Page 97 of We All Live Here
Lila thinks about this as they stroll back toward the tube station. This has been the worst thing about it all, and perhaps the reason why shehasn’t felt as destroyed by the end of Gabriel as she might have expected. She had been so obsessed by the Shiny Object that had been Gabriel Mallory that she had completely failed to think about the far better man whose feelings she had trampled over. Every time she thinks about him picking up that typewritten chapter, the shock on his face, she feels a shame that ends up somewhere in her boots, a dreadful, chill thing, like the kind of damp cold that gets into your bones on the worst kind of winter day.
“I don’t think he’ll talk to me.”
“Then you send him a long text explaining what an idiot you’ve been, and you absolutely take responsibility for all of it, and you say you hope that one day he can find it in himself to forgive you, especially as the book has been canceled.” She turns to look at Lila and stops for a moment. “You did cancel it, right?”
Lila pulls a face.
“Oh, Lila. For God’s sake.”
•••
The thing is,Lila cannot find a way round it. She knows she has to cancel the book. The contract had arrived in her inbox, followed a few days later by a cheerful digital reminder to sign. She had opened it, looked at the figure, with all its lovely zeros, and wanted to cry. She has no other way of earning money, not the kind she needs to support everyone. She has considered a thousand alternatives, but everything she thinks up sounds weak, even to her. Dan has cut her child support, her savings are down to an amount that would barely fill her car with petrol, and she has no idea what she and the girls will live on, once that is gone. She sent Jensen a payment for the last of the garden work the previous week. It was not acknowledged, and she was not surprised. But that was the last sizable chunk from her royalties, and she had not felt able to ask Bill for any of it, given he no longer even wanted to live with them.
There is nothing for it. She will have to sell the house. And somehow this fact mixes with the cold hard fury of the last few months, and finally propels her into action.
•••
“Hi! I waswondering how you were.”
Lila had pulled Jessie’s number from the school WhatsApp, expressing interest in coming to her shop to buy some art supplies: a lie, but it sounded better than “I’d like to come and wrench your heart out through your ribcage with my bare hands.” She has arrived forty minutes before she is due to pick up Violet, and stands in the little shop, stacked to the ceiling with tubes of paint, A3 cartridge paper, and crafting supplies, breathing in the faint smell of turpentine. “Much better, thanks,” she says, trying to ignore the distinct sweatiness of her palms.
“You went so pale in that coffee shop! Does that happen to you often?”
Jessie is wearing an old-fashioned shop apron in navy blue. Her hair is clipped up and she looks young, fresh, and pretty. Lila gazes at her surreptitiously as she serves a customer: an old woman who counts out the price of two balls of wool with gnarled, arthritic fingers. It is easy to imagine how attractive she was to Gabriel. The mystery was why he wanted someone else at the same time.
“Would you like a cup of tea? I can nip out the back to make us one while it’s quiet.”
Lila declines. “Actually,” she says. “I need to talk to you about something.”
Jessie is apparently perceptive enough to detect the change in tone. She gazes warily at Lila for a minute, then walks out from behind the till. “What?” she says baldly.
“This is really awkward.”
“Go on.” Jessie’s smile has disappeared.
“That headache I got when—when we met. It wasn’t a headache. I was—” Lila swallows. “I was just shocked when you mentioned Gabriel Mallory. Because…” It’s horrible what’s happening on Jessie’s face. It’s as if she already knows, and her whole face is begging Lila silently not to say the thing. “I—I had been seeing him. I thought it was just me.”
For a moment, everything in the shop grows still.
“Gabriel—Gabriel was seeingyou?”
All the color has drained from Jessie’s face. For a crazy moment Lila wonders if that was what she had looked like when Jessie had said the same to her. She suspects she hadn’t looked quite so photogenic.
“You meanseeingseeing?”
“We had sex. And were talking most evenings.”
Her mouth has dropped open. “Since when?”
“Well, two or three months ago, and the sex happened…in the last month.”
They flinch as the bell rings at the door. As they turn, a man in a checked shirt and salmon-colored trousers walks in, holding a list. He squints at it, then looks up at them.
“I need some gouache. Is that how you pronounce it?” He says it “gwayche.”
There is a short silence.
“Goo-arsh,” says Jessie, numbly. “It’s over here.” She walks the man to the far corner of the shop, where all the paints are on display in little white tubes. “Don’t go over as far as that bit. They’re all watercolors.” She turns back toward Lila, her face still rigid with shock.
