She put the paper back in the box and closed her eyes.
This was too much. A bit like going through their wedding photos, but worse, because all of this paperwork, this history, was something they hadn’t shared.
‘You alright?’ Raven asked.
‘Sorry, I just—’ She shook her head at the piles of paperwork, then gave Raven what she hoped was a grateful smile. ‘You’re so kind to do this with me.’
‘Not a problem,’ said Raven, making a pointy gesture at the invoice Sue had just set down. She handed it across, Raven squinted at it, scanned the top of it with her phone, then put it in a different pile.
No more pick-me-up takeaway nights for Sue.
‘Sue?’ Raven awkwardly crossed her legs into a sort of yogi position. ‘Do you want to take a break? Pop the telly on or something?’
‘Oh, no. Not at all. Unless you want to. Whatever you want is perfect, but I’m fine. This is fine. It’s all fine.’ Sue was talking blithering nonsense, of course. She’d actually been feeling as if cement was being poured through her body. Suffocation by insight.
‘Would you be happier if your brother was helping you with all of this?’
‘What? Dean? No, why would I want Dean to help me?’
‘Err … because he’s an accountant?’
Yes, that was true, but Dean was also married to Katie and Sue wasn’t ready for Katie to know about this. Or, god forbid, her mum.
It’ll all end in tears, Suey. All end in tears …
Sue bumbled around for an explanation that touched on some sort of truth, ‘I mean, you’re right in a way. Dean was an accountant, but now he’s in accountancy recruitment, so … this probably isn’t his thing.’
Raven chewed on her lip. ‘He might have a better idea of what to do. Like, how to get everyone to pay up, or resubmit or something. I don’t know if you can invoice for work that’s been done years back.’
‘Oh, no,’ Sue protested. ‘You’re doing a brilliant job. I never knew you could do so much on a little app.’ She was amazed, actually. Ten seconds to find the app, five to download it and off they’d gone. What a difference a clued-in teenager makes.
They’d started out with the tables turned, of course. Sue setting the first box down and giving it a firm look. But when her hand had begun shaking as she lifted the very first invoice scrawled in Gary’s scratchy handwriting, Raven had taken the lead. Two evenings they’d been at it, now. Absorbing, untangling, filing, trying their best to divine what on earth had been going through her Gary’s mind, not just on that last day, but over the last three years. It was how far back the paperwork went. To just about the point where his father had passed.
That had definitely been a rough patch. Reg had been a brilliant father-in-law, but he’d never had a good run of things. Parents gone too early. Straight to work at fifteen. Married young. Divorced young. Gary had moved in with him after his mother had swanned off to Australia with a nouvelle cuisine chef she’d met at Bicester village back when it first opened. All this and yet Reg, much like his son, had always been one of those chipper chappies. Whistling while he worked. Washing up the mugs from the endless cups of tea his customers made him. Proudly telling everyone he met that his boy was going to take over the business he’d built for him. He’d had such a struggle with his cancer in the end. His second wife, Nadine, falling to bits as he, too, fell to bits. His body betraying him in cruel ways. He’d begged them in the end. Begged Gary and Sue to bring him to the Netherlands or Switzerland. Wherever they could make it all stop. The hospice people had taken over then. It was why Gary had done the 10k for them not even two days after the funeral. He hadn’t trained at all. Just signed up and ran. They couldn’t have done it without them, those lovely women from the hospice. Managing the physical pain against the emotional.
Anyway.
Sue wasn’t ready for her family to know that managing the finances for Young & Son’s Plumbing had been quite the problem. Up until he’d died, Reg had always done it, but Sue had presumed they’d done some sort of handover across the years. She’d been sure of it, in fact. The morning her Gary had knelt by his dad’s bed tearfully swearing he’d make Young and Son’s the best damn plumbing business Britain had ever seen, or Oxfordshire at least, had been a powerful one.
Unfortunately, it appeared Gary hadn’t had much of a way with numbers. When they first started going through the paperwork, Raven had gently asked if he had suffered from dyslexia. Sue had said no, dyslexia wasn’t really something children had when they were young. Not at their school anyway. They just got on with it. Failed school or passed it. Went to work if it had been the former. Went to college if it had been the latter and then went to
