“Maybe,” she says. “I’m pretty sure that’s how I work.”
“I’ll take what I can get,” he says, rolling back to his side of the bed and pulling the duvet over himself. “I’ll take what I can get.”
Downstairs the house is quiet and filled with pools of morning sun. Laurel pokes her head around the kitchen door; Poppy is not in there. She walks in, the soles of last night’s tights catching against splinters in the soft floorboards, and she switches on the kettle. Beyond the kitchen window a cat sits on the garden wall and observes her. There’s a loaf of bread on the counter, a white bloomer, half-gone. She cuts a slice and searches the fridge for butter. Inside is evidence of the life that Floyd and Poppy live when she’s not here: the remnants of half-eaten meals, the tin-foil containers of leftover takeaways, open packets of ham and cheese and pâté and pots of yogurt. She takes the butter and spreads the bread thickly. Then she makes herself a mug of tea and takes the bread and the tea to the table by the window. In solitude she thinks about Floyd’s pronouncement. She’d been half expecting it. She’d wanted it. But now that she’s got it, she’s worrying at it, picking at it, overthinking it.
Why, she wonders, does he want me? What did he see when he walked into that café last month, what did he see that he liked so much? And why can’t he live without me? What does it even mean anyway? When her children were small they’d sometimes say, “What would you do if I died?” And she would reply, “I would die too, because I could not live without you.” And then her child had died and she had found that somehow, incredibly, she could live without her, that she had woken every morning for a hundred days, a thousand days, three thousand days and she had lived without her.
So maybe what Floyd meant was that he felt his life did not make as much sense without her and if that was what he meant, then maybe, yes, maybe she did feel that way, too. Paul had never made such proclamations. A simple “I love you” was how he’d announced the depth of his feelings. Still, she’d made him wait months before she’d reciprocated.
She wipes the crumbs from the plate into the bin, places her mug in the sink, and picks up her handbag and her coat. In the hallway she finds her shoes: last night’s heels. She slips them on wishing she’d thought to bring a flat pair. She is about to leave when she remembers the bag of birthday gifts sitting in the kitchen: Paul’s book, a necklace from Jake and Blue, a bottle of her favorite perfume from Hanna. When she comes back into the hallway she sees a figure beyond the front door, and then there is the clatter of metal as a bunch of letters is forced through the letterbox and lands on the doormat. She picks them up and places them on the console.
Her eye is caught, as she turns to leave, by the letter on the top. It looks formal, probably financial: a fat white A4 envelope.
Miss Noelle Donnelly
The name rings a bell.
She wonders for a moment why mail addressed to a complete stranger would be delivered here. But then she realizes. Of course. Noelle Donnelly must be Poppy’s mum.
In the front garden she looks up and sees Floyd standing in his bedroom window, his mouth turned downward into a sad face, his hands pressed against the glass. She smiles and waves at him. He smiles and waves back, blows her a kiss, draws a heart in his breath on the windowpane.
Paul was right, she thinks; she is allowed this. She just needs to work out how to believe it.
There are more gifts for Laurel at Jackie and Bel’s house that day. The twins have made her a box of chocolate truffles, some more successfully truffle-shaped than others, and Jackie and Bel have bought her gift vouchers for a spa in Hadley Wood. They’ve made her a cake, too, the first cake of her birthday. It’s a Victoria sponge, her favorite. She blows out the candles and smiles at the boys’ singing of “Happy Birthday to You.” She drinks a glass of champagne and she tells her friends all about the previous evening, the relating of which has them both agog. They tell her that she looks glowing, that her hair is shining, her eyes are sparkling, that she has never looked better. They say that they will invite them over for lunch next week, her and Floyd, and Poppy too maybe, that they cannot wait to meet this man who has brought light back into their friend’s world.
And all the time Laurel is thinking that this feels like a normal Saturday at Jackie and Bel’s, but also not like a normal Saturday at Jackie and Bel’s. Because for the first time in years there’s an energy somewhere outside her own body, an energy that belongs to her yet isn’t of her. It calls her and it pulls her, and instead of lingering after tea and cake as she normally would, instead of trying to squeeze as much normality out of her time with her oldest friends as possible, she finds her hand on her handbag at five o’clock, words of thanks and farewell coming from her mouth. Her friends squeeze her hard in their hallway and there’s a sense shared by all of them that things have changed, as they changed all those years ago when Jackie and Bel told her they were a couple, as they did when Ellie disappeared, as they did when the twins were born, and as they did when Paul left. The ebb and flow of need and priorities was moving things along again and Laurel knows that she will not need her Saturdays here as much as she once did.
She climbs into her car and she drives as fast as she can back to Floyd’s house.
The letter is still there, on the console when she walks in, but someone has crossed out the address and written “Return to Sender/Not known at this address” on it.
The name shouts out at her again.
Noelle Donnelly. Noelle Donnelly.
Why does she know that name?
“How was your lunch?” asks Floyd.
“Lovely,” she says, “really lovely. Look”—she shows him the box of homemade truffles—“the boys made these for me. Isn’t that sweet? And we’re invited as a couple next weekend. If you want to go?”
“I’d love to,” he says, hanging up her coat for her, and then her scarf.
Poppy rushes downstairs at the sound of Laurel’s return and throws her arms around her.
“Oh!” says Laurel. “That’s nice!”
“I missed you this morning,” she says. “I thought I’d see you.”
“Sorry,” says Laurel. “I had to rush home to get ready for lunch.”
Floyd has opened a bottle of wine in the kitchen and poured Laurel a large glass, which sits on the kitchen counter waiting for her.
“Funny,” she says absentmindedly, swinging herself onto a stool. “I think maybe I might know someone who used to live in this house.”
He puts the wine bottle back in the fridge and turns to her, an eyebrow raised. “Oh yes?”
“Yes. There’s a letter on your console. For Noelle Donnelly. And I can’t for the life of me remember how I know the name, but I do. I thought...” She treads carefully. “For a moment, I thought maybe it was Poppy’s mum.”