Page 12 of Breaking the Dark

“You know I have no one over there? You know it’s just me. Well, me and Mr. Smith.” She smiles.

“Your cat. I know. But we don’t need anyone. Particularly once we’ve had a child. We won’t need anyone at all. We can just…freewheel. Just the three of us. I have skills, you have skills. We don’t need a fancy house or fancy cars. We don’t need anything, apart from each other.”

Ophelia smiles, squeezes his hand hard, feels the pulse of his blood, feels the calmness of it all at long last.

FIVE

JESSICA STILL FEELS unwell later as she gets ready for her lonely-girl dinner at the Bleeding Heart. She pairs her black jeans with a black cami and a cropped blazer and fluffs her mermaid hair out over her shoulders. She’s ravenous, but the thought of rich French food makes her want to hurl.

Before she heads out, she calls in at Julius’s to feed Speckles. This time she closes the door very carefully behind her and approaches the kitchen slowly, making kissy noises as she goes. The cat stares at her in that way in which he has taken to staring at her since the moment on the window ledge during the storm when she almost showed him what she could do. He could smell it on her, she knows that, the dark scent of her engines, the things that live inside her that make her able to do things that other people can’t. He smelled it and now he knows it and the look he’s giving her could be interpreted as respect, or even fear. You, he seems to say to her as his eyes narrow and he pulls his soft paws closer in toward his body, you are not like the other ones.

“That’s right, cat, you’d better believe it,” she says as she empties kibble into Speckles’s bowl. “And what do you think of my hair?”

The cat says, Eow, before strutting toward the bowl on the floor and turning his back to her. Jessica sighs and takes a moment in Julius’s pretty apartment, lets her eyes roam across the painted walls and smart kitchen tiles, the table lamps, and the framed prints on the walls. She can feel change coming in the air, a passage from here to there. She has been the same for so long now. She has become stagnant. Dull. She has not been evolving, and she needs her life to move along again, but she fears it too, the change. She fears it so badly she can taste it.

She waits with the cat while he eats and she sits on the floor with him for a while, stroking the thick fur under his chin. By the time she leaves the apartment five minutes later, her jacket is covered in cat fur, but she feels strangely happy.

The Bleeding Heart sits on the Upper East Side between Madison and Fifth. It boasts oversized Moroccan lanterns and terrace seating with heaters, and blankets draped over the backs of chairs. Jessica is taken to her table by a young woman in black and handed the wine list and the menu.

“Just water, please,” she says, handing the wine list back. “Oh, and bread. Could I get some bread? Lots of bread.”

The birthday party arrives a few moments later. Jefferson’s mother, Susie, looks great for fifty in a fitted green silk dress, her shiny dark hair in a ponytail. The young girl with her, who Jessica has been told by Amber is Susie’s niece, Matilda, is at that terrible age for girls when everything happens all at the same time—teeth, skin, puppy fat, nose. The poor thing looks petrified to find herself in the company of Fox, who is, Jessica has to concede, horribly good-looking for a sixteen-year-old boy.

Fox is taller than Jefferson’s father and has the expansive, self-confident demeanor of a twenty-five-year-old. His hair is longer now than in the photograph Amber showed her and it flops onto his forehead instead of being teased backward into a boy-band pompadour. He’s wearing a white shirt with green chinos rolled up at the ankle and very expensive-looking white-and-pink high-top sneakers. His wrists are circled with leather bracelets and there is a signet ring on his right-hand pinkie. And even here, in the subdued lighting of the restaurant, she can see that his skin is poreless like plastic, that his hands sit on his lap and his gaze is on the ceiling, that his face carries the same small, secret smile as his twin sister’s.

Jessica sets her phone to record and then picks up the menu and stares at it. A waitress brings her a basket of bread that is warm to the touch, and when she tears it open a glorious yeasty plume of steam emerges from its heart. She stuffs it into her mouth greedily. It’s the first thing she’s enjoyed eating in two days and she has to stop herself from making sex noises while she chews…and at that thought, her mind returns again to Luke, the smell of his bed linen, the smell of his skin, the night she can’t quite remember, when they may or may not have used contraception.

“Are you ready to order, madam? Or do you need a minute?”

The pretty waitress is back, and Jessica jumps slightly, swallows down the hunk of bread in her mouth. “God. Yeah. Sorry. I…er…” She stares blankly at the menu. “I have kind of an upset stomach. Do you have anything…bland, maybe?”

The waitress’s face furrows. “Erm, let me see. I mean, we do have a nice potato and kale velouté. It comes with truffle oil and roasted hazelnuts on the top, but we could serve it without?”

“A veloo—?”

“Soup. It’s a smooth soup.”

Jessica smiles at her gratefully. “Done,” she says, handing over her menu. “And can I get another basket of this amazing bread, please?”

Across from Jessica, the party guests are still consulting their menus. A waiter appears next to them and asks if they want any aperitifs, and they order champagne, plus a gin and tonic for Susie’s husband and Cokes for the kids. Fox is still casting his gaze upward, which Susie notices.

“Are you okay, Fox?” Susie asks. “Is there something up there?”

The boy lowers his gaze and smiles at Susie. “No,” he says smoothly. “Nothing up there. I’m good.”

Susie smiles back. “How was England this summer? Did you and your sister have a good trip?”

“It was amazing. It was perfect.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful! I’m so pleased. What did you get up to?”

“Not much really. My dad has this new place he’s renovating, out in the country, so we were there for the whole month. Just hanging out.”

“And the weather. Was it good?”

“It was perfect, just perfect.”

Jefferson’s mother smiles at Fox playfully, sensing a backstory. “Did you meet someone, Fox?”

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