Adam’s parents do, of course. They organize most of it.
Becky thinks she is to blame for breaking up her parents’ marriage, for her mother having to take on double shifts to pay the mortgage, for keeping her up through long nights of baby-screaming and later bed-wetting. For everything that caused her heart to give out.
Becky cries and cries and hugs Maisie tighter, with all her love: this precious child who has come into their lives at such a cost.
When Maisie has just a few more years of primary school left, Adam sits Becky down to talk about the future.
‘I’ve got money now,’ he says. ‘Not endless money, but enough so if you want to retrain or something you can. I can pay for some childcare. And there’s my mum and dad.’
‘I can’t have you pay for my whole life, Adam. It feels really wrong.’
‘That’s the point. I want you to find something you really love to do so you can feel less reliant on me. I don’t want you to feel like you need me around. I want you to want me around. It’s honestly not about the money.’
‘I just … Whatever you say about it, I find it hard to get past how much you’ve done for us when you didn’t need to do any of it. Wouldn’t life be easier for you if you didn’t have to spend time visiting us?’
‘I don’t have to do anything. Maisie’s the best thing in my life, Becky. She’s not an obligation. She’s not an inconvenience. I absolutely love her, more than anything in the world.’
She is so relieved to hear him say it.
She knows it’s true, but she likes to hear him say it from time to time. It keeps her feeling safe.
Soon, Maisie and Becky move from her old family home into a new place, a maisonette near good schools, and closer to where Adam lives in Shoreditch. Becky takes adult education courses and applies for internships with heartfelt letters written to those people whose work she admires. She’s still young, only twenty-four herself. Somehow, between them all, they make it work.
The day Matthew hires her as his PA, with the promise of a move into feature film development if she does her time and proves her worth, Becky finds herself standing outside the central London office, employed, with the sun out, a script to write a report on in her bag, an overpriced coffee in her hand, and she realizes that Adam was right, in the early hours of that kids’ playground in Hounslow. She has a life that she loves, after all.
A piece of long-held tension drops away.
That evening, after Maisie is long since tucked-up and asleep, she opens her new laptop – a congratulatory gift from Adam – and for the first time Googles his name:
Scott.
Chapter 14
Less than an hour after returning home from Cannes, Becky finds herself sitting in the back of a company-account black cab, her handbag still cluttered with boarding pass pieces, torn luggage labels, a free mini-bag of airline pretzels, napkins. She has been summoned back to the office, torn away from Maisie and Adam and their cupcakes.
‘Where are you?’ Matthew had asked. He had flown back on a flight even earlier than hers to catch his son Bart before he left on the school trip to Venice. ‘Sorry, but I need you back at the office as soon as you can manage.’
As Becky’s cab swings past the oversized-headphone-and-satchel-wearing walkers of Old Street, she inflicts tiny mutilations to her body – straightening her hair where it will not be straightened with tugs to the skull, pulling at her looped silver earrings so the lobes stretch and sting. She is anxious. She copes badly with the threat of bad news in a vacuum. What has she done? How has she messed up?
She taps hard at her phone and finds an image of Scott, grinning madly with freshly bleached hair. Nominated for an award now! Oh Scott, the gods keep on giving! Something about being the best something in something to do with finance? Who cares what exactly, the point is he looks like the cat that got the cream, the Olympian gold medallist, Zeus, Neptune, Caesar – so smug with his new Tom Ford sunglasses balanced on his head, questioning: But what to wear on the big night?
Body bag? Thinks Becky, toggling to Google Maps, typing in his office address and watching (not for the first time) the thick blue-lined route appear, running hot and fast like a vein through London. She could go there now, couldn’t she? Later today, perhaps, or tomorrow when she’s worked out exactly what she will say. Something like: Did you hold me down as you fucked me? You hurt me, you know. She could get her answers, she could, but then what? A police investigation? They’d have to believe her first! And what to tell Adam? What to tell Maisie? What if Scott denied it?
Her head hurts. No, she tells herself, she must focus on the present. She has something more immediate she needs answers to. And so she taps at her phone again, plugging in her name, the company’s name, Matthew’s name, into Google, into Twitter, into Instagram. She has done this a hundred times, tracking word of mouth on film releases, writing up reports on how trailers have landed, how various stars are talked about. She knows her way around.
She finds what she is dreading.
The fractured images she had been trying to marshal the previous night in Cannes when Sharon’s agent had grasped her arm – It’s clear you don’t know – now coalesce into a toxic jigsaw.
Blonde chignon. The long neck. That face. Lapis-blue eyes.
Amber Heath.
Client of DB’s.
The woman on Matthew’s kitchen floor.
Becky stares at the name again, and the first search result. A clip, hosted on an entertainment news website – one that carries breaking gossip, publishes intrusive photos and catty rumours and no doubt makes a ton of money;
