Page 97 of Double or Nothing

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

ALICE

Iknow I’m in trouble before I even step through the front door.

Not trouble like I used to be in when I was fourteen and Dad found a cigarette butt in the summer house, or sixteen when I came home drunk after Annabelle Hurst’s birthday party and puked into one of Mum’s antique umbrella stands.

This is grown-up trouble. The kind that comes dressed as ruthless concern, served neatly alongside roast beef and parsnips. A replay of the roast beef dinner I missed yesterday, because I was too busy crying over Bryce Maddocks in a playboy’s arms.

Hell, how I wish I was still there now.

I stand on the doorstep of my parents’ house with my finger hovering over the bell, feeling like a naughty schoolgirl summoned to the headmaster’s office. It’s ridiculous that the dynamic is still this way at twenty-eight years old. Yet still, Dad summons, and I appear.

The fact I missed Sunday dinner yesterday was clearly a criminal offence. Mum’s messages started polite. Then concerned. Then sharp.

All of them went unread.

By the time I finally replied, they’d turned from where are you, darling? to your father wants to see you, Alice. Now. So, here I stand, ready for the grand reckoning.

I sigh as I press the bell.

My family home glows behind the frosted glass panel in the oak doorway, warm and golden and completely false. Not false in the cheap way. There is nothing cheap about my parents’ house. It’s tasteful to the point of aggression in its mansionesque splendour. Every vase is exactly where it should be. Every painting properly lit. Every flower arrangement suggesting effortless elegance, despite some poor local florist sweating over it for three hours straight. Mum always has the place decked full of them.

The door opens and our head housekeeper greets me. One of the only genuine characters in the place.

“Miss Parker,” Helen says. “Good evening.”

“Hi, Helen.”

I step inside, and the smell hits me. Red wine. Rosemary. Polished wood. Childhood. Control.

Mum appears at the drawing room door dressed in cream silk, with a string of posh pearls around her throat. Her smile is tight enough to snap.

“Alice. How lovely to see you. Eventually.”

“Sorry about dinner,” I say, kissing her cheek. “I got caught up.”

“In the studio?”

“Yes.”

She sighs. Soft, elegant… and lethal.

“Your father was very, very disappointed when you didn’t appear yesterday.”

Of course he was.

Dad is always disappointed, and it always feels like sin. It’s disappointment in a quiet, devastating way. He doesn’t need to shout. His disappointment lands more cleanly than anger. It makes you want to correct yourself before you even know what you’ve done wrong.

“He’s in the dining room,” Mum says.

“Great.”

Only it’s not great. It’s the opposite of great.

Once upon a time, I held the fake notion that he’d be leaping with glee when my work finally started getting any kind of recognition besides his friends’ token purchases, but that has long died a death. My art means less and less to him with every passing year.

He gets to his feet when I enter, because manners are sacred in this house even when affection is used as a bargaining tool.