The Road Trip, Beth O'Leary [read an ebook week .txt] 📗

take a slow, wobbly breath, because there it is again, the moment I think about seeing my father – a weight against my chest like the heel of a hand pushed against my ribs. The power he has is mine/given, and now I choose/to take it back. It’s my most popular poem on Instagram, just three lines long, titled ‘Simple’. It’s one of my least favourite poems now – I wrote it in the months after I’d lost Addie and cut off contact with Dad, and now its oversimplicity seems faintly pathetic. As though freezing out my father would flick the switch, and here I’d be, perfectly healed and happy, my own master.

‘Dyl?’ Marcus prompts. ‘You know your mum and dad are invited, right?’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I know.’

‘And you’ve not seen your dad for over a year and a half?’

‘No. I’ve not.’

‘And you’re just going to . . . see him at the wedding?’

‘Yes.’

There’s a long silence.

‘Is there a game plan beyond that point?’ Marcus asks dryly.

Addie keeps glancing at me, her gaze like sunshine on my cheek.

‘Not yet,’ I say rather helplessly. ‘I’m hoping I’ll know what to say when I get there. Luke will be there too. It’ll be all right with Luke there.’

‘OK!’ Marcus says, and I hear him stretch, and Deb say oof as he presumably elbows her somewhere. ‘Well, luckily we’ve got about two hundred or so miles to work on that shitshow of a strategy.’

THEN

Addie

Marcus changes completely after our trip to see the snake. No more flirting, no charm – he pretty much ignores me. But I sometimes feel his gaze on me when I’m not looking. It takes me a couple of days to notice that when Marcus is watching me, Grace is watching Marcus.

‘You’re looking at him again,’ I tease her as we wash up the breakfast things side by side. She’s washing, I’m drying and surreptitiously picking off the bits of scrambled egg she’s missed.

‘Who, Marc?’ She’s been idly staring at Marcus on the terrace, through the window above the kitchen sink. ‘Oh, I’m a lost cause, aren’t I? I just find him so fascinating.’

We get on well, me and Grace. She can be a little much sometimes, but I’ve lived with Cherry: I have pretty good tolerance for intense posh people. Plus she’s incredibly smart, and like Dylan she’s not patronising about it. And, crucially, she’s never looked at Dylan the way she’s always staring at Marcus.

‘If you find him so fascinating, then why . . .’ did you sleep with his best friend, too?

Grace laughs, getting the subtext. ‘Darling, I’m the queen of self-sabotage, don’t ask me why I do anything. Besides, Marc isn’t the sort of guy you go steady with, is he? If we’d been exclusive, he would have lost interest even more quickly than he did. He wanted free-spirit Grace, sexual-adventurer Grace, always-out-of-reach Grace. He wants games and scandal.’

‘You deserve someone who wants you for who you really are,’ I tell her. ‘And doesn’t try to turn you into somebody else.’

She laughs, throwing her head back. ‘I’ve yet to find a man like that,’ she says.

I wince, and she clocks it straight away. She presses one soapy hand to mine, stilling it for a moment to catch my eye.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘That wasn’t about Dylan. He’s not a bad man, nothing like that, he and I just weren’t . . . Oh, it wasn’t real.’

‘Was it a game? To Dylan?’ I force myself to ask. ‘The whole thing with you?’

Grace sobers, pressing her lips together. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry, darling, I know you’ll probably find that terribly distasteful, but I don’t think he ever liked me, and honestly, I didn’t like him that way either. Marc was losing interest, and . . . sleeping with Dylan, it got Marc’s attention in a way I never could with any other man. And I think Dylan liked having something that was Marc’s for once.’

I flinch at that. Grace sends me a sympathetic glance but keeps going.

‘Leaving for Europe was a master stroke on my part, frankly, because if those boys need one thing, it’s a sense of purpose, and so they chased me far longer than they would’ve if we’d all stayed in Oxford. I think they liked the idea of sleeping with the same woman more than they ever liked me.’

My teeth are gritted tight. ‘I’m sorry,’ I manage. ‘That’s horrible.’

‘Oh, I gave as good as I got, darling,’ Grace says, passing me a plate. ‘And I’ve done plenty worse to others. If you run with this lot’ – she nods to the figures draped around the pool – ‘things are always going to get a little messy. The difference is, with Marc . . .’ She sighs. ‘I can’t seem to shake him the way I’ve always shaken everybody else.’

‘I get it,’ I say, stacking the plate.

Grace smiles slowly at me. ‘Dylan’s really got under your skin, hey?’

I blush. Grace smiles.

‘Well. May he prove to be a man who deserves you,’ she says, handing me another plate with a flourish.

They break stuff: a lamp in the ballroom, a door on the second floor. Connie’s finger, which means she spends a night in a French emergency room with Uncle Terry, who was the only person sober enough to drive her, since his hangovers are worse than everyone else’s and he can’t keep up.

They drink and laugh and get high and the days turn blurry under the sun.

Meanwhile I fix everything. Except the finger – that’s outside my expertise.

In fairness to them all, they do treat me and Deb like part of the gang. Not like the caretakers. It’s just when something goes wrong and they yell for me or my sister that I’m reminded we’re not quite on a level here. I’m not really one of them.

‘They’re like overgrown children,’ Deb observes one day, looking down at them all on the lawn. Connie has her head on Marta’s stomach, Grace