“No,” says Hanna. “You’ve changed you. You wouldn’t be going out with him otherwise. I’m really pleased for you, Mum. Really pleased. You deserve it.”
“Did you like him, Hans?”
“Floyd?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah,” says Hanna. “Yeah. He seems OK.”
And that, coming from Hanna, is praise indeed.
24
Laurel doesn’t see Floyd that evening. But he calls her at seven o’clock, just as he’d said he’d do, and Laurel is surprised to feel a little pulse of annoyance.
“I’ll call you at seven,” he’d said. And here he is, calling her at seven. She might have enjoyed a few moments’ indulgent anticipation. For a minute she toys with the idea of not answering her phone, but then she checks herself. She’s doing it again, keeping too much of herself back. And this was exactly why she and Paul had not survived the years of Ellie’s disappearance, because ofher, because she’d never allowed herself to be properly subsumed into her relationship with him, had disapproved of him for loving her so deeply and unquestioningly, felt gently suffocated by the lack of gaps in his feelings for her. At the first moment of mutual desperation, she’d escaped into the airlock inside herself that she’d deliberately kept empty all those years.
“Hi,” she says brightly, “how are you?”
“I am very well indeed. Oh, apart from the gaping hole in my heart where you should be right now, of course.”
“Stop it,” she says teasingly, although she half means it.
“Do you not have a gaping hole in your heart, Laurel?”
“No,” she says. “No. But I am missing you.”
“I’ll take that,” says Floyd. “What are you up to?”
“Well, I have a glass of wine, naturally.”
“Are you dressed?”
“Yes. I am fully dressed. I am even wearing slippers.”
“Slippers, yes, carry on. What else?”
“A big cardigan.”
“Ooh, yeah. A big cardigan. How big exactly is your cardigan?”
“It’s huge. Gigantic. Really long sleeves that cover my hands. And a hole in the hem.”
“Oh, tatty then? A tatty cardigan?”
“Very tatty. Horribly tatty.” She laughs.
“No, no, don’t stop!” he jokes. “Tell me more about your big tatty cardigan!”
She laughs again and looks down at her phone as she hears another call coming in. It’s Jake’s number and Jake only ever calls her on a Wednesday, and she feels an instant jolt of primal worry and says, “Floyd, I’m going to have to call you back. Jake’s trying to get through to me.”
“Quickly, quickly! What color is it? Tell me it’s brown? Please.”
“No,” she says, “it’s black! Now go! I’ll call you back.”
“Jake,” she says, switching to his call.
“No,” says a female voice. “It’s not Jake. It’s Blue.”