Olivia’s head turned towards me. “It wasn’t as bad as it sounds, Frank. Truly. She didn’t think of it as lying to you. I told her that we might have to wait a while before we talked to you about it, because you’d had a big argument with your family, and she said, ‘Like that time I had that fight with Chloe, and all week I didn’t even want to think about her or I cried.’ She understands more than you think.”
“I don’t want her protecting me. Ever. I want it to be the other way round.”
Something moved across Olivia’s face, something a little wry and a little sad. She said, “She’s growing up, you know. In a few years she’ll be a teenager. Things change.”
“I know,” I said. “I know.” I thought about Holly sprawled in her bed upstairs, tearstained and dreaming, and about the night we made her: the low triumphant laugh in Liv’s throat, her hair wrapped round my fingers, the taste of clean summer sweat on her shoulder.
After a few minutes Olivia said, “She’ll need to talk about all this, in the morning. It would help her if we were both there. If you want to stay in the spare room…”
“Thanks,” I said. “That’d be good.”
She stood up, shook out the throw and folded it over her arm. “The bed’s made up.”
I tilted my glass. “I’ll finish this first. Thanks for the drink.”
“Several drinks.” Her voice had the sad ghost of a smile in it.
“Those too.”
Behind the sofa she stopped and her fingertips came down, so tentatively I barely felt them, on my shoulder. She said, “I’m so sorry about Kevin.”
I said, and I heard the rough edge on my voice, “That was my baby brother. It doesn’t matter how he went out that window, I should have caught him.”
Liv caught her breath like she was about to say something urgent, but after a moment she let it out in a sigh. She said very softly, maybe to herself, “Oh, Frank.” Her fingers slipped off my shoulder, leaving small cold spots where they had been warm, and I heard the door click quietly behind her.
When Olivia tapped lightly on the spare-room door, I went from dead asleep to awake and depressed in under a second, even before any of the context came back to me. I had spent way too many nights in that spare room, back when Liv and I were in the process of discovering that she no longer felt like being married to me. Even the smell of it, emptiness and a dainty spritz of fake jasmine, makes me feel sore and tired and about a hundred, like all my joints are worn down to the quick.
“Frank, it’s half past seven,” Liv said quietly, through the door. “I thought you might want to talk to Holly, before she goes to school.”
I swung my legs out of bed and rubbed my hands over my face. “Thanks, Liv. I’ll be there in a minute.” I wanted to ask if she had any suggestions, but before I could come up with the words I heard her heels going down the stairs. She wouldn’t have come into the spare room anyway, possibly in case I met her in my birthday suit and tried to lure her into a quickie.
I’ve always loved strong women, which is lucky for me because once you’re over about twenty-five there is no other kind. Women blow my mind. The stuff that routinely gets done to them would make most men curl up and die, but women turn to steel and keep on coming. Any man who claims he’s not into strong women is fooling himself mindless: he’s into strong women who know how to pout prettily and put on baby voices, and who will end up keeping his balls in their makeup bags.
I want Holly to be the one in millions. I want her to be everything that bores me stupid in a woman, soft as dandelions and fragile as spun glass. No one is turning my kid to steel. When she was born I wanted to go out and kill someone for her, so she would know for sure, all her life, that I was ready to do it if it needed doing. Instead, I landed her with a family that had already, within a year of first laying eyes on her, taught her to lie and broken her heart.
Holly was cross-legged on her bedroom floor in front of her dollhouse, with her back to me. “Hello, sweetheart,” I said. “How’re you doing?”
Shrug. She had her school uniform on. In the navy-blue blazer her shoulders looked so slight I could have spanned them one-handed.
“Can I come in for a bit?”
Another shrug. I shut the door behind me and sat down on the floor next to her. Holly’s dollhouse is a work of art, a perfect replica of a big Victorian house, complete with tiny overcomplicated furniture and tiny hunting scenes on the walls and tiny servants being socially oppressed. It was a present from Olivia’s parents. Holly had the dining-room table out and was polishing it furiously with a chewed-looking piece of kitchen roll.
“Sweetheart,” I said, “it’s OK that you’re really upset about your uncle Kevin. So am I.”
Her head bent down farther. She had done her own plaits; there were wisps of pale hair sprouting out of them at odd angles.
“Got any questions you want to ask me?”
The polishing slowed down, just a fraction. “Mum said he fell out a window.” Her nose was still stuffed up from all the crying.
