Daisy Haites: The Great Undoing: Book 4 (Magnolia Parks Universe)
Daisy Haites: Chapter 13

When we get into bed that night, Tiller loads his gun and I stare over at him — his face pulls and then he says he’s sorry, but then he puts it under his pillow anyway.

I don’t say anything, just lay there, staring up at the ceiling.

“It’ll only be for a while, Dais.” He rolls in towards me.

“Mmm.” I nod.

It’s not what I want, that’s what I said to him. Even if it is sometimes. I spent all my life wanting to be normal, and then I got it, finally — it only cost me everything else. And then once I got it, I’d wait til Tiller would fall asleep at night and creep into a room I kept locked up and sit under a painting my brother and I stole together and wonder whether it was worth it? I don’t know if it was.

I love Tiller. We work, when I’m normal — we work. He’s good, he’s beautiful, he’s protective, he’s thoughtful, he’s kind — and we work in my W2 4BA apartment. We work in the cafe across the road. We work in the Thai restaurant around the corner, at the cinema and the farmers’ market, we work when we walk around Kensington Garden Square…

But I don’t know if we’ll work here.

“We’re going to be okay,” he tells me, his nose pressed up against mine. But I suspect he knows as well as I do—

I’ve never been on a sinking ship, but I do think about them a bit… How my life is one, just slow-motion sinking. They’ll get me one day… One day, I will die. Someday, someone will take me and the penny will finally drop and my ship will be sunk.

Tiller and I, we’re a sinking ship now. We’re on the Titanic and they’ve struck the iceberg but everyone is telling them there’s no danger, they’re fine, it’s an unsinkable ship, keep sleeping.

As I lay my head down next to him I know there is a hole in the ship, and the gun under his pillow says he does too — it’s just that neither of us are willing to climb off the boat yet.

“We’re going to be fine,” I lie back.

Tiller wakes up early the next morning — he says he has a work thing and he’s got to go.

It might be true, I just think he doesn’t want to be here. I get it, I don’t hold it against him.

He works with the girl he used to date before me.1 They’re friends still.

I don’t think those two things really have anything to do with each other, but I guess your mind does go there because can you ever fully disconnect from a person? I don’t know… He goes in to work early, she’s there — she says, you’re here early and he shrugs, says something like, yeah I just had to get out of the house. And she’s like, uh oh, trouble in paradise? And he’s like, I don’t want to talk about it, which he mightn’t, maybe that’s true, but it’s also simultaneously telling her that there’s something to talk about — and she’d touch his arm and say, well, if you change your mind… and then she’d walk away and he’d watch her walk away, and he’d wonder if it was easier with them than it is with us, and of course — of course — the answer is yes. It’s yes. She was a little British country girl who grew up in Bakewell, came down to London to be a big city copper, moved over into the NCA after a few years and fell in love with the American transfer.2 And him, well — he grew up near Cisco Beach.3 Middle child, his mum is a dentist4 and his dad was a police officer — retired now — originally from Ireland.5. Two brothers, one’s a teacher,6 one’s a lawyer7 — and him, the police officer-turned-Interpol-turned-NCA-agent. He did well in school, he was popular, well adjusted, completely handsome all his life but it didn’t seem to disable him in any of the ways it sometimes can — two serious girlfriends before me, one in college, and then Michelle.8

I know that he brought her home to meet his family at least twice9, 10 but he’s never asked me home. Even though he’s been home twice since we’ve been together. Even though he’s going home next month for Christmas.

I’ve met them on FaceTime. His dad doesn’t stay on for long — he’s not much of a talker, Tiller says. He pretends like it’s not about me. We both know it is.

“How’s wee Michelle, then?” his dad asked him once, in front of me.

“Dad—” Tiller gave him a look, nodding his head at me as subtly as he could but his dad just waved his hand through the air and then Tiller slammed shut the computer, pulled me onto his lap, kissed me a lot which lead to more than kissing me a lot. That was the moment I became sure that it actually was about me personally — I’d wondered up until then whether his parents had a problem with me, me being me and Tiller being Tiller. Tiller being the personification of good, me being the sister of the personification of bad, at least to them — I’m not an idiot, so of course, I’d considered that — I just didn’t know whether it was completely true until that day when he tried to cover his father’s rejection of me with a million tiny kisses and eventually his whole entire body.

It’s because Tiller is good that I know he’s not going in to work to see Michelle, I know that,11 I trust that. It is also because Tiller is good that I know that he’s left the Compound early because he’s trying to get as far away from it as quickly as he can, like he might catch the badness of us all — or worse, he might catch its appeal.

I wander downstairs into the kitchen midmorning the next day, Julian’s dog at my heels. I like him. He’s such a smooch. As soon as he heard me get up this morning he ran out of my brother’s room and over to me. I’ve always wanted a dog. We had a tiger once, briefly. Julian was trying to steal Impression, Sunrise12 which everyone thinks is hanging in the Musée Marmottan Monet,13 but actually the real one is hanging in the office of the woman Julian stole it for. Allegedly, the man Julian stole it from was her ex husband, the painting really belonged to her, he refused to hand it over in the divorce so she hired my brother to take it for her. When he and the boys got to the house, they found a caged tiger cub— Julian can’t stomach a caged animal so he stole the painting, took the cub and banged the ex wife.14 That’s the story anyway. The cub lived with us for a while, he was so gentle and so sweet, but the bigger he got, the more precarious it became, and Julian would never declaw an animal so we had to get rid of him and now he lives on a reserve for Sumatran tigers in Ubud.

It’s a strange feeling wandering down the stairs I’ve wandered down all my life until my life got turned on its head. I love these stairs, they’re so theatrical. Everything in our house is palatial. Steps that would easily be at home in a grand museum or a baroque palace somewhere in Austria, but they sit here quietly in South Kensington and have witnessed an array of illegal and smutty things in their time.

I make my way to the kitchen, wondering whether I’ll see my brother, and if I do, whether I’ll speak to him.

One of us will have to say sorry first and maybe it should be me because I lost him a lot of money but then maybe fuck him because he said the meanest things he could to get back at me — and he did it, it worked — he broke me.

Cried myself into a panic attack, the nurse at the hospital had to give me something to calm down.

I don’t want to see him. But the fridge is open when I walk in anyway. A pair of legs.

Not Julian’s though.

He sticks his head out. Best head in the world, I’d wager — but I shouldn’t think that, so forget I said anything.

“Hey.” Christian stares over at me.

“Oh.” I swallow. “Hi.”

“Hi.” He closes the fridge, smiles a bit as his eyes fall down me. Of all the people to see — Christian Hemmes hadn’t even crossed my mind as a possibility. I’m in Stella McCartney trackpants and a sports bra.

He nods his head at LJ. “That dog’s pretty keen on you, ey?”

I shrug. “I don’t know why.”

He watches me for a few seconds. “Dogs are a good judge of character.”

“What are you doing here?” I blink.

He gestures to himself. Workout gear. Grey track shorts, black muscle t-shirt, trainers. “Best gym in Knightsbridge.”

“That is true.” I nod once, smiling — but not too much. I don’t want him to know how happy I am to see him — and however happy I am, I know it’s more than I should be.

He walks towards me, and God he’s very, very beautiful. I try to downplay it in my mind when I think of him, which isn’t often,15 that hair of his always pushed back to some kind of perfection and the pink mouth with the smile that could get you pregnant. He stops, tilts his head.

“Is it weird I’m here? Because if it is…” He trails. “I’m still going to come over—”

I start laughing and he grins over at me.

“For the gym.” I nod.

“I mean, gym memberships are very expensive—”

“You drive a £180,000 car—”

He shrugs like he’s helpless. “You gotta skint somewhere—”

I roll my eyes, brush past him on purpose a little as I walk over to the fridge.

“There’s no food in here.” I stare at the horrible emptiness of it.

“Yeah, well — didn’t you hear?” He gives me a look. “The chef quit about a year ago—”

I give him a look. “Did she?”

He nods.

“Terrible working conditions, I’d imagine — it’s a thankless job cooking for a band of boys—”

“I remember personally thanking you—” he tells me and it looks like he’s trying not to smile, and I close the fridge.

“Do you?”

He nods coolly. “I thanked you there—” He points to the counter top. “I thanked you there—” He points to the table. “Thanked you up against that window.”

“I think with that window you actually just thanked yourself—”

He cracks up and I don’t smile back even though I want to.

Is he really flirting with me? I don’t say anything, just boost myself up on the bench and stare over at him.

“Your brother went to Waitrose—” Christian nods with his chin. “I think he was hoping to have the kitchen fully stocked before you woke up.”

I shake my head. “That doesn’t sound like my brother…”

But actually it does.

“Hey—” He stands in front of me. “I’m sorry about what happened to your friend.”

My eyes drop from his. “Thanks—” Shake my head a little. “We weren’t close, really” — I roll my eyes at myself — “not that that makes it better.”

He nods, looking for my eyes. “You’re okay though?”

“Yeah—” I give him my brightest look. “Not a scratch.”

He breathes out, sounds relieved, actually. “Romeo fucking Bambrilla—” He shakes his head. “What a smooth move…”

I give him a look. “It wasn’t a move.”

“That’s just his schtick, then?” Christian lets out a laugh. “Saving you?”

I sit up tall, eyebrows up, defensively. “So what if it is?”

He throws his hands in the air and turns away. “How the fuck am I meant to compete with that?”

I frown at him curious. Is he—? I can’t tell. I feel like I can tell, but I don’t know. I’ve been wrong before.

Also. Boyfriend. I have one.

He looks back over his shoulder, breathes out a smile, shakes his head a little.

“I like seeing you in this house again,” he tells me.

I shrug my shoulders.

“I don’t know how I feel about seeing you in this house yet—” I squint over at him suspiciously. “You and my brother being friends… who’d have thought?”

“You—” He leans back against the fridge. “Once upon a time, at least.”

I give him a small smile, I don’t know what it means — but I feel too exposed sitting across from him, all still where he can read me and watch me, so I jump off the bench and start loading the dishwasher.

“So,” he says, moving over to the sink, rinsing plates and then handing them to me, “how does that normal life we got for you feel about the developments of the last few days?”

I purse my lips, stare at the plate in my hand, make a conscious decision not to read into the ‘we’ in that sentence. I peer up at him. “Not that good.”

That makes him look a bit sad. “Yeah?”

I nod. “I had to postpone this semester.”

“No—?” He frowns and I nod.

“Julian said he’ll bring me in a private tutor—” I shrug. “But it’s not really the same.”

Christian sighs. “I’m sorry, Dais.”

I give him a resigned shrug, because what else can I do? All the decisions for my life were taken back out of my hands overnight.

I fought for so long to be the one who got to control my life, and some flowers, one dead girl and a stupid white van usurped all my efforts.

Christian’s staring over at me, face as serious as always, watching me with eyes I don’t even dare to believe in, and he’s frowning.

Moves in closer towards me. Elbows me. “Are you at all happy to be back, then?”16

I breathe in through my nose and look up at his face.

“Do you smell different?” I ask, trying not to sound devastated.

His head tilts, not sure what I mean.

“You don’t smell like John Varvatos anymore.”

“Oh.” He nods, getting it. “No— I stopped wearing it.”

“Why?” I frown, like I’m not personally offended at the thought.

His face pulls uncomfortably — and holy shit, what a face — that’s the first thing I think. It is, for the most part, just as I left it.

A new freckle under his right eye. Eyes are just as much trouble as they’ve always been, coloured like honey spilt on leaves in autumn.

Cheekbones and a jawline that cuts like glass. Hair’s a bit longer, just as golden though.

He feels like I’m looking at a painting.

“Because Magnolia bought it for me when we were at school, so I always wore it because I thought she’d like me more if I did.”

“Oh.” I say, turning away.

“I don’t want her to like me anymore.” He says and I turn back to face him. “So I stopped wearing it.”

I cross my arms over my chest. “Well so, what do you wear now then?”

A little smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. “Blanche. Byredo.”

“Okay.” I shrug. “Why?”

He shrugs back. “Just reminds me of something I love.”

1 Michelle is her name.

2 What? I have a dossier on everyone I know.

3 Nantucket, MA.

4 It’s why his smile is so perfect.

5 Hence, Killian.

6 Marcus

7 Phelan

8 She’s older than me. Born in the early ‘90s. Tiller doesn’t like it when we mention I was born in the year 2000.

9 I checked their corresponding flight records.

10 Shut up.

11 I mean that, I really do.

12 48 cm × 63 cm. Oil on canvas.

13 2 Rue Louis Boilly, 75016 Paris, France

14 Of course he did.

15 Even if it’s all the time.

16 Yes.