Page 97 of Mad Mabel

Neither Cess nor Ness were looking at me, which was unusual. “A letter about what?”

“What do you think? About his pride and joy.” Cess lifted her hand and gestured around. “Rosehill. His lawyer is making a claim that he should be entitled to this place. Don’t worry, Mabel, we expected this.”

“But he isn’t entitled to it,” I said nervously. “Is he?”

“No,” she said. But not with as much conviction as I’d have liked.

“Does your lawyer think Dad is entitled to the house?”

Cess let out a long exhale. “He thinks your father could make a case that he is. The law is a slippery thing; he can argue that he’s entitled to anything. It will be up to the judge to decide if his case has merit.”

“What kind of case can he make?”

“From the sounds of it, his case will be based on a few things, but the long and short is that he’ll argue that he needs the house more than I do.”

“He needs it? For what? Parties?”

Neither of them responded.

“What?” I asked.

Cess and Ness exchanged a look. “In not entirely unrelated news, we heard today that your father is getting married. To Susan. And he’s arguing that he needs the house to raise his family.”

“Family? What family?”

“Well.” Ness dropped her gaze. “Susan has a young daughter, Amelia.”

I hated the sting that this information brought. I found myself thinking of the pretty little girl I saw with him at Mass. “So he can argue that he needs the house so he can raise his new family?”

Cess looked me straight in the eye. “The strongest argument he has for claiming the house is that, along with his new wife and stepdaughter, he’d be raising you, the heir to the house, inside it.”

65

The day after Cess received the letter from my father’s lawyer, I grabbed Daphne, and we went for a ride.

I needed to process my thoughts. Christos hadn’t been at school that day and I’d spent the day obsessing about the reasons for his absence. The best I could hope for, I figured, was that his mother had kept him home in order to keep him away from me. The worst was that his head injury had deteriorated after I left. The memory of Billy’s injury and his stay in the hospital was fresh in my mind. Christos had hit his head hard. If something had happened to him, it was my fault. Why did this keep happening?

The other thing on my mind, of course, was my father. I’d always known my father loved Rosehill, but I don’t think I’d understood the extent of it. Had he only married my mother for the house? Had his plan always been to dispense with her when he had what he wanted? If that was the case, it was little wonder that he wasn’t a fan of me.

“Where are we going?” Daphne asked me, for the seventeenth time.

“One thing I love about you, Daph,” I replied, “is that you don’t ask questions.”

She rolled her eyes. “Just be grateful I’m still here despite the fact that you haven’t answered.”

We pedaled on.

After half an hour we arrived at a house on a quiet, tree-lined street. It wasn’t Rosehill by any stretch, but it was a pretty bungalow, with shutters and brightly colored daisies in planter boxes, overlooked by a huge jacaranda, which held a fair-haired little girl in its branches.

My father’s car was in the driveway.

“Who is that?” Daphne said, as we watched from across the street, tucked behind a tree.

“That’s my father’s new family.”

It hadn’t been hard to find Susan’s address. I’d got it from the parish directory. I wasn’t sure that he would be there, of course. He’d have his own place, most likely—he wasn’t so unorthodox as to live with a single mother before they were married—but I felt there was a good chance he would be there at dinnertime, as my father wasn’t a cook, nor was he the type of man who would like to open a tin of beans for dinner.

Amelia was high up in the tree, lost in her own little world, gesturing and smiling and talking, playing multiple roles in her imaginative game. It reminded me of the way I’d play when I was her age. She was a sweet-looking child—ethereal—small and fair and pixie-like. This didn’t remind me of myself at all.