Page 18 of The Heir Apparent
Now I could make a proper dinner from odds and ends in the fridge. More than my medical degree, more than my bank account in my own name containing my own salary, it was my capacity to take care of myself that made me proud. I could suture a laceration and barely leave a scar, but it was my ability to make soup that felt like alchemy.
I spooned the orzo into bowls and pushed one towards Amira. She looked at it warily. “I can’t remember the last time I had dairy or pasta.”
I ate a mouthful. In our school years, she had watched in bewilderment as I dieted and deprived myself down to the bone. I did two hours of ballet a day for no other reason thanto arrest the development of my teenage body. I threw up every Christmas dinner until I was eighteen. I wondered, when she finally succumbed and joined this family, if she had vowed to herself that she would do it differently. But it could never be different. Mum was taller and slimmer than both of us, and she had denied herself so long her hair began to fall out. When Papa gave Isla the ring that now sat on Amira’s finger, she had a 27-inch waist. By their wedding day, she had shrunk down to 23 inches. I knew this fact not because my mother told me but because every woman in England somehow knows about Isla’s “handspan waist.”
“I bet you’ve been so stressed, you probably haven’t had a proper meal in days,” I said carefully.
It was an argument that might have worked on me once. Life was a relentless calculation of calories consumed. A few days of intense restriction might permit one indulgence like a full meal. She nodded slowly.
“I don’t need extra cheese on top, it’ll just hurt my stomach,” she said, pushing the plate of grated parmesan towards me.
“Would you like another martini?” I asked.
“Yes please,” she said, taking little pecks of individual orzo from the tines of her fork. “This is nice, thank you.”
We ate in silence. I poured another round of drinks, and we listened to the relentlessly upbeat music of our childhood. When Adele came on again, Amira grabbed my phone and started skipping through songs in search of something she liked.
“Is this your dog?” she asked of my phone background.
This was the first time in the decade since I’d left that a family member had asked me a single question about my life. Once Papa had realised I wasn’t coming back, he’d settled into an icy silence that lasted the rest of his life. The others followed his lead.
“That’s Ragu, Jack’s dog.”
“Is Jack your boyfriend?”
“He’s my friend,” I said, flushing. “I live in a cottage on his mum’s vineyard with another friend.”
She nodded and looked again at my phone. “Is Ragu a German short-haired pointer?”
“Yes, but they don’t use him for hunting. I mean, he kills a lot of things—rabbits, blackbirds. But that’s of his own accord,” I said, irrationally nervous.
“If his prey drive is that high, they need to train him to hunt,” she said absently. “Do you have any more photos?”
I opened my photo app and handed the phone back to her. “There’s nothing saucy in there, except a few gnarly wounds from the hospital. Just flick around.”
I drained my martini as she swiped. Ed Sheeran crooned over the speakers, something a teenaged Amira would never have allowed. I wondered what she made of it all, the life I had chosen at the end of the world over the one to which I had been born, the life Vikki had been desperate to give her. The monotonous tap of her finger suddenly stopped. She stared for a long time at whatever she’d found on my phone, her eyes narrowing.
“Who’s that?” she asked, turning the phone around for me to see.
I hesitated a moment. “That’s the other guy I live with, Finn. Would you like something else to drink?”
She stared at the screen. My phone displayed our “family photo” taken on Christmas Day: the three of us with our arms looped around each other, Ragu bored and unimpressed at our feet. We’d posed for it at the end of a long day drinking Jennings sparkling wine. It had been taken ten days earlier, but it might as well have been a hundred years ago.
“Yes please,” she said, pushing forward her glass. “What does Finn do for a living?”
“We’re in the same residency program,” I said, trying to keep my voice light. I was never sure how many details of Louis’s disastrous trip to the vineyard made it back to London. But clearly enough for her to still be furious at Finn and me.
She continued glaring, but seemed to decide to let it go when I proffered a fresh martini. She took the glass from my hands and sipped it.
“Okay, so that’s three drinks,” I said, desperate to change the subject. Even after I abandoned Louis, even after I lost him, I was still in the habit of protecting him. “If we stop now, we’ll be fine to inspect the flowers tomorrow and not look totally minging.”
Drake came on the speaker, and Amira pushed the volume all the way up to its limit. For the first time since I’d come careening back into her life twenty-four hours earlier, she smiled at me.
“Fuck the flowers,” she said.
At 3 a.m., I staggered into a guest room and flopped onto the bed. Four and a half martinis, it turned out, was too much. We had listened to the 2010s throwbacks before dancing through the early 2000s. By the time I was queuing up Beyoncé’s entire discography, Amira bent over the farmhouse sink in the kitchen and unleashed her dinner and drinks.
“Alright, bedtime,” I declared.
