Page 80 of Meet me at the Seaside Cottages

She swings her expensive handbag over her hips, turns around, does not say goodbye.

*

Shelby is outside the pub, having a cigarette. They give a small nod to each other. Essie is so sure Connor will be outside in a moment that she doesn’t want to head off quite yet. Then, as the minutes pass, and Shelby takes a drag and stares flatly at her phone, and the large moon gleams down on the black maw of the harbour, Essie realises something terrible, but something she has always known; Connor is choosing his mates over her. It was one thing when she was being funny about the deer. But when it comes to money . . .

She pulls her coat around herself against the cold northern wind and slowly makes her way up the high street, back towards the tiny bedroom, not even hers, in her mother’s house. What more can she even lose?

Shelby, she can feel, watches her all the way.

31

‘Um, Essie?’

Janey is running late and has a packed day, as well as a kitchen that is covered in late-night toast crumbs. Janey just shouts up the stairs. If the girl is going to behave like a grumpy teenager, she’s just going to have to treat her like one. ‘Essie, where’s the car?’

Essie has tossed and turned all night. Every time she nearly dropped off, she remembered all over again. Were they broken up? Was this a fight they could fix? Why had she ever come back here?

‘What?’ she growls.

‘My car. You know. That you borrowed yesterday for all your smart friends and promised to bring back home clean and full of fuel?’

Essie sits up.

‘Oh, crap,’ she says. It is, of course, still sitting outside the End of the World. She’d meant to wake early and go and get it . . . she’d thought she’d be waking up with Connor, in his beautiful room with the rolltop bath . . . oh, crap.

She checks her phone and sees lots of missed messages. He wants to talk, thinks he should come back and see her by himself another weekend. She’s still utterly livid. With Connor, with herself, with Tris, with Dwight and his stupid greedy look; theentire bloody situation. She needs quiet to think. She’s trying to work out what had happened last night. All the boys, talking about money, talking toDwightabout money, while she was sitting right there. Oh, God. And she had stropped out, and what had that gained? Precious little, except the question in her mind: however sweet Connor was, did he really see her as something serious? It didn’t feel like it. She finds herself wondering, too, was she trying to prove something to herself? To see how much she could make him care? Make him stay? Because there was a man in her life before who, the second she moved away, vanished immediately. Ugh.

‘ESSIE!’

‘For God’s sake, Mum, it’s at Shelby’s bar, stop freaking out.’

*

Janey walks up the stairs, trembling with rage. She doesn’t know where this rage comes from suddenly, this towering fury. It’s like a volcano going off inside her, hot and bitter to her very core. She never thought of herself as an angry person – sad, of course, when her marriage broke down. But jaunty, on the whole; cheery. This rage monster is absolutely blinding her.

‘Essie!’

‘Whaaat?’ Essie says through the closed door, sounding like Kevin the Teenager.

‘It’s my morning to go and see Johnson! To bring him his breakfast so he doesn’t start eating stuff he shouldn’t be eating, because Lish is working all night at the hospital. Then I’ve got a full clinic! Essie, how could you?’

Janey has had such a disappointing few days. Getting to know Lowell, getting to know his family, even, feels like being shown a gift that is never ever going to be yours.Here’s what you could have won. If you were younger and sexier. Thanks for the sympathythough!She is feeling profoundly down and disappointed, and the last thing she needs is this – a fully grown adult in her house behaving as thoughshe’sthe unreasonable one because she needs her car. She erupts like a volcano.

‘You’re not even LISTENING to me,’ says Janey, almost in a shriek. ‘I run EVERYTHING for you, I run myself RAGGED shopping and washing and doing everything round here for you, and you treat me like absolute scum. I spend my whole life bending over backwards for you and terrified of upsetting you and I’ve just trained you to be completely selfish!’

She regrets the words the second they’re out of her mouth. There is an ominous silence. Then the door opening. Essie looks absolutely numb.

‘I know.’ She nods. ‘I know how you feel about me.’ She is deathly white.

‘Don’t start with that CRAP,’ shouts Janey. ‘Haven’t you had enough self-pity yet? How long are you going to keep blaming me – not Colin, of course, not your dad, just me – for every stupid bloody thing that happens for the rest of your life? Well, have fun, because I am OUT.’

Janey is so blinded by tears she is not even sure she can drive by the time she stumbles to Shelby’s bar. But she manages to go to see Johnson, who is insistent he can do everything himself – is better, even as he growls at her for not bringing him contraband cake. She goes round the kitchen putting things he likes out of reach; he is still not steady enough on his feet to climb a chair to get at the chocolate biscuits. She takes him out for a wobbly turn around the garden, and then hands over gratefully to Emma, who gives Janey a big hug that makes her feel worse instead of better. Other people’s daughters seem to have no trouble hugging her. Then off to her clinic.

*

‘There is literally nothing wrong with you, and this is an NHS appointment. Other people need them!’

She is trying, but it is very difficult to be cross with Mr Zandisky for very long.

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