Madly (New York 2)

“I am your sister. I was just so afraid when I found out that you wouldn’t think I was anymore, I—”

“You’re…you’re the worst. You’re the worst. The worst.” May choked. “I would never care about that. I would have helped you. I would’ve been on your side. But you never trusted me. You, you shoved me aside and decided I wasn’t your sister. Don’t tell me that you wanted to be my fucking sister. Sisters tell each other things. They—they’re for each other. Who were you for? Just yourself and your mean fear and your stupid business and no one.”

Allie felt the room, the noise, the heat of the small dining room spinning around her. She didn’t know where to look, or how to hold her body, or what to do. She looked at her plate, the oozing eggs and weird greens and oily pink meat, and felt sick.

“Everybody has known except for me. It’s so…typical I could scream.” But May didn’t scream, and she said this so softly, Allie could barely hear her. “You told some one-night stand before you told me.”

Then Ben came banging out of the kitchen, wearing a scrupulously white chef uniform and a scary expression that he shot right at Allie so hard that she jerked as though he had thrown a ladle at her. He didn’t look at her for more than that second, though, before he turned his attention to May, all of his attention, and came over.

“What’s going on?” He didn’t yell, but it felt like he was yelling.

“I’m going home, Ben. I’ll talk to you later, but I need a little time.” May grabbed her bag and stood up. Ben took her elbow and led her into the kitchen. They were a wall of us. Allie was them.

Allie was the worst.

Chapter 14

His brother had come to New York, the fruit of four years of thawing ice and awkward transatlantic phone calls, to sit in his living room in Manhattan, physically present, terribly familiar, and eat pizza.

“I’ve been thinking of moving back to London,” Winston said.

Nev grunted, then folded a slice of pizza and shoved half of it in his mouth like he’d been eating New York style his entire life instead of French cassoulet and salads with vegetable rosettes.

On the patio, Cath and Bea were laughing over Internet videos.

Winston was at sea.

He cleared his throat. “Beatrice seems to have everything under control here, and not to need my…help. So. It seems like the sensible thing to do.”

“You don’t think you’re a good father, is what you’re telling me?”

“I wouldn’t put it that way, precisely.”

“No, but that’s what you’re saying. You’re thinking of going back to London because you think you’re crap at being a father, but Bea thinks you’re a good father, except when you do things directly because you think you’re a bad father, which, actually, at least in the moment, makes you a bad father.”

Winston closed his eyes. He loved Neville desperately. But when he was like this, like an overeager retriever with a wet duck, he very much wanted to snipe at him. Particularly at the ever-so-thinning hairline he was trying to hide with that ridiculous barber cut and “hipster” beard.

“Come again?”

“Bea is just like you.”

Winston recalled Allie saying something similar, and his similar reaction of instant rejection. Hearing Nev say it, too, made him very much want to know what Nev thought,

and also worry about Allie, who had only texted him once today, to tell him it hadn’t gone well with her sister and she’d be back soon.

“You can’t see it because you’re you,” his brother said. “But it’s terribly obvious. When you were her age, at university, I was marking off the days until you’d come home on holiday in a datebook I hid inside a pigeonhole of my desk. You’d drive up in that ridiculous Vauxhall you had, and you’d whisk me off for a day of curry chips and racing forms, or take me to Stonehenge or over on the Chunnel for some two-hundred-pound French meal complete with cognac. You talked like she does, and you made the same faces and waved your hands around like she does, and you felt like her to be around. Like you were absolutely mad to take up every experience you could get your hands on.”

Winston nearly felt as though his brother had told him someone they had known as boys, or young men, had died.

He remembered all that, he did. That mad existence as a young man, his hopes.

Nev clapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t look so glum. The way I see it—the way Cath sees it, actually, since she’s the one always telling me this—is you’re going to die.”

“That’s a comfort.”

“Don’t be an ass. The point is that you’re not dead yet. That’s why I’m here, because you’re my brother. The same brother who took me to France, the same brother who tried to bollocks up my life a few years back, the same brother who bought me this pizza. I don’t want to die with everything fucked up between us, and neither do you.”

Nev picked up another slice of pizza, folded it and lifted it to his mouth. Grease dripped onto the rug beneath the coffee table.