Page 48 of The Girl You Left Behind
She bends down to peer inside it and sees her Le Creuset dish, its surface bubbling with something cheesy.
“I made some supper. Pasta bake. I just threw together what I could get from the corner shop. It’ll be ready in about ten minutes. I was going to have mine later, but seeing as you’re here...”
Liv cannot remember the last time she even turned the oven on.
“Oh,” says Mo, reaching for the oven gloves. “And someone rang from the council.”
“What?”
“Yeah. Something about council tax.”
Liv’s insides turn briefly to water.
“I said I was you, so he told me how much you owe. It’s quite a lot.” She hands her a piece of paper with a figure scribbled on it.
As Liv’s mouth opens to protest, she says, “Well, I had to make sure he had the right person. I thought he must have made a mistake.”
She had known roughly how much it would be, but seeing it in print is still a shock. She feels Mo’s eyes on her and, in her uncharacteristically long silence, she knows that Mo has guessed the truth.
“Hey. Sit down. Everything looks better on a full stomach.” She feels herself being steered into a chair. Mo flips open the oven door, allowing the kitchen to flood with the unfamiliar smell of home-cooked food. “And if not, well, I know of a really comfortable banquette.”
•••
The food is good. Liv eats a plateful and sits with her hands on her stomach afterward, wondering why she is so surprised that Mo can actually cook. “Thanks,” she says, as Mo mops up the last of hers. “It was really good. I can’t remember the last time I ate that much.”
“No problem.”
And now you have to leave.The words that have been on her lips for the past twenty hours do not come. She does not want Mo to go just yet. She does not want to be alone with the council-tax people and the final demands and her own uncontrollable thoughts; she feels suddenly grateful that tonight she will have somebody to talk to—a human defense against the date.
“So. Liv Worthing. The whole husband-dying thing—”
Liv puts her knife and fork together. “I’d rather not talk about it.”
She feels Mo’s eyes on her. “Okay. No dead husbands. So—what about boyfriends?”
Mo picks a piece of cheese from the side of the baking dish.
“Ill-advised shags?”
“Nope.”
Mo’s head shoots up. “Not one? In how long?”
“Four years,” Liv mumbles.
She is lying. There was one, three years ago, after well-meaning friends had insisted she had to “move on.” As if David had been some kind of obstacle. She had drunk herself halfway to oblivion to go through with it, and then wept afterward, huge, snotty sobs of grief and guilt and self-disgust. The man—she can’t even remember his name—had barely been able to contain his relief when she had said she was going home. Even now when she thinks about it she feels cold shame.
“Nothing in four years? And you’re... what? Thirty-two? What is this, some kind of sexual suttee? What are you doing, Worthing? Saving yourself for Mr. Dead Husband in the hereafter?”
“I’m Halston. Liv Halston. And... I just... haven’t met anyone I wanted to...” Liv decides to change the direction of this conversation. “Okay, how about you? Some nice self-harming Emo in the wings?” Defensiveness has made her spiky.
Mo’s fingers creep toward her cigarettes and retreat again.
“I do okay.”
Liv waits.
“I have an arrangement.”
