‘With all of those donations coming in you can gold plate them if you like.’ Dean nudged her shoes.
‘No! Dean, I – oh, no, I just—’ A swell of nausea rolled through her as she pictured the spike in donations after her segment had run on Brand New Day. As if she were the charity case. She were the one to be pitied. That wasn’t the case at all! It was Gary they should be thinking about. Gary and the fact that he hadn’t felt there was anyone in the world he could open up to. Not even his wife. The one person in the world he should have been able to count on and she had been absolutely oblivious.
‘Bad joke. Bad joke.’ Dean swiped his hand across his face. ‘I know you wouldn’t do anything like that.’
‘I couldn’t even if I wanted to which, of course, I wouldn’t.’ Sue said hotly, fighting back a rush of unwanted emotion. She’d been so proud of how she’d held it together on the telly. Explaining to Kath how she was doing the ride in the memory of her husband so that no one else had to go through what he’d gone through. Raven and Flo had come along to lend their support, rightly guessing Sue would try to back out of her interview. Flo had suggested she pretend she was the woman in the Scottish Widows advert and Raven had said as long as she remembered it was for LifeTime it would make it easier. Both of them had been right. Kath had also been incredibly kind and open. Even lovelier than she seemed on the telly. So much so that once they had started talking, telling each other stories about Kath’s brother who had apparently been a brilliant mimic and Gary who could get the whole pub laughing with his long, drawn-out jokes, it had almost been as if the cameras had disappeared. Except for the big microphone waving above them.
‘Don’t you worry, Suey. You’ve got the biggest heart in the whole of the UK. You deserve every penny of it.’
‘It’s not for me,’ Sue shook his arm off of her shoulder. ‘It’s for LifeTime.’
‘They’re sending in the donations because of your story,’ Dean insisted. ‘For what you’ve been through.’
What Gary had been through was a million times worse than anything she’d been through so no way was she going to accept any of this as a compliment.
‘Ooeeeoo. Look who’s bothered to show up.’ Bev appeared from the kitchen with a large tray of cauliflower cheese in her oven-mitted hands.
‘Sorry, I was just …’ Sue was about to explain how the ride had taken longer than she’d thought when her mother briskly turned and headed to the dining room where she heard some sort of self-righteous exchange about some people deigning themselves to be above helping with the family meal.
‘Don’t worry about her. Mum’s just jealous.’
‘What?’
‘Of you being on telly.’
‘No, she’s not.’
Dean grinned, ‘Wanna bet? She’s spent the past half hour going on about everyone at work asking how to get on your Instagram site and wanting to contribute to your fundraising site.’
‘I don’t have a fundraising site. It’s all part of Brand New Day.’
‘Give us your phone.’
Sue unzipped the pocket of her mostly all-weather jacket and handed it to him. Dean gave it a couple of taps. ‘Don’t you have a passcode for this?’
‘No. Gary’s the only other person who looked at it and I’d nothing to hide, so …’
Dean’s eyes flicked over to meet hers. He cricked his neck then asked, ‘What do you want as your password?’
‘Garyboberry,’ she said without thinking. It had been her password for the past fifteen years for just about everything. Garyboberry1999 when they required numbers. Garyboberry1999! for when you needed a symbol.
Dean tapped in the password. ‘Put your helmet on,’ he directed. ‘Now smile.’
She gave him a confused smile.
Dean did a few more swishes and flicks on the screen then handed the phone back to her. ‘There. Now you have an Insta account linked to the Brand New Day donations page.’ He dropped her a cheeky wink. ‘I’ve put fifty quid in in Mum’s name.’ His phone rang, interrupting one of the first complicit moments they’d shared as brother and sister since they’d been children.
His face went sombre as he listened then began nodding along, ‘Yeah, yeah. No, I get it. I’ll make some calls, but …’ he swept his hand across his face. ‘Shit. Yeah. Can you tell Katie I’m going to have to sit this one out? Lunch, I mean.’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Ohhhh … Suey …’ Dean went into a mode she was all too familiar with. The ‘you wouldn’t understand’ mode. ‘Just some staffing problems. Our IT guy decided to go walkies.’
‘In tax season?’
Dean’s chin jutted out as he scrubbed it. ‘It happens. Separates the boys from the men, tax season does.’
‘I know someone,’ Sue said. ‘He’s a computer guy.’
Dean started to laugh and then stopped, as if he’d given himself a lecture about actually listening to Sue rather than blowing her off as was the usual family remit. ‘Who’s that then?’
‘His name’s Dylan. He’s young, but … from what I understand, he knows his way around a computer.’
A phone call to Raven and then to Dylan later, Dean had a smile back on his face.
‘Suey?’ Dean tapped at his phone for a few furious seconds. ‘You’re a bloody marvel.’ He wiggled the phone in front of her face. He was moving it too quickly to read but it looked like it was the donation page he’d just set up. ‘Let’s just say the
