Bea found me sitting on my bed, still in the clothes I'd worn to the shop.
She knocked on the open door. “Can I come in?”
“Yes.”
She sat in the chair beside my dressing table. She looked at the flower box, then at me.
“I've told Mum the picture wasn't fair.”
“Is she taking it back?”
“She says people shouldn't take a joke so seriously.”
I looked down at my hands.
Bea leaned forward. “I know it wasn't a joke to you.”
“Why does she get to decide where I stand?”
“I agreed with her.”
“I know. Why does what she wants matter more than what you promised me?”
She was quiet for a while.
“It shouldn't,” she said.
“But it does.”
“I've got myself in a mess. I'm trying to make things easier, and everything I do makes you more upset.”
“Then stop trying to make it easy for her.”
Bea rubbed her forehead. I could see the tiredness around her eyes. Before this week I would have got up and sat beside her. I would have asked what I could do to help.
I stayed on the bed.
“Are you leaving?” she asked.
“I don't know.”
Her face changed.
“Please don't.”
“I thought you didn't want people watching me.”
“I want you here. I do.”
“Then help me be here.”
She nodded, but she didn't offer to change the name in the notebook. I didn't ask again.
The doorbell rang below us. Mother called Bea, and she rose.
“I'll come back.”
“You don't have to sit watching me either.”
She paused at the door, then went downstairs.
I heard Ruth's voice in the hall. She was explaining that one of the serving dishes had no matching lid because lids liked to leave her house. Mother asked whether she had checked properly.
“No, Helen. I stood in the kitchen and wished for it.”
I got up.
Ruth was carrying two large dishes, with a third tucked under her elbow. I took that one from her.
“There she is,” she said. “Useful niece.”
Mother led us into the kitchen and began examining the dishes. Ruth watched her for a moment, then turned to me.
“I've got to pick up some groceries. Want to come?”
“Yes.”
“We haven't eaten yet,” Mother said.
“We'll bring her back,” Ruth said.
“We?”
“Me and the groceries.”
I went upstairs for my phone and shoes. Bea was in the kitchen when I came back, listening to Mother decide which dish could hold potatoes.
“Fresh air,” I told her.
She nodded. “Okay.”
Ruth's car had a cloth shopping bag on the passenger seat. I moved it and got in. There was a packet of mints in the cup holder, already open. She offered it as we pulled away.
“I've seen the family group,” she said.
I put a mint in my mouth. “Then you've seen my exciting affair with an old phone.”
She glanced at me. “I'd rather you told me what happened.”
I told her about Nate. About who he had been to me and who he was now. Then I told her what he'd shown me that morning, what Bea said she knew, and how I'd lost my place beside my sister because Mother took a picture.
Ruth pulled into the shop car park and switched off the engine. She didn't reach for the bags yet.
“You didn't send the message?”
“No.”
“Then I believe you.”
I looked at her. The quick answer made my throat ache.
“I didn't know,” she said. “About any of that.”
“Neither did I.”
She sat with her hands on the steering wheel. “Do you want me to go in there?”
I imagined Ruth walking into Mother's kitchen and telling her what she thought. It was tempting. It also gave Mother another person to address while I stood waiting for an answer.
“Not yet. Bea and I are speaking to her in the morning.”
“All right.”
She picked up the shopping bags.
“You can sleep at mine,” she said. “Tonight, if you want.”
“I'm supposed to be staying for the wedding.”
“You can go to a wedding from my house. People do leave it sometimes.”
I laughed.
She opened her door, then looked back. “The room's there, Lucy. You know where everything is.”
I did. I'd lived in it from seventeen until the start of the summer, finished school there and left shoes under the bed. Ruth hadn't turned it into a store cupboard the day I moved out.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Think about it.”
We bought bread, milk, potatoes and a cake Ruth said was for emergencies. There was no queue until we reached the checkout. Then three people arrived ahead of us with overflowing baskets.
“They heard about the cake,” she whispered.
I smiled. It was easier here. Nobody watching whether I looked appropriately happy for Bea. Nobody asking me to keep the peace while they moved my name around a page.
We took the bags to Ruth's house. I carried the milk into the kitchen and put it in the fridge without asking. She had a tea towel over the handle of the oven and a little heap of unopened post on the table. I had missed that untidy table.
She went upstairs to find the missing lid. I followed.
My old room stood open. The bed was made. The small lamp on the windowsill was still there, beside a paperback I'd left behind.
“It hasn't run away,” Ruth said from the landing.
“The room?”
“That too.” She held up the lid. “Top of the wardrobe. Obviously.”
I picked up the paperback, turned it over, then put it back. I could stay here. I could get out of Mother's house without leaving Bellmere or abandoning the talk I'd asked for.
That made it easier to decide what I wanted tonight.
“Will you take me back?” I asked.
“Sure?”
“For tonight. I want Mum to answer me in the morning. If Bea's going to sit beside me, I want to be there.”
Ruth nodded. “And if you change your mind?”
“I'll call.”
She put the lid under her arm. “Good.”
On the drive back, we talked about the room at the guesthouse and where I could put the lamp I'd bought. Ruth said she'd help carry my case up on Monday, provided nobody expected her to admire wallpaper before she'd had tea.
When she dropped me at Mother's gate, she waited until I opened the front door.
I turned and waved. She waved back, then drove away.
I went upstairs and moved the old phone from beside my bed to the front of the dressing table, where I'd see it as soon as I woke.
In the morning, I wasn't going to ask Mother where I could stand at the wedding.
I was going to ask why she had sent him away.