Page 119 of Famous Last Words

‘Shush. Take your pick. I have no idea what the cakes are.’

Niall nods as he remembers the day she came back to him. Knocked on his door out of the blue. Asked if he wanted a tea. He’d said yes. They’d had five each. Whiled away an afternoon together, and only when the sun descended had they got on to the important stuff.

It’s evening, now, again, and Colombia bustles around them. Hot and colourful and only slightly dangerous – it’s best for his trainees to learn on the ground, and this week’s course is all about Bogotá and its varied practices. Viv walks more closely to him than at home, and Niall’s glad she came. He wouldn’t have come if she hadn’t wanted to.

‘It’s coffee and walnut,’ Viv says, taking a bite, ‘old-fashioned but nice.’

Niall gazes at her. Perhaps she no longer thinks about back then, their separation, their reunion, but Niall does, every single day. Viv comes first, work second, and that’s the natural order it has to be.

She shows him the other slices, and Niall thinks there could literally be a piece of shit in that box and he would still eat it with her.

‘What do you want to do tonight, and until we go home?’ Niall asks.

‘Don’t mind,’ she says. ‘But – about home. There’re a few stray cats waiting for us …’

‘Uh-oh,’ Niall says. ‘How many is a few?’

‘A good number. Four.’ Viv leans right up against him, head on his shoulder, and Niall looks into the distance. They still have the one-eyed cat.

Niall thinks about that stupid cat, and the others joining them soon, and muses that it’s funny: all this time he was trying to reunite Deschamps and Camilla, his own two strays. Deschamps wrote that he had spent seven years living in a boarded-up lighthouse on the Dungeness estate, coming out only at night, but really, he had been cleverer than that. He’d worked cash in hand, no ID needed. Couch-surfed, slept rough, paid for motels and short-term lets all over the south-east, in notes he was paid with that left no trace. He’d only ever gone to Dungeness to ping the mast, should anyone have intercepted his book.

Niall worked so hard to bring them back together, but it took a lot of time, and a lot of therapy, for him to realize that what he needed to do was give that to himself. To reunite himself with who he loved most.

62

Cam

They’re about to leave the house; Polly has a musical theatre performance. She’s nearly fifteen, tall and thin and blonde, just like her father.

‘Ready?’ Luke says, a hand on the doorframe, watching Cam.

‘Sure,’ she says. ‘I was just thinking about … everything.’ She looks at Luke’s printed-out memoir on the shelf. Charlie survived – and Cam wasn’t charged: his account of events matched hers, and the CPS said she’d acted in self-defence. He’d gone to prison for harassment. She wonders if he’d backed up her story out of kindness, guilt or something else. She hasn’t ever quite told Luke how close she’d come to falling in love with somebody else: he doesn’t need to know.

‘What’s new?’ Luke says, with a dimpled smile.

‘Right. I know. I never change. You get your work done?’ she asks him.

‘No,’ he says, the way he always has. ‘Not enough.’ He grins at her, and it’s a dark sunburst of a smile from her husband, who she once wished was law-abiding, meek and less fun. No longer. ‘Fuck it,’ he adds, though it is not as humorous as he once was.

He doesn’t write much any longer. Does odd writing jobs, online, is all. The last book he wrote was his memoir, written just for her,Famous Last Words, the one he delivered to her in the Jiffy bag. They called it that to replace his infamous notethat the papers got hold of. She printed and bound it at work, added a back-cover blurb for them to keep. No one else ever saw it. She wouldn’t want them to. Sometimes, even now, Cam lies awake at night thinking that her husband has killed three men. It has changed him, she thinks. Hardened him into something perhaps more serious. Bleaker, sometimes, his humour darker. His view of his self fractured.

Polly strides in, in full orange make-up, glittery costume – it’sWest Side Story, but seems to be some sort of lurid modern version of it. Cam can’t help but beam at her, though – secretly – she’d rather stay home and read. Once an introvert, always an introvert.

‘Can you French-plait me?’ she asks, and she comes to her mother over her father. She is still this way. Was tentative with Luke for years, as though he were a stepfather or a stranger. And he was, to Polly, though it pained Luke to know that. He didn’t move in with them for a year and, even then, there was a self-consciousness to it when he eventually did. He still knocked on the door sometimes, sat stiffly on the sofa, never made himself a drink. It has taken years.

Polly first called him Dad only three years ago, when she was twelve. Until then, he was Luke. And she still favours Cam. Always will. Sometimes, you pay a price for happiness. It’s worth it, but you still pay it.

Luke averts his gaze from Polly going to Cam, and she tells herself that this is just being a mum, though she knows it isn’t true. If Luke had never gone out that night, he might be plaiting her hair right now. She knows he would have been that type of father: involved, not a stereotype in sight.

‘Sure,’ Cam says, and she begins to weave her daughter’s mane together, and it could be Luke’s. Thin and straight and shiny, natural blonde highlights move like silk underneathher fingertips. Sometimes, she thinks the family resemblance helped father and daughter to knit back together.

‘Is Libby coming?’ Polly says.

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Is Bobby?’

‘He’s too young to sit for that long,’ Cam says. Bobby, born three years ago using a surrogate, looks just like her sister; Cam hadn’t realized she could ever love a nephew almost as much as she loves her own daughter.

‘Even though it’s the best performance he will ever see?’ Polly says, doing a little jig.

‘Even though,’ Cam says, while Luke snorts. He’s grasped his daughter’s personality easily, these past seven years, but he still doesn’t quite know it like Cam does. Sometimes, she finds herself wanting to exchange a glance with somebody else, somebody who isn’t there: the Luke who never left. Other times, Cam feels he never did. It’s complicated, she supposes.

She finishes Polly’s hair, and they head out the back way of the upside-down house that they still live in, do not, now, want to move from, no longer afraid to sleep by the patio doors. The three of them walk through the bedroom, which is no longer divided into two halves. It’s come together, whole once more. His and hers.