The Perfect Girl

ZOE

I stop reading because I hear my mum coming down the stairs, finally. The script is quite interesting but it’s mostly just a love story between Chris and Julia so far and it’s told in the voice of Lucas’s dying mum, which I find really weird, so I’m not one hundred per cent fully interested if I’m honest, also because I don’t see what it’s got to do with me.

Really, I’m not exactly sure why Lucas was so keen for me and Mum to read it.

I put my phone down, in fact I push it down the side of the sofa cushions because the panop thing is still making my palms sweat a bit so I don’t even really want to look at it, and I go and wait in the hall for my mum as she comes down the stairs, her hand trailing on the polished banister. When she gets to the bottom, she first puts her finger on her lips to keep me quiet so we don’t wake the baby, and then beckons me to follow her into the kitchen.

I follow her in there, and she gets a wine glass out of the cupboard and pours herself a hefty slug from a bottle that starts to drip with condensation now that it’s out of the fridge. I wait, listening to the glass chinking on the granite, and I straighten my dress, because since we’ve been in the Second Chance Family she likes me to look nice, and I think I’m probably a bit mussed up from lying on the sofa.

She drinks deeply, twice, then she says, ‘Zoe,’ and I say, ‘Yes,’ and I’m full of fear because this is the moment that she and I have to come together, so that we can decide what we have to do. From the railway-station-sized clock on the kitchen wall I estimate we have about seventeen minutes left to do it in before Tessa and the men get here.

‘I think…’ Mum says, and with her fingers and her palms she makes a motion that smooths her cheeks up; it’s a temporary facelift. And in spite of everything, a tiny part of me glows, because I feel a little bit happy that we’re going to do this together, that we’re going to do anything together in fact, because that hasn’t really happened for a very long time.

And my heart’s pumping like the loud techno music beats that make cars shudder, because now’s the moment, but then she says, and her tone is as bright as Grace’s mobile: ‘Do you know what I think would be nice? I think we should make some bruschetta for the boys.’