Chapter Three

THAT evening, Marcus managed to mask his dismay when the door opened to the Bradford family’s modest two-bedroom terraced house. Engaged on his mobile phone, Tom was wearing the same jeans and rumpled rugby shirt, and had probably neither been to the office nor showered. And once again, his face had that exhausted expression, a general tired confusion, so out of character for this usually in-control man. On the bright side, Moira must have called him, because he appeared really pleased, if a little distracted, to see Marcus standing on the doorstep.

“I come bearing gifts,” said Marcus, holding up a shopping bag.

On arriving back from an extremely frustrating and fruitless meeting, he had purchased fresh pasta and other natural ingredients from the organic supermarket next to the station before picking his car up and driving straight to Tom’s. If he could do nothing else for his inherited family, he could at least cook them a decent, healthy meal.

Tom mumbled something inaudible to the caller before opening the door wide. Marcus had never really warmed to their modern new-build house, but Tom had bought the place with cash when they first married, fully intending to upscale to one more substantial as soon as children came along. Then economic times plummeted and Tom’s construction business suffered along with the rest of those in the country, making competition tough and profit margins thin. Despite mild protests from Raine, offers of handouts from his parents had been humored but emphatically rejected. Tom Bradford made his own way in this world, thank you very much. Although he had continued to squirrel money away for the future, they’d never quite had enough or found the time to upgrade.

Marcus stepped across the threshold and tripped over a plastic toy pony discarded on the hallway carpet. When the door closed behind him, odors of sugary cereals and stale food instantly assaulted Marcus’s sense of smell. By the front door, Katie’s Disney backpack sat discarded on the floor next to an untidy pile of school coats, which had once hung in their regular place on the coatrack. Toys strewn along the floor of the hallway and living room looked as though they had been there for days, maybe weeks. Raine had always been house-proud, even with two hyperactive kids to clear up after.

Marcus lowered his shopping bag onto the countertop of the open kitchen. Signs of the girls’ tea—an empty can of spaghetti hoops and a half loaf of sliced bread—sat next to the toaster. Unwashed dishes and pans overflowed from the sink onto the work surface. Even the kitchen floor was mottled with crumbs and splashes of food. Marcus had to stop his natural, professional inclination to roll up his sleeves and tackle the mess. Instead he moved to the middle of the living area and waited for Tom to speak.

“Sorry,” said Tom, a pained expression squeezing his features as he followed Marcus’s gaze. “I’ll get around to that later. The girls were exhausted. They’ve been at home all day running amok. I’ve already put them to bed.”

“You have?” said Marcus, unable to mask his disappointment. He could always converse better with Tom when either Raine or the girls were around. But tonight was important, and he needed to get his act together, to keep his focus. “No problem. Better probably. Means we can chat without being disturbed.”

“Come sit down,” said Tom, moving quickly to the main couch and tossing several toys onto the floor to make space for Marcus. “Can I get you something?”

“Not yet. Let’s have a chat first.”

Tom nodded and seated himself across from Marcus. Rather than covering pleasantries again, Marcus dived into the conversation.

“How are you balancing work with caring for the girls?”

Although fleeting, the pain crossing Tom’s face was clear. “It’s been tough. I won’t lie. I’ve missed a lot of work and Pete, my partner, has been a star taking up the slack. But he can’t keep doing that forever, and moreover we need more business coming through the door. Otherwise we’re all out of a job. That’s my specialty. Going out, meeting clients, and getting the work in.”

“Who’s helping you? With the girls?”

“Mum, mainly.”

“Anyone else?”

“Our neighbor, Olive, takes them in sometimes after school if I’m running late. And the mother of one of Katie’s friends, Mrs. Kelley. They’ve both been great,” said Tom, looking levelly at Marcus. “I’m doing all I can, I really am, Marcus. But….” Tom faltered, so unlike him.

“But?”

“Oh God, I haven’t even told Mum.” He stood abruptly and went to the small dining table, where, from a pile of papers, he pulled out a brown envelope. When Marcus spotted the Social Services name across the envelope, an involuntary icy shiver ran through him. In silence, he read the carefully worded yet coldly official language about having received a claim indicating that the children might be in danger of neglect and advising him of a visit from a local social worker the following Wednesday.

“I can’t lose them too, Marcus.”

While still reading, Marcus had been unprepared for the sudden eruption of emotions that ripped from inside, part anger at the faceless and nameless threat and part rage at himself for having deserted Tom and the girls when they needed him most. Without thinking, he shot up from the sofa and spat at the letter.

“Over my dead body. Over my fucking dead body are they taking the girls into care. You’re a good father, Tom. Anybody can see that. Who the fuck do they think they are? And what kind of an arsehole would have reported—”

But as quickly as the emotional tsunami rushed in, as he peered down at Tom, his common sense kicked in. He stopped, sat back down, and took a few steadying breaths before continuing calmly but assertively. Many times in his restaurant kitchen, this tactic in times of crisis had borne dividends.

“Tom, this is not going to happen. I promise you, okay? But we need to stay positive and, more importantly, get organized. This is all fixable. Where’s Raine’s scheduling board? It used to be on the fridge.”

One of Lorraine’s qualities—and she had many—had been her ability to meticulously organize the lives of the people around her. Nothing ever slipped through the net. For the girls, she had used a simple magnetized whiteboard with a crisscross of lines to organize their time; after-school activities; anything they needed to bring to class; weekend parties; and more importantly, which of the adults would be responsible for what. Without ever telling her, Marcus had been so impressed with the way Raine had oiled the wheels of her family’s lives that he had adopted the same method to organize a staff rota in each of his restaurants.

Tom returned with the board—still covered with Lorraine’s colorful handwriting—a handful of pens, and a damp cloth. Marcus understood without asking. How could Tom bear to stare at his late wife’s handwriting on full display every day? Of course he had hidden the board away. Just how much had this poor man suffered alone trying to put on a front of normalcy for his girls?

“Can you get Moira on the phone, on speaker preferably? Let’s work out the girls’ schedule together.”

Moira answered after one ring. Marcus half suspected she had been waiting for the call. With Marcus’s schedule allowing him to be available early in the week, they managed to get the next four weeks plugged in. Between Tom and Moira, they detailed all of the girls’ after-school activities and special events onto the board. One thing Raine had never done, but something Marcus insisted upon, was writing emergency contact numbers for each of them, including the neighbor, Olive, and Mrs. Kelley. Once it was completed and back in pride of place, Marcus took a photo of the board on his smartphone.

After wishing Moira good night, Marcus turned his attention to Tom. His features had visibly relaxed.

“Okay, mate,” said Marcus. “Now you need to do me a favor.”

“What’s that?”

“Go have a shower and a shave. You look like the walking dead. And while you’re gone, I’m going to cook up some food.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Who said it was for you?”

Tom snorted and shook his head but headed toward the stairs. Before he hit the first step, though, he turned back to Marcus. “Don’t touch the dishes. I’ll sort the kitchen out when I come down.”

“Go and shower,” ordered Marcus.

Like a sprinter anticipating the starting gun, Marcus waited for the bathroom door to close, his signal to rush to clean up. Cleanliness and cooking went hand in hand, and he would not even open his shopping bag until the dishes were done and the kitchen surfaces were spotless. First off, though, he set about finding the girls’ toy box and clearing all the toys away. Afterward, he got out the carpet sweeper to get rid of the worst of the dirt on the carpet—he wouldn’t vacuum while the girls slept. Finally, once he heard the shower going, he cleaned the kitchen floor before setting out a pan of boiling water for the pasta and cooked the sauce, cleaning everything as he went. On many occasions he had offered to cook for the family, so he knew his way around their kitchen like an old hand.

By the time Tom trod gently onto the bottom stair, Marcus had two plates of carbonara, slices of garlic bread, two small bowls of garden salad with a simple lemon, balsamic, and garlic dressing, and two bottles of chilled beer sitting on the dining table. In between cooking, he had also made simple but healthy pack lunches for the girls and Tom, and left them in the fridge. Clean-shaven and in a simple combination of fresh tee and baggy sweatpants, Tom looked incredible, a lot more like the man Marcus had admired all those years ago. When Tom spoke, he had to rip his gaze away.

“Marcus,” he said, stopping and looking first around the room and then at the table. “I told you I—”

“I cook. You eat. Now shut up and sit down with me. If you can’t eat the food, then just drink the beer.”

For someone who claimed not to be hungry, Tom polished off everything on his plate with enthusiasm. By ten o’clock they leaned back together on the sofa, watching the rerun of a soccer game. Man United versus Liverpool. Neutral territory. Tom even chipped in when Marcus provided a commentary about a certain player’s performance. Somewhere not too far below the surface, the real Tom was still there.

When Raine had been alive, she and Tom had come to an agreement that when there was a football match on the television, she could go out for drinks with her girlfriends. Marcus, classed as one of the girls, had been included in the invite but had always been conflicted because he also wanted to know how the game was going. On one occasion, when Marcus’s team had been playing, and without any prompting from Marcus, Tom had sent him text messages providing updates on the score. This had been a small gesture but one that had always stuck in Marcus’s mind.

During the commercials, Marcus sat back into the sofa and went over what they’d agreed, partly to remind himself but also because doing so systematically appeared to relax Tom. A second beer and Tom was almost back to his old self. Only as the game ended did Marcus dare to touch on a topic he had been avoiding all evening.

“Tom. At the funeral—”

“Christ, Marcus. I’m sorry. I should have called you before now, believe me—”

“But do you really believe that Raine was seeing someone?”

“No,” said Tom. Marcus regretted having brought the topic up then, but after Tom scrubbed his face with his hands a few times, he carried on. “I honestly didn’t know what to believe. At the time, the police wouldn’t tell me anything. Just the name of the other person who died in the car along with her.”

“Damian Stone.”

“You remembered?”

“Not something I could easily forget. I’ve been racking my brains to think if she’d ever mentioned him before. But the truth is she hadn’t. Ask any of my staff—I have a bloody good head for the names.”

“Turns out they did yoga together. Lesson was even up on her board still, morning session. And now that I think about it, she used to laugh about some bloke called Stoner—remember thinking what an odd nickname that was.”

“Stoner? The other passenger was Stoner?”

Even Marcus had heard Raine laugh about a guy called Stoner, who cracked jokes and made inappropriate noises during sometimes overserious yoga sessions.

“So they were on the way to yoga when it happened? I thought you said something about the accident happening on the M25.”

“Yes, the accident happened afterwards.”

“So where were they heading?”

“No idea. They’d been talking about joining a different outfit. They both found their existing one a bit stuck-up. Maybe they were headed there. But to be honest, Marcus, it doesn’t matter now anyway. Nothing’s going to bring her back.”

“If you say so,” said Marcus, a trace of doubt in his voice.

“What are you doing here, Uncle Marc?” came a young voice from the stairs. Katie stood there in her SpongeBob SquarePants pajamas, bleary-eyed, her auburn hair sticking up in all the wrong places.

“Go back to bed, princess. Me and Uncle Marcus are having a grown-up conversation.”

“What are you doing with Mummy’s Play Planner?” she asked, folding her arms adorably.

“Her what, Katie?” asked Marcus.

“It’s what Raine used to call the organizer,” said Tom. “Uncle Marc and I have been planning out the next few weeks’ activities. Figuring out who will pick you girls up and drop you off. So that you can still attend all your activities.”

“Is Uncle Marcus going to be coming to see us more often now?”

Although he remained silent then, Marcus could sense Tom turn his way. The words, the pledge, needed to come from him.

“Yes, Katie,” said Marcus, noticing a very faint wheeze from the little girl. “I’m going to be here lots, as long as you, Charlotte, and Daddy want me here. Did you need your inhaler? I think I saw it on the table.”

She smiled then and plodded into the living room.

“How’s the maths coming along?” he asked, which got him a roll of the eyes reminiscent of her late mother.

“Numbers. And I hate numbers. They don’t seem to make sense.”

“Well, then,” said Marcus, “mission number one. We’re just going to have to make them make sense to you, aren’t we?”

“If you say so,” she said, going over and getting the small blue L-shaped inhaler. She turned and smiled at him then, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes, telling him that he wasn’t forgiven yet. “Charlotte will be happy to see you, to get things back to normal.”

Well, not normal, perhaps, thought Marcus, but maybe a new kind of normal.

After Katie had taken herself back upstairs, Marcus and Tom washed the dishes together in companionable silence before Marcus made his excuse to leave. Tom walked Marcus to the front door and they stood together unspeaking for a moment. What Marcus found strange was that he felt something needed to be said, but realized he had never really had this close a relationship with Tom. Before his brain had fully engaged, the words slipped out.

“You want a hug, big man?”

Tom’s gaze dropped to the carpet, but his lopsided grin was almost comical. “Why? Do I look as though I need one?”

“No, it’s just—Shit, I don’t know why I said that.” Marcus reddened at his own comment, feeling awkward.

“Appreciate the offer. But I’m good, thanks.”

He met Tom’s eyes, and they both chuckled and then fell quiet again.

“Listen, Tom,” said Marcus quietly but with total conviction, “I promise you—I promise—that things are going to get better from now on.”

Once again Tom’s gaze dropped to the floor, but he gently nodded. Wanting to spare Tom any more embarrassment, Marcus opened the front door and stepped out into the night. A few strides down the path, before Tom had shut the door on him, he turned back.

“One last thing.”

Standing there, he waited until he had Tom’s full attention.

“Next time I come, I’m going to sit you down and, over a beer or two, explain to you exactly why the soccer team you support is such a large pile of dog poop. I mean, come on, really? They spend millions on new players and then come fourth in the league. Both coach and manager should be fired, and preferably from a cannon.”

“Sod off, Vine.”

But the wide grin on Tom’s face was priceless.

Yes, thought Marcus, we can do this. Side by side we can put things back together again, maybe not the same as before, but at least help to bring some much-needed love and support back to the family.

On the way to his car, he didn’t even realize he was whistling until a passerby—a woman walking her dog—smiled amiably at him.