He left this morning without even saying goodbye to me. And that’s my fault, is it? No. You haven’t landed me in it.
Well, if you hadn’t been so holier-than-thou. All right, all right. Todd, let’s not start with the blame game. That way only lies hurt feelings and angry-faced emojis.
All right. Look, I wasn’t really my place to say anything. And I shouldn’t have lied to him, should I? Hey, look on the bright side.
At least it’s now all out in the open. The short-lived calm of a rare family moment had shattered like glass. I’d thought, for a second, that we might actually be okay. We’d been talking about dinner, about going shopping for ingredients for the mushroom risotto my dad and I used to make together.
I’d even agreed to go with them. It felt like a step back to normal. Then my stepmother mentioned a prison visit for my half-siblings, and my dad told her he’d be getting off work soon. I said I’d be ready in half an hour.
My dad called it progress. I should have known better. Progress in our family was always a prelude to a fight. My dad pulled me aside.
He said he’d mulled it over and was ready to make a deal. His heart wasn’t in it anymore, and since I was family, he wanted to do right by me. Before I could even process the warmth of that, he hit me with the real reason. “The price.
35,000 is a good offer. But it’s not a great one. I’m going to need a minimum of 45. ”
Forty-five?
I stared at him. This was his version of doing right by me. I told him it was a lot, asking so much for being family. He just smiled, cold and businesslike.
“And if you weren’t, I’d be asking for 50. Come on. You’re still getting a great deal and you know it. ”
I’d never seen this version of him before.
He took that as a compliment. He was selling me a share of the shop, our family business, and he was haggling like I was a stranger off the street. I said yes to 45, but the taste of it was bitter. There was no celebration in it.
Just the silent knowledge that family, to him, was just another transaction. Later, Grace and I talked. She tried to soften the blow. She said I’d dodged a bullet growing up, given my father’s performance the other day.
I told her not to joke about that. It was a lot. She reminded me that I was looking after a kid whose mum had just been sent down for murder, even if it was self-defence. Love makes you do crazy things when you get older, she said.
And that was exactly why I’d never fall in love or get married. Not worth the carnage. She called me too young to be that cynical. Then there was the constant, quiet pressure from Bethany and Todd.
They kept suggesting that I wasn’t enough for Harry. That the kid needed more consistency. They talked about me as if I was a problem to be managed. Todd had missed a phone call, supposedly an unforgivable sin, and they’d gone behind my back to discuss it with Sarah.
They said Harry needed stability, and maybe he should stay with them for the rest of the holidays. They saw my hesitation and my hurt, and they just pushed harder. It stung. They were acting like I was the unreliable one, like I was the one who needed saving, when all I was trying to do was hold a child together who had lost his entire world.
I felt my control slipping away, not just over the shop, but over my own family. Sarah called. She said she’d visited my mother in prison. She said Mum wanted to talk to me in person.
She hadn’t gone into details, just said it was important. I asked why Mum didn’t just call me herself. Sarah guessed she thought I’d say no. And she was probably right.
I hadn’t seen my mother in years, not since she’d been locked up. The wounds were old, but they were deep. I told Sarah I’d think about it. She knew I’d go.
She called me a fool for it. I told her I knew what I was doing. “Do you remember love makes you do crazy things? ” she’d said, with that knowing smirk in her voice.
She knew the hold my mother still had on me, and she knew I’d never be able to refuse a request made in person. She was right. I went to see her. The visiting room was cold, sterile, the same as I remembered.
She sat across from me, older, worn down by the years inside. We exchanged the usual pleasantries, the forced calm. Then she looked me in the eye, and I saw that spark of desperation I remembered from my childhood. “Look, I’m glad you came to see me, Sarah.
Because I really need your help. ”
I asked what she needed. She said it wasn’t a what, it was a who. My blood ran cold.
I knew, before she even said it, that I was being dragged into something dangerous. She wanted me to help someone, someone connected to her old life, her old crimes. She wanted me to risk everything for her. I couldn’t do it.
I told her no. When I broke things off with her, I’d been trying to protect myself. Now she was asking me to risk it all. I told her I cared about her, but she just laughed, cold and bitter.
“If that was true, you wouldn’t be asking. ”
I left the prison feeling hollow. I’d built my life on being nothing like my parents. And here I was, a hair’s breadth away from being dragged back into their world.
I needed a drink. I met up with Ollie and James at the pub. Ollie was a hustler, used to con people at poker in his younger days. Now he was trying to game the crypto market.
The talk turned to money, as it always did. Ollie told me he was working on a deal to buy half of a well-known restaurant, Speed’s, from Valia. It was a brilliant opportunity, except Valia was playing hard ball. She wanted an extra ten grand.
He was trying to scrape the money together, but he’d already had a hard no from his mate. I heard myself offering to help. I told him I could raise five grand at a push. It was a stupid, impulsive move.
The look on his face was pure shock and gratitude. He said he wouldn’t forget it. I told him I wouldn’t let him. It was a bad idea.
I knew it even as I said it. But I was tired of watching from the sidelines, tired of being the reliable one who always got taken for granted. I wanted to be a player. Later that week, I ran into Jen.
She was complaining about her dead-end relationship. I told her to ask him what the deal was. She asked me why she should be the one to make the first move. I told her I could think of three reasons.
“Nada. Zero. Zip,” she shot back, before asking me why I looked knackered. I laughed.
“Sad being me sometimes, Jen. ”
Later, Tim made a mushroom risotto for his little foster kid, Lucy. The girl had lost her mum to prison. She was acting out, and Tim didn’t know what to do.
He put the dish down in front of her, hoping it would be a bridge. She wouldn’t even touch it. She just snapped at him, told him it was getting caught in her throat. Tim wanted to go and talk to her.
I warned him to give her space. He insisted the food was a way through. I tried to make him see reason. Everything familiar in that girl’s life was gone.
Everything that made sense was chaos. A mushroom risotto wasn’t going to fix that. I could have been talking about myself. I knew that girl’s pain.
I’d felt it every time I looked at my father’s calculating eyes. “What can fix it? ” he pleaded. “Your guess is as good as mine.
Time, tons of therapy, unconditional love. ”
“So, there is hope then. ”
“Maybe nothing can. ”
“I can’t just give up on her.
”
“So, it’s ‘we’ now, is it? ”
“Yeah, we’re all she’s got. ”
“Okay, as long as we both know we have to go into this with our eyes open. At the end of the day, Tim, you and I, we might not be enough for Lucy.
”
I had to walk away. I couldn’t stand there and pretend I had any answers when I was falling apart myself. I had to find the money for Ollie. I couldn’t just hand him five grand and walk away, not without a plan.
So I decided to host a private poker game at the restaurant we were trying to buy. High stakes, strictly incognito. No one could know, not even Valia or Leon. It was a desperate move, but it was the only one I had left.
On the night of the party, the tension was unbearable. I was trying to keep the guest list a secret, keep everything under wraps, and keep my own anxiety from boiling over. I had one of my backers’ attention to keep. I’d even roped in Grace to help serve drinks, promising her a hundred quid for her trouble.
And then there was Kit. He’d cornered me again, pushing me to take Harry for the rest of the holidays. I was so close to telling him where to stick it. But he had this infuriating way of making me feel guilty.
He kept going on about the kid’s stability, about how I’d missed a phone call, about how I needed to be more reliable. He was right. I was a mess, and he knew it. I told him I’d take the kid.
It wasn’t an agreement, it was a surrender. But I had to keep my focus. The poker game. The money.
The future of the shop. The night of the poker game, everything was set. The cards were laid out, the chips were stacked, and my one big backer was in the room. It was all going according to plan.
It was a gamble, a huge one, but it was mine. I was calling the shots. The door to the private room swung open. Valia stood there, her face a mask of cold fury.
She looked at the card table, then at the backer, then back at me. The silent judgment in her eyes was worse than any accusation. The game was up before it even began. I was frozen, my heart pounding.
Everything I’d risked, everything I’d worked for, was crashing down around me in a single, terrible moment.
