in. "The guard was watching for me. You knew I was coming."

"This isn't a surprise to anyone, Lauren." Catherine picked up her pen, then set it down, which, for her, was a gesture of enormous feeling. "Beatrice telephoned me three weeks ago. Whatever else she is, she was decent enough to prepare us."

Three weeks.

I sat down. My legs decided without consulting me.

Three weeks was before the bedroom door. Before the lock. Before the lawyer with the folder under his arm.

Three weeks was right about when someone in my husband's house decided I was leaving.

"You knew," I said. "Before any of it. You let me walk into it alone."

"We were advised—"

"Advised." The word came out of me like something spoiled. "Your daughter was being thrown out of her home, and you were advised."

"I was told my daughter had been unfaithful and was about to be divorced, and that the families would handle it quietly." Her voice stayed level. The voice of a woman ordering lunch. "I had no reason to doubt it. You've never given me one."

"And did you ask? One phone call, Mother. That's all it would have taken."

She was quiet for a moment. I made the mistake of thinking it was shame.

"The house is full of your father's old colleagues this month. Appearances matter. You of all people should understand that you married for them, after all."

"I married Jack when I was twenty-three and stupid."

"Then find somewhere discreet to be stupid in until this settles." She opened the drawer and produced an envelope, already prepared, which was its own answer to everything. "There's a flat we keep for visiting consultants. There can be an allowance. Quietly. If you're reasonable about the name, and you don't speak to anyone about the Roland family."

"Reasonable."

"You were always the reasonable one."

I looked at her. At the envelope. At Matilda in my chair, hands folded, like this was a play she'd already read the ending of.

And I understood, standing in the room I'd grown up in, that I'd been discarded by two families who used the same word for it.

Handle it quietly.

"I'll manage."

"You never could."

"Then I'll learn."

Mrs Avery was at the front door before I reached it, the way she'd been at every door of my childhood one step before I needed her, never one after.

"Miss Lauren." She helped me into my coat, and something small and flat went into the pocket while she did it. Her hand covered mine for exactly one second. "Your father kept an envelope in the study. For emergencies. I kept it where she'd never think to look."

"Mrs Avery—"

"He'd have wanted you to have it." She stepped back, all formality, because the cameras in this house had always been human ones. "Eat something. You're all edges."

The gate closed behind me like a lock turning.

I drove because driving was better than deciding. The envelope sat in my coat pocket like a coal, the only warm thing in the car.

Somewhere past the third exit, my stomach turned.

I'd pulled into a gas station before I decided to. Coffee, hot dogs, the sweetness of rotisserie grease under fluorescent light. I made it two steps inside before it hit again, so hard I had to grip the chip rack to stay upright.

"Ma'am? You okay?"

"Fine," I told a total stranger, at midnight, in a gas station. "Just tired."

I bought water with a bill from the envelope of my dead father's emergency money, arriving exactly on schedule and sat in the car with the window cracked and the bottle sweating in my hand.

And I did the math.

Twice. The first time felt like a mistake, so I did it slower, like arithmetic was the problem.

I knew what this was.

I knew whose it was, too.

And

the first clear thought I had, sitting in a gas station at midnight with my father's money in my pocket, was the one that scared me most:

No one can ever know.