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EIGHTY

They got back from Bangate Cove an hour ago and Ash is still in a state of shock.

She goes to the fridge for wine and notices that the bowl of vegan curry Nick Radcliffe had made for her is still in there, under cling film.

She stares at it blindly for a moment. An image flashes into her mind of that tall, vital man leaning against the kitchen counter, blue eyes flashing, a tea towel over his shoulder, the lovingly tended curry on the hob behind him.

Then she thinks of him just now, striding out into the icy water, plummeting into the depths, disappearing.

She pulls the bowl from the fridge and scrapes the contents with some relish into the bin before rinsing the bowl and putting it in the dishwasher. There, she thinks, the last traces, gone.

Her mother walks into the kitchen a moment later. She looks shell-shocked, gray, her hair tangled up by the wind and sea spray into a thick thatch.

“What a mess,” she says. “What a horrible, horrible fucking mess.” She sighs loudly.

“And now we’ll never know what happened to Tara.

What happened to Amanda. Those poor boys.

Poor Emma. The lack of closure is…” She sighs again.

And then she looks straight at Ash and says, “But we’re going to be great.

Aren’t we? You and I? You’re going to be great.

I’m going to be great. We’re both going to be great? Aren’t we?”

And they are going to be great. They really are.

They’ve been talking a lot about the future these last few days.

Nina is going to find a business partner to help her with Paddy’s restaurants.

She’s going to sell this big old house that was bigger, she’d told Ash in the car just now, than she ever wanted or needed her house to be—Paddy’s house, she told Ash, it was always Paddy’s house.

She will downsize to a modern apartment on the beach in Folkestone with a terrace directly over the sea, with bedrooms for Ash and for Arlo so that they will always have a home to come back to.

Ash knows now that her time has finally come.

The weight she has been laboring under for all of these months since those letters started to arrive from Ritchie Lloyd, since the police turned up at her flat, since being diagnosed with a personality disorder, since her father died, and since Nick fucking Radcliffe walked into their lives—it’s all gone.

She is sane. She is clear. She is pure and unfiltered, and she is ready now, ready to leave the Riviera, her mother’s protective bosom, her home comforts, and the shadow of her father’s memory.

Because that’s another thing that’s changed.

A letter had arrived that morning in a handwritten envelope, addressed to Ash.

It was from Nick.

Dear Ash

We never did get around to those life-coaching sessions, did we?

There was so much I would have liked to share with you if we had.

But mainly this: your family was not perfect, it really wasn’t.

Your father was not perfect and your mother is not perfect, and really, if you want to heal yourself and find your jumping-off platform into the adult life you so want for yourself, I suggest you sit down with your mother and make her have a difficult conversation with you.

She’ll know what you’re talking about and then it will be up to her whether or not she’s capable of sharing the truth with you.

And then and only then can you become the woman you are destined to become.

Get out there. Own your truth. Seize the world by the balls. Be the best person you possibly can.

Yours, with good intentions, Nick

Ash had read the letter twice in quick succession, her heart racing hard inside her chest. She’d looked at the back of her mother’s head, staring at her laptop on the kitchen table.

“Mum,” she’d said, sliding the letter on the table in front of her for her to read. “What does he mean?”

And her mother had told her everything. Every last thing.

Ash had taken it in, held it inside her heart, her gut, her mind, felt it start to rip her into tiny pieces, but then she’d taken control of the feelings, turned them around and looked at them objectively and thought, Yes, of course.

Of course. It had all made a weird, sickening kind of sense of everything, of the feeling she’d always had that her life was a story that someone was writing about her and not a real thing.

But it was a real thing, it had been, all along.

And she was not a doll or a puppet, not an actor playing the role of “soft-hearted daughter” in the movie of her life, she was a real person, with edges and spikes and layers and terrible truths to confront.

And while she will always be her mother’s child, she is also an adult, and it’s time now for her to go.

Nick Radcliffe might well have thought he was throwing a hand grenade into the glossy facade of Ash’s fake golden world, but actually, he had done her a favor, her and her mother.

Now they could walk side by side, holding each other up, as equals and as friends.

They’d embraced for a while then, and Ash had breathed in the scent of her mother, the scent that has always brought her to safety, to home. And then they’d set off together for Bangate Cove.

But something occurs to Ash now as she stares down at the letter still sitting unfolded on the kitchen table where they’d left it.

The font.

The layout.

The sheen of the paper.

She’s seen a letter like this before, she knows she has.

She runs up the stairs to her bedroom and pulls open the bottom drawer of her desk, rifles through piles of stuff until she finds what she’s looking for. The letters that Ritchie Lloyd had sent her during that insane, crazy summer when she lost her mind, her reputation, her self-worth—her way.

She holds the two letters up, side by side.

They are identical.