Page 89
“I’ve got chicken,” she said. “And rice. Loads of rice. I bulk-buy it, because I’m thirty-four and I’ve just discovered meal prep. And carrots, somewhere.” She was already opening the fridge. “I could do a batch now. If that’s okay. If that’s not overstepping.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I know I don’t.” Lauren pulled out a pack of chicken thighs and looked at Berkeley, who had sat down in the middle of the kitchen floor with an expression of deep, sudden interest. “But he’s looking at me like I might.”
Carly began to object, and Berkeley thumped his tail once against the tiles.
“Fine,” Carly said. “But no seasoning.”
“I wasn’t going to season it.”
“No onion. No garlic. They’re poisonous to dogs.”
“I know that. I lived with a golden retriever for years.”
“No skin. It gives him—”
“Carly.” Lauren turned round with the chicken in one hand and a saucepan in the other. “I’ve got this.”
Carly closed her mouth.
She sat at the little pine table, the same chair as last time, and watched Lauren cook for her father’s dog.
It shouldn’t have been anything. A woman boiling chicken in a small kitchen. But Lauren did it with total attention. She trimmed the fat. She rinsed the rice twice. She tested the water with a finger and swore when it was hotter than she expected. And the whole time, she talked to Berkeley, telling him what was in the pan and how long it would be and that he was very handsome and very patient.
At some point, Berkeley lay down at her feet, right in the way, and Lauren stepped over him every time she needed the sink.
Carly’s chest went tight before she knew why.
Her dad used to talk to Berkeley while he cooked. Exactly like that.
“You’re quiet,” Lauren said, without turning round.
“I’m always quiet.”
“You’re quieter than usual. Your competent silence has gone a bit… less competent.”
Carly looked at her hands. “Dad used to do that. Talk to him while he cooked.”
Lauren turned the hob down and leaned against the worktop, facing her, and didn’t come any closer.
“What did he talk about?”
“Everything. Football. The gyms. Who’d been in, who hadn’t paid. Which of the instructors he thought were shagging.” Carly almost laughed. “Berkeley knows more about the business than I do. He sat through years of board meetings in that kitchen.”
“Does your dad still talk to him?”
It was asked so gently that Carly answered before she could decide not to.
“He can’t, really. Not like that. His voice is going.” She picked at a knot in the pine with her thumbnail. “Hands first, then legs. Now it’s his voice. Some days you can understand him, some days you can’t. He gets frustrated, so he stops trying.” She paused. “I’ve got voicemails on my phone from before. Him ringing up to ask if I’d remembered Samantha’s birthday, or telling me the score. Stupid things. I can’t delete them.”
She hadn’t meant to say any of that. She hadn’t said it to Beth, and certainly not to Samantha, who’d have had a plan for it by morning.
Lauren didn’t have a plan. She didn’t say I’m so sorry, or have you thought about backing them up to the cloud. She just stood there with a tea towel over her shoulder.
“Don’t delete them,” she said eventually.
“I wasn’t going to.”
