‘Mamma, he’s forty-four, with his own parents living two streets away. You don’t need to check that,’ Annie added, before suddenly remembering she was on camera, and smiling brightly like a toothpaste advert.
‘Well, maybe you don’t care whether he is eating okay and not working too hard, but I do! Harry, please dial in to Greg’s number.’
Harry, with a nervous glance at his Auntie Annie, clicked on the laptop so that it called through to Greg.
‘How did you even get his number?’ Annie hissed, behind her fixed grin.
‘Why would l not have his number?’ Mum said, shaking her head as if baffled. ‘You think I’m letting my youngest child move to New York to live with a man without getting his number? What if I want to check whether you already own the cardigan I picked out for your birthday?’
‘Not a problem you need to worry about,’ Annie muttered, glaring at the screen.
‘I don’t think he’s answering.’ Harry shrugged.
‘Well, why ever not? Annie, where is your husband on a Sunday morning?’ Mum waved one hand around as if that would conjure him up in the dining room.
‘Maybe he’s at church?’ Lottie suggested, in between licks of her panna cotta spoon.
‘Annie? What are your husband’s plans for today?’
‘This may come as a shock to you, Mamma, but I don’t know his every move even when on the same continent.’
‘You didn’t message him to say good morning?’ Mum’s eyes narrowed.
‘Nope.’
‘Well, what about when you had a goodnight call yesterday?’
Annie scraped at the non-existent remains of her dessert.
‘Annie, when was the last time you spoke to your husband? Have you any idea at all where he is?’
‘Now’s not the time, Gabriella,’ Dad interjected, his voice soft but firm.
‘I stopped recording as soon as pudding arrived,’ Ben said, holding up his bowl as proof.
‘Who’s up for a game of frisbee?’ Moses asked, ‘Harry, Lottie and Oscar, excellent. Last one out there has to stand nearest to the compost bin.’
By the time they’d got their shoes on and clattered outside, declaring Paolo to be the last one out as they barged past, Annie was hiding in the kitchen. Mum, rather than retreating upstairs for her afternoon snooze, settled Dad into his armchair to watch the games outside, and went in for the kill.
‘Antonia, what’s going on? It’s not normal to not know where your husband is. I don’t care if he’s living in the North Pole or on the moon. You haven’t talked about him once the whole time you’ve been home. It’s even worse than Bridget and her wedding.’
Bridget froze in the doorway, almost dropping her armful of pots. Mamma raised five daughters. She saw everything.
‘Nothing’s going on.’ Annie wiped at the saucepan she was washing up, but it was half-hearted, and we knew she knew that she was cornered.
‘Maybe that’s the problem!’ Mum replied. ‘Maybe you need to get a something going on again! Stop pretending you don’t have a husband and start showing him that you care where he is and what he’s doing.’
In the background, the doorbell rang. ‘I’ll get it!’ Cooper said, ducking out of the room before anyone else beat him to it.
Annie blew out a sigh, dislodging a clump of bubbles from the dishwater. ‘I’m trying, actually. I’ve messaged and called him multiple times in the past twenty-four hours and he hasn’t replied. I even emailed him, and got an automatic reply saying he’s out of the office. So, in answer to your earlier question, I don’t know where the hell he is. My money is on him having finally run out of patience with me hiding out on the other side of the ocean and avoiding his calls. So, if you must know what’s going on, I think the answer to that is that, most likely, my marriage is in ruins, because I won’t give my husband the only thing he really wants, and, even worse, would rather run away than dare tell him that, leaving him wasting time when he could be moving on and finding someone else to have a baby with.
‘So, it turns out all the haters were right all along!’ Annie continued, laughing bitterly as she dumped the still-dirty pan onto the draining board. ‘I’m a selfish cow. Because I’d rather live like this, stringing him along with my excuses, than face up to it and be honest. Because then I’d have to let him go, and the one thing I’ve realised since coming here is that I don’t think I can bear to live without him.’
‘Well, thank goodness!’ Mum cried, pressing a tea towel to her chest. ‘I thought you had gone off him like with that hamster you were so obsessed with and then decided, poof, you didn’t want it any more.’
‘Amen to that!’ A gravelly East Coast drawl had all of us spinning around to face the kitchen doorway.
‘Greg!’ Annie gasped, as dollops of suds dripped off her fingers onto the kitchen tiles. ‘What are you doing here?’
