let Toby keep all the furniture, disappointing him completely. He’d been itching for a fight about something, but she just wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. Let him be the one waiting for an emotional response of some kind for a change. She didn’t want his furniture, anyway. Nothing that was a link to her old life. Nothing but Jack.
None of that ultra-modern, minimalist designer stuff would fit here, anyway. She smiled again. She fitted here. Whitehaven wasn’t the first property she’d owned, but it was the first place she’d felt comfortable in since she’d left the shabby maisonette she’d shared with her father and siblings. She knew—just as surely as the first time she’d slid her foot into an exquisitely crafted designer shoe—that this was a perfect fit. She and this house understood each other.
The kitchen clock said it was twenty past eight. Ben sat at the old oak table, a lukewarm cup of instant coffee between his palms, and attempted to concentrate on the sports section of the paper instead of the second hand of the clock.
Megan had never been like this when they’d been married. Yes, she’d been a little self-absorbed at times, but she’d never shown this flagrant disregard for other people’s schedules, or boundaries, or … feelings. He wasn’t sure he liked the version of Megan that she’d gone in search of when she’d left him. Or this new boyfriend of hers that he wasn’t supposed to know about.
Twenty minutes later, just as his fingers were really itching to pick up the phone and yell at someone, he heard a car door slam. Jas bounced in through the back door and, before he could ask if her mother was going to make an appearance—and an apology—tyres squealed in the lane and an engine revved then faded.
‘Nice dinner?’ he asked, flicking a page of the paper over and trying not to think about the gallon of beef casserole still sitting in the oven, slowly going cold. Eating a portion on his own hadn’t had the comfort factor that casserole, by rights, ought to have.
Jas shrugged her shoulders as he looked up.
‘Just dinner, you know …’ she said. And, since she was eleven-going-on-seventeen, he supposed that was as verbose as she was going to get.
‘Have you done your homework?’
‘Mostly.’
This was quality conversation, this was. But he was better off sticking to neutral subjects while he was feeling like this. In the last couple of years as a single dad, he’d learned that transitions—picking-up and dropping-off times—were difficult, and it was his job to smooth the ripples, create stability. Being steady, normal, was what was required.
‘Define mostly,’ he said, smoothing the paper closed and standing up.
Jas dropped the envelope assorted junk she was clutching to her chest onto the table and threw her coat over the back of a chair. ‘Two more maths questions, and before you say anything …’
Ben closed his mouth.
‘… it doesn’t have to be in until Thursday. Can I just do it tomorrow? Please, Dad?’
She stared at him with those big brown eyes and blinked, just once. She looked so cute with her wavy blonde hair not quite sitting right in its shoulder-length style. His memory rewound a handful of years and he could hear her begging for just one more push on the swing.
‘Okay. Tomorrow it is.’
‘Thanks, Dad.’ Jas skirted the table and gave him a hug by just throwing her arms around him and squeezing, then she lifted a brightly coloured magazine out of the pile of junk on the table. ‘Recreational reading,’ she said, brandishing it and attempting to escape before he could inspect it more closely.
He wasn’t so old that his reflexes had gone into retirement. The magazine was out of her fingers and in front of his face before she’d fully disentangled herself from the hug.
‘What’s this trash?’
Jas made a feeble attempt at snatching it back. ‘It was Mum’s. She’d finished it and she said I could have it.’
Ben frowned. Buzz magazine. He’d never read it himself, but he knew enough from the bright slogans on the cover that it was the lowest form of celebrity gossip rag. The lead story seemed to be ‘Celebrity Cellulite’. Nice. What was Megan thinking of giving Jasmine a publication like this? Didn’t his ex know how impressionable young girls were at Jas’s age?
‘I don’t think this is appropriate.’
Jas rolled her eyes. ‘It’s interesting. All my friends read it.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘All of them?’
The nod that followed couldn’t have convinced even Jas herself.
‘That’s what I thought,’ he said. ‘I mean, there’s no substance in here. It’s just rubbish …’ He flicked through the pages, hoping his daughter would see what he saw. ‘It’s the worst kind of gossip. I—’
But then he stopped leafing idly through the pages, his whole frame frozen. His mouth worked while his brain searched for an appropriate sound. He placed the magazine on the table and stood, arms braced either side of it, as he stared again at one particular grainy photograph.
‘Told you it was interesting,’ Jas said with a smirk.
‘But that’s …’
Jas turned so she was side-by-side with him and leaned against his bunched-up arm muscles, looking down at the magazine too. ‘Lulu Thornton,’ she informed him, in an astoundingly matter-of-fact voice. ‘Or Louise as she now likes to be called. Mum thinks she’s a waste of space. Most people do.’
‘Lulu who?’ he whispered hoarsely.
Jas punched him on the arm. ‘Da-ad! You’re stuck in the Stone Age! You know … She married Tobias Thornton, the actor.’
Again … who?
‘We watched him in that action movie last weekend. The one with the bomb on the private jet?’
Oh. Him.
The picture was dull and not very clear—the product of a telephoto lens the size of a space shuttle, no doubt. But there was no doubting the fierce glare in those eyes as she squared up to the paparazzo, her son clutched protectively to her, his face hidden. He’d been on the receiving end of that very same look just a few hours ago and it still gave him the shivers thinking about it.
‘And she’s famous?’ he asked Jas, trying to sound as uninvolved as he actually was, but less involved than he felt.
Jas nodded. ‘Well, famous for being married to somebody famous. That’s all.’
Married. He should shut the magazine right now and condemn it to the recycling bin. Only … she’d said she was divorced. Almost divorced. And, in the few moments that she’d let her icy guard down, he’d known she was telling the truth. The gaudy headline splashed across the top of the feature seemed to confirm his gut instinct: ‘Louise’s Private Hell Since Split!’
He took one last look at her image and felt a twinge of sympathy. Going through a divorce was bad enough,
