Truly Madly Guilty

'Can we?' said Erika. She didn't know if she should remind him that she was in therapy.

'Everybody wants the babies,' said Oliver, ignoring her. 'The cute little babies. But what they really need is foster parents for the older kids. The angry ones. The broken ones.' He stopped and suddenly he seemed to lose confidence. He picked up his superfood smoothie. 'I just thought ... well, I thought maybe we could consider it because maybe we'd have an understanding, or at least an inkling, of what those kids are going through.' He sucked on his straw. She could see the harbour reflected in his sunglasses.

Erika ate her salad and thought of Clementine's parents. She saw Pam making up the stretcher bed for her to stay the night, yet again, flicking her wrists so that the crisp, white sheets floated in the air: the beautiful, clean fragrance of bleach was still Erika's favourite smell in the world. She saw Clementine's dad, sitting in the passenger seat of his car while Erika sat in the driver's seat for the first time. He showed her how to put her hands at 'a quarter to three' on the steering wheel. 'Everyone else says ten to two,' he said. 'But everyone else is wrong.' She still drove with her hands at a quarter to three.

What was that phrase people used? Pay it forward.

'So let's say we do it,' said Erika. 'We take on one of these broken kids.'

Oliver looked up. 'Let's say we do.'

'According to this article, it's going to be terrible.'

'That's what it says,' agreed Oliver. 'Traumatic. Stressful. Awful. We might fall in love with a kid who ends up going back to a biological parent. We might have a kid with terrible behavioural issues. We might find our relationship is tested in ways we could never imagine.'

Erika wiped her mouth with her napkin and stretched her arms high above her head. The sun warmed the top of her scalp, giving her a sensation of molten warmth.

'Or it might be great,' she said.

'Yeah,' said Oliver. He smiled. 'I think it might be great.'

chapter eighty-six 'Do you want distracting talk?' said Sam as he drove her into the city. 'Or calming silence?'

'I don't know,' said Clementine. 'I can't decide.'

It was a little after ten on a Saturday morning. Her audition wasn't until two. The ten minutes past ten leaving time had been calculated to take into account anything that could possibly go wrong.

'I can drive myself,' Clementine had told Sam last night.

'What are you talking about?' said Sam. 'I always drive you to your auditions.'

She thought with mild surprise, So we're still us then? Maybe they were, although they still went off each night to sleep in separate rooms.

Something had changed over the last week since the first aid course; nothing dramatic, in fact the opposite. It was as though a feeling of utter mundanity had settled upon them, like the start of a new season, fresh and familiar all at once. All the anger and recriminations had gone, drained away. It reminded Clementine of that feeling when you were recovering from being ill, when the symptoms were gone but you still felt light-headed and peculiar.

The girls were with Clementine's parents today and they were both in fine form. Holly had come home from school yesterday with a Merit Certificate for Excellent Behaviour in Class, which Clementine suspected was really a Merit Certificate for No Longer Behaving Like a Crazy Person in Class. 'The old Holly is back,' her teacher had told Clementine in the playground, and she'd done a little 'Phew!' swipe of the back of her hand across her forehead, which made Clementine think that Holly's behaviour at school must have been much worse than she or Sam had been made aware.

Ruby had said Whisk could stay home today and have a little rest. She appeared to be losing interest in Whisk. Clementine could already see how poor Whisk was going to slip unobtrusively from their lives, like friends sometimes did.

'Okay, so there's no need to panic because we've allowed enough time for exactly this possibility,' said Sam, as the traffic on the bridge came to a stop and a neon sign flashed in urgent red letters: INCIDENT AHEAD. EXPECT DELAYS.

Clementine breathed in deeply through her nostrils and out through her mouth.

'I'm fine,' she said. 'I'm not thrilled, but I'm fine.'

Sam held out his palms as if in meditation. 'We are Zen masters.'

Clementine studied the crisp white curves of the Opera House's sails against the blue sky. Thankfully the Opera House was one of the venues where she knew she'd be given her own warm-up room, and she wouldn't have to share with other cellists, or worse, talk to the chatty ones. There were plenty of dressing-rooms available, some with harbour views. It would be a comfortable, pleasant process. Her audition would be in the rarefied atmosphere of the concert hall.

She looked back at the road. The traffic inched forward past two cars with crushed bonnets. There were police and an ambulance with the back doors open, and a man in a suit sat on the kerb with his head in his hands.

'Erika said something the other day and it sort of stuck with me,' said Clementine. She hadn't been planning to say this but all of a sudden she was saying it, as if she'd been subconsciously planning it.

'What's that?' said Sam warily.

'She said, "I choose my marriage."'

'She chooses her marriage. What does that mean?' said Sam. 'That doesn't make sense. She chooses her marriage over what?'