Evita frowned and pursed her lips, but Cath knew she was wavering. Time to push. “You have to choose the lesser of two evils, Evita. Either you spend dozens of hours knitting her a sweater she hates because it looks like something her grandmother would wear, or you spend ten hours knitting her something she likes because it makes her look like a tramp.”
Evita raised an eyebrow.
“What?” Cath asked. “She’s thirteen years old. Looking like a tramp is her highest aspiration in life.”
And then the most astonishing thing happened—Evita laughed. It didn’t last long, but it was a genuine laugh, and it seemed to surprise her as much as it did Cath.
“You don’t have a very high opinion of Beatrice,” Evita said.
“Oh, please. Are you trying to tell me you didn’t spend your teenage years stealing lipstick from your mother and making out with boys she didn’t approve of? I bet you were the hottest thing since sliced bread.”
Evita tsked dismissively, but she couldn’t conceal her amusement. Richard said, “Watch what you say, darling. I’m the only person in the room who knew you back then, and I could tell tales on you if I wanted to.”
“Shush, Richard,” Evita replied, her Cruella persona firmly back in place. “Honestly.” She turned her attention back to the sketch. “This looks like a very heavy piece. What weight of yarn did you have in mind?”
Got her.
Evita would make the sweater. Cath had won her over, maybe even won the woman’s respect. It was a major victory, and one that might eventually develop into friendship.
Except after tomorrow, you’ll never see her again.
The reminder jolted her out of her reverie. Leyton was only Limbo. She and Nev weren’t married, and they weren’t going to be.
“Heavy,” she said. “You want something really chunky, and those giant turkey-baster needles.”
Nev’s mother frowned to indicate her distaste for the whole notion of chunky yarn and giant needles. Cath got it. They were gauche. She was gauche. The sweater wouldn’t belong in this family any more than she did.
“Don’t worry,” Cath reassured her. “It’ll be over quick, and then you can forget it ever happened.”
She was no longer talking about the sweater.
Chapter Seventeen
Until Winston showed up to spoil it, it was the most pleasant morning Nev could ever remember spending with his parents. All down to Cath, of course. She chatted with his mother about yarn weights and gauges and other mysterious knitting things, and then she reclaimed his sketch pad and began making notes with his charcoal pencil while carrying on a conversation with his father about German art, which she seemed to know rather a lot about.
When Winston appeared in the entranceway, he wore a remote, hard expression, and his eyes shone with a manic light Nev recognized from childhood. His stomach tightened in an instinctual response he hadn’t felt for years. Winston was up to something. The bad kind of something.
“Where have you been?” their mother asked. “Come and sit for a while.”
Winston stayed put. “I’m terribly sorry to interrupt, Mother, but I’d like to speak to you and Father and Neville privately. May I have a few minutes in the library?”
The request seemed to fluster the normally unflappable Evita, who sputtered, “Well, I don’t know. I think not. It would be terribly rude to leave Cath on her own. But perhaps, if it’s important …”
Cath rose then, her eyes on Winston, and Evita fell silent. His brother and the woman he loved stared at each other for what seemed a long time, some silent communication passing between them.
“I’ll go,” she said.
She dropped the sketchbook on the couch and walked straight out of the room without so much as glancing in his direction. She departed like royalty, like the faerie queen she was—spine straight, head held high, footfalls inaudible on the thick carpet as if she were floating.
Nev ought to have admired her fortitude, but he found himself shuddering instead, filled with a dreadful uncertainty. She’d left the room like he was nobody to her. Perhaps it was true. He’d find out soon enough. Trouble had been approaching, slow and inexorable, since he’d asked Cath to come to Leyton with him. Now it had arrived.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“I had her investigated.”
“Winston!” his mother said. But her indignation was put on, her tone the one she used to feign surprise. She’d known. She’d probably asked him to do it.
“Over the bank holiday weekend?” Nev asked. It was an inane question, but then he always responded to his family’s insanity this way, with flippant calm. It was what they expected of him. It was what he expected of himself.