Page 18 of Bargaining

She planted her hands on her hips. “The estate agent called me. What were you thinking? You can’t just tell people the house isn’t for sale.”

Hello, lovely to see you, too. I’m fine. Thank you for asking.

She moved past me into the living room and flung open the curtains. Daylight dazzled me. Blue skies. Bright sun. Somehow, it had slipped my mind that it was daytime. I was still wearing pajamas.

She thrust a large manila envelope at me. “This was in the porch.”

I tossed it on a side table and flopped into a frayed armchair. “You didn’t see these people. They were talking about knocking a wall out. What kind of people walk all over someone’s carpets in outdoor shoes? Psychopaths, that’s who. Antisocial behavior like that is an indicator of more serious criminality.”

Tiff let out a deep sigh and cradled her face in her hands, like I was exhausting her. I probably was. It wasn’t my intention. Tiff approached her grief by attacking it with a sledgehammer. She wanted the house cleared and sold. Done and dusted. When she’d cleared all the Dad admin from her inbox, maybe then she’d drop to the floor and howl, but not a moment before.

If I could have physically wrapped my arms around this house and carried it away to somewhere safe where no one would bother us, I would have. Every book, every ornament, every teaspoon destined for the charity shop was a little shard of glass twisting in my heart.

“It’s true, Tiff. I watched a documentary about it once. You know these people who graffiti bus-stops or park in disabled parking spaces when they don’t have a permit? Nine times out of tenthey turn out to be murderers. Anti-social behavior, you see. I’m sure it’s the same with not taking off your shoes.”

Tiff held her head in her hands and sighed. “I know this is awful. It’s all terrible and painful, and I don’t want to do any of this either, but these are cash buyers. Do you know how rare cash buyers are? We have to get this done.”

I let out my own deep, dramatic sigh, because Tiff needed to know that she was exhausting me, too. “I’m sorry that I’m not willing to sell our childhood home to psychopaths. We don’t have to rush into this. Can we at least discuss renting again?”

“Cash-buyer psychopaths.” Tiff stood at one of Dad’s overstuffed bookcases, pulling out dusty tomes and leafing through them absently. “This is what we agreed. We’re not renting. It’s delaying the inevitable. Who wants to be a landlord? You’ll get no peace. The place is falling apart. We’d need a new boiler. Rewiring. Everything ...” Her eyes shifted to the envelope I’d put down and she wrinkled her nose. “Aren’t you going to open that? It looks important.”

Nope. It’s never important.I drifted away to make tea. Tiff started a tale of woe about being left out of the school mums’ group chat, but I let her voice fade to a drone. In the kitchen, the dark linoleum had been trodden to gray. The floral curtains hung faded and threadbare. Somebody else would come in here. They’d rip this floor up and tear these curtains down. My stomach started to hurt again.

When I returned to the living room with the tea tray, Tiff was stacking an empty cardboard box full of Dad’s books.

“What are you doing?”

“Life can only be understood backward; but it must be lived forward,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“Kierkegaard.” She snapped the book in her hand shut and dropped it unceremoniously into a box. I resisted the urge to dive and snatch it back.

Tiff’s expression was deadpan. “I always found philosophy so depressing. This Kierkegaard dude sounds like another barrel of laughs.”

“I heard he got left out of the school mums’ group chat and that’s when his melancholy took root.”

“Fuck off.” She rolled her eyes, but a faint glimmer of humor flashed on her face. “I was the first one to discover that the head teacher was having an affair, and I always volunteer for the bottle tombola. I’m an asset to any mums’ group chat. Who wouldn’t want me in their clique?”

“I don’t know. Your meme game is so strong, too.”

She nodded her head in firm agreement. “I know, right? At least someone appreciates my memes.” She scooped the envelope off the table and thrust it at me. “Open it. You can’t just let letters pile up in the porch.”

Fine. I opened it to humor her, with my best “this is a pointless exercise, but you’re insanely irritating so I’m doing it to shut you up” expression, so she’d get fed up and go home. I slid out a wad of neatly printed paper, and the bold “Marital Contract” header jumped out at me. A bright yellow Post-it clung to the front page, with a handwritten “To Charlotte. For your urgent review. Cole.”

I flipped through, scanning the document. It was all bullet points and inscrutable legal jargon.For goodness’ sake.He’d actually drawn up a contract? What was he thinking?

“Cole?” Tiff’s eyebrows shot up. “You’ve kept in touch? Didn’t he dump you and do a runner after you kissed him?”

I had no energy to get into it all, but it was preferable to being lectured about the house.

“He kissed me. And yes, we ... parted ways, and now he wants to marry me because he can’t be bothered to find a real wife. He’s such an arsehole these days that he needs a stooge to come to his events with him, like some weird employee/wife to convince people he’s not that much of an arsehole.”

Tiff’s incredulous laugh came out in a burst. “You’re joking?”

“I wish I was.”

Another slim envelope slipped out of the paperwork onto the floor. Bending down to retrieve it, I read the handwritten note on the front: “You’ve been carrying too much for too long. You need to rest. I have a resort in the Maldives. Silk sheets and a private chef on call. Stay as long as you like. You won’t have to lift a finger.”