Chapter 3

The dinner was at his mother's, which is how these things usually start.

Marguerite does a family lunch on the first Sunday of the month.

This time she had put Coraline at the table proper and me down at the end by the kitchen door, and she had done it without a flicker.

"You don't mind, Elodie. You're always up and down helping anyway."

Coraline kept a hand on her bump the whole meal, arranged for the room, and she is very good at that.

She learned that entire family in about eleven weeks, which is faster than I ever managed.

It came at the pudding.

She'd asked me to pass the cream, and I passed it, and it went over. Down the tablecloth, into her lap, and about four inches of it caught her dress.

I want to be exact about this, because it matters for what came later.

I didn't tip it. She took it one-handed, tilted her wrist, and let go while my fingers were still on the jug.

The room reacted before the cream had finished moving.

"Oh — oh, that's cold, that's — Des—"

Desmond was round that table before anybody else had a napkin up.

He crouched by her chair with his hand flat on her back, and his mother started saying something about the dry cleaner.

Coraline cried the way women cry when they've decided in advance how long it's going to last.

Then Desmond turned and looked up at me, still crouching, in front of nine people.

"What is wrong with you?"

My face went hot all the way to the hairline, and nine people watched it happen.

"She took it out of my hand."

"She's seven months pregnant, Elodie."

"I know exactly how pregnant she is. I bought the crib."

That part is true. I bought it in February, after Coraline mentioned in front of him that she couldn't afford one.

He looked at me across the table, and I understood exactly what I was for.

Marguerite put her hand over her mouth.

"Don't be petty," Desmond said. "God, of all the—"

And then he said it. In his mother's dining room, with a cloth napkin in his hand and cream on his cuff.

"You could learn something from her, you know. She's warm. She's gentle with people. That is what a man wants to come home to."

Sun 6 April. D: "You could learn something from her. She's warm. That's what a man wants to come home to."

I typed it under the table with my thumbs while Marguerite passed the cream jug to somebody else.

Nobody thought anything of it. That is the entire reason the file exists.

Coraline went upstairs to change into something of Marguerite's, and Desmond followed her up.

I stayed at the end of that table by the kitchen door and ate the rest of my pudding. I was not going to give them the pleasure of a door closing.

His uncle Gerald has never said much to me in nine years. He leaned over while the plates were going out.

"He's a fool," Gerald said quietly. "You know that, don't you."

"I do know that."

"Right." He looked at his glass for a moment. "You'll want to be careful about the paperwork, then. That's all I'll say at this table."

I turned to look at him properly, and he had already gone back to his pudding.

Desmond drove us home and talked the whole way about how I could have handled it better.

Then, on the ring road, he mentioned the thing that put the date on everything.

"The Halliday anniversary dinner's the fourteenth. Four hundred people, the whole board." He indicated left. "I want you there, obviously. You're the family face."

"What are you announcing?"

He hesitated for exactly long enough.

"The Meridian development's going into a separate holding," he said. "Coraline's going to be listed on it. It's cleaner that way, given the baby, and it protects you, actually, if you think about it."

"You're putting a Halliday project in your girlfriend's name."

"I'm putting it in a structure." He was pleased with the word. "Elodie, don't be difficult about this on a ring road."

I looked out of the window for about a mile.

"The fourteenth," I said. "I'll be there."