Page 60 of Marry Me…Maybe?
‘She told him that you’d lent her something and she wanted to post it back.’ Her expression levelled out until she looked almost contrite. ‘I couldn’t ask him directly. I think he might have thrown me out of a window if I had.’
She gave a terse smile. The woman clearly found it difficult to tell a joke. What a curse that must be.
‘What can I do for you, Francesca?’ Emily asked, pulling herself together now she’d got over the shock of seeing Theo’s mother on her doorstep.
‘I wonder whether I could come in and talk to you? I have a few things I need to tell you.’
She frowned. ‘About Theo?’
‘Yes. And about me.’
Nodding slowly, wondering what the hell she was about to be told and accepting that she didn’t have the strength to refuse to hear it, she backed up so the woman could walk into her hallway. She realised that any link with Theo at this point was better than the nothing she’d been living with since she’d walked away from him.
‘Come into the living room,’ she said, leading the way.
Francesca walked over to one of her sofas and positioned herself daintily on the edge of it, waiting for Emily to sit down opposite before she began speaking.
‘I heard that your mother passed away. I wanted to offer my greatest sympathies,’ she said, her eyes soft and kind.
‘Thank you.’ Emily was taken aback by the woman’s opening gambit. She’d expected nothing less than a severe dressing-down.
‘So your mother didn’t go to school in France, then?’ Francesca asked, with a meaningful look in her eye.
Ah, so here it came…
‘No.’
‘She went to a boarding school here, didn’t she? My old school?’
‘Yes.’
‘I thought so.’
She moved back on the sofa a little and crossed her legs, as if settling in for a comfy chat.
‘I knew your mother at school. Not well, but I always liked her. She was really kind to me once. I was being bullied and she told them off in no uncertain terms. They never bothered me again. Even back then it was clear she suffered from malaise at times, though.’
She shook her head and smiled sadly.
Emily felt a strange weight lifting from her, as if Francesca’s version of her mother somehow rounded out all the other memories she had of her. The ones of when they had laughed and played and had fun together. Before she’d got sad and had flown into unpredictable violent rages, and taken to her bed a lot.
‘I knew I recognised you from somewhere,’ Francesca continued, apparently unaware of the intensity of the sorrow she’d caused to flood through Emily’s whole body. ‘You’re very much like your mother. You have the same mannerisms. The same hair and eyes.’
‘Yeah, I heard that a lot when I was young. Before she…’ Emily paused, realising she no longer had to reel out the lie that had almost become the truth in her mind over the years. ‘Before she was committed.’
Francesca nodded, seemingly accepting the confession without any kind of difficulty. ‘Theo is very much like me in many ways,’ she said, raising her eyebrows and pursing her lips. ‘It’s not surprising we butt heads all the time.’
Emily smiled sadly at her, trying not to dwell on how shebutted heads with Theo too because it only made the sorrow intensify.
‘I suppose that’s why we never got on too well when he was younger. I’m guessing he told you about the woman he got mixed up with right after Hugo’s death? And the wild behaviour he indulged in afterwards?’
Her gaze locked with Emily’s and she saw regret there.
‘Yes. He did tell me a bit about that.’
‘The thing you have to know, Emily, is that I knew what that Lauren woman was doing the first time I met her, and I so desperately wanted to save him from the pain of what was about to happen. Unfortunately, in my grief at losing Hugo, I didn’t handle things too well.’
‘No. That’s what Theo told me,’ she said, knowing there was no point in trying to placate the woman.
