Page 21 of Don't Let Him In

“I don’t know, Jonathan. I really don’t. I don’t understand anything, really, about the way your finances work. Where does all the money go? You work all these hours and yet still…” She sighs.

I jump on her words. “Exactly, darling, exactly. I work my guts out, I sacrifice time with you just to be at the beck and call of these people,and even then, there’s never enough money. So come on. Let’s do it. Let’s sell up and cut ourselves loose.”

“Jonathan,” she says, grimacing at me as if I am a moron. “I’m about to become a grandmother. The baby is going to be here in under a month. How can I possibly think about selling up and moving now? Em needs me. And not only that, but Iwantto be here. This is where I belong, where my friends are, my family, my job, all of it.”

She’s done it, I can feel it. She’s cut the rope that tethers her to me, but I know there are still a few strands intact and I grab for them. “Tara. Please. I can’t live like this. You know I can’t. It’s killing me. Help me.”

I make my eyes big, and I see a flicker of pity across her face. But then the coolness returns. “What do you want me to do?” she says. “I don’t understand. How can I help you if we both want different things?”

I turn it round. “So, what, darling, what do you want? What would make you happy?”

She pushes her tumbler round in a tense semicircle with her fingertips and then back again.

I gulp, silently, as I stare at her. She suddenly looks beautiful again, the light catching the hazel streaks in her hair as she lifts her head and says, “For you to leave, Jonathan. For you to justleave.”

TWENTY

So,” Ash asks Nina a few days later. “What did Nick say? About the ring?”

Nina is scrolling through the Deliveroo app on her phone, choosing a pizza. She glances up at Ash quickly and then back down again, her finger still on the screen. “He said exactly what I thought he’d say. It’s the ring he bought for the wedding to the dead fiancée.”

“And why did he have it with him?”

She sees a muscle in her mother’s cheek twitch and knows she’s getting on her nerves.

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask. None of my business.”

“Well, it sort of is.”

Nina blinks slowly and Ash hears her exhale. “There,” she says, passing Ash her phone, “your turn.”

Ash sighs and takes the phone, scrolls through to the vegan section, selects the Mozella with wild mushrooms, and hands it back again.

It’s Friday night and Ash has declined an invitation from Ella to spend the weekend at her place in Brighton, said she was tired, thought she might be coming down with something, but she wasn’t coming down with something, she just couldn’t face it. Ella’s two flatmates were so full-on and always did that thing of trying to impress upon her how well they knew Ella, as if they were insecure about the fact that Ash hadknown her since they were both seven. They constantly threw out desperate in-jokes and you-really-had-to-have-been-there stories and Ash found it exhausting. So here she is on a Friday night, ordering pizza with her fifty-one-year-old mother instead.

“Twenty to forty minutes apparently,” says Nina, turning off her screen.

“Can I open wine?” asks Ash.

“Sure. There’s a fizzy one, I think, in the door?”

Ash opens the door, her eyes find the fizzy wine, and she pulls it out and stares at it for a moment, giving herself a beat to frame her next question. “So,” she says, “when are you seeing him again? Nick?”

“Well, actually, I think he might be coming over tomorrow night.”

There’s an edge to her mother’s voice, a dryness. She knows that Ash doesn’t want him there, that it is an intrusion, that it is weird and strange for her. But Ash can also hear the resolve in her mother’s voice, the note of “It’s my house and I’m a grown woman and I can do what I like under my own roof,” and she is, of course, entirely right. Ash makes herself smile and says, “Oh, that’s good.”

“He’s taking me to that new place in town, the one where Luc Martin cooks—you know, who your dad used to love?”

Ash shrugs. She’s not a crazed foodie like her parents, or at least, she likes food, but she’s not fussed about who cooked it. “Is it going to be expensive?”

“Yes. Probably.”

“I hope he pays for you.”

Nina throws her a surprised look. “I can afford to pay for my own dinner,” she says.

“Yes, well, just don’t pay for his.”

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