‘Oh you know, the stepmother thing. That get together you have for women landed with other people’s kidshaped baggage.’
Eve wanted to smack her head on the desk.
‘Nancy! That was a coffee. One coffee. With one other woman, plus her sister. It was just for moral support.’
‘Well, whatever. Club, support group, coffee morning. I mentioned it to Melanie and she asked if you’d mind if she came along. So I said, contact you.’
‘Thanks,’ said Eve.
‘That’s OK,’ Nancy replied, the sarcasm going right over her head. Or maybe not. ‘Melanie says she needs all the moral support she can get. So I gave her your work number and e-mail address. She’s going to call to find out when the next meeting is. If you don’t want her to come, all you need to do is tell her.’
Next meeting.
What next meeting?
Her good mood evaporated, Eve stabbed irritably at her keyboard, deleting e-mails. She could kill Nancy, really she could. Mind you, she could kill herself more for mentioning it in the first place. You’re a journalist for crying out loud. The first rule is you never tell anyone—especially not another journalist—anything that you don’t want to see in print.
As she dumped updates from dailycandy, mediaguardian, style.com, mediabistro and the Washington Post without bothering to open them, her eyes alighted on a name she’d been entirely unfamiliar with until a few days earlier. But it wasn’t just Melanie Cheung’s e-mail address that made Eve’s heart sink. It was what Melanie had written in the subject box:
Stepmothers’ Support Group.
‘Melanie? You in there? There’s a call for you…’
Clambering to her feet, Melanie Cheung peered around one of the dozens of plastic-shrouded fashion rails that lined her stockroom. If personalshopper.com carried on growing at this rate they were going to have to out-source fulfilment, and do it soon. The warehouse off the Caledonian Road had seemed perfect eighteen months ago when she was setting up, not least because Melanie could live above the shop. Now she could barely move for cardboard boxes. Her company was growing too big and too fast. Melanie knew that was better than the alternative. In the current climate, the entire shopping population of London didn’t have enough fingers to count the number of start-ups that had gone under in the last year. And now the recession was squeezing more. So the scale and speed of the company’s success terrified Melanie.
Terrified and thrilled her.
This monster was hers. The first thing she had done for herself—done at all, in fact, beyond shopping and smiling and making small talk—since she moved to London as Mrs Simeon Jones, and the mere thought made her heart pound with excitement.
‘Tell them I’ll call back,’ she said. ‘I’m kinda busy right now.’
‘Already did,’ said Grace, Melanie’s office manager, right-hand woman and what passed for friend. Scratch that, only friend. ‘But she’s pretty persistent. It’s from that magazine you did an interview for last week. She says you’re expecting her call. Eve someone. Sorry, I didn’t catch the surname.’
Melanie swallowed hard. Now she’d really done it. ‘OK…’ she said. ‘Tell her I’ll be right there.’
‘Melanie Cheung speaking.’
Two years after the split, eighteen months after the decree absolute, it still surprised her how easily she had become Melanie Cheung again. Melanie Jones had vanished as quickly as she’d appeared. Sometimes it seemed to Melanie as if the other her had only ever been a ghost. The real her had always been there, lurking just beneath the surface, biding her time, waiting to make her move.
‘Hi, this is Eve Owen,’ said a voice on the other end of the phone. ‘From Beau.’
The woman sounded cool; official, if not exactly unfriendly. ‘I got your e-mail. And, to be honest, I think Nancy might have given you the wrong impression.’
‘In—in what way?’ Melanie’s heart was pounding.
This probably wasn’t what she’d thought it was. Probably the woman was just calling to check some facts, but still Melanie had to resist the urge to check her reflection in the small mirror that hung on the back of her office door.
‘Well, we’re not really a group, to be honest. Or a club, or anything like that. We’re just friends, well, two of us are. And we’ve only had one meeting, so far. And that wasn’t so much a meeting as a couple of cups of coffee. And one of us isn’t even a stepmum.’
‘Oh.’ Melanie didn’t know what she’d been expecting, but it certainly wasn’t this. ‘It’s just that Nancy—your reporter—well, she said…’
‘So I gather. Anyway, to get to the point, I’ve spoken to the others.’
‘The other members?’
‘Like I said, it’s not a club, so there are no members. But I’ve spoken to my friend Clare, and she’s spoken to Lily, who’s her sister, and we’ve decided…’
Melanie sighed. To say this woman sounded reluctant was the understatement of the year. But if she’d learnt anything from her ill-advised marriage to Simeon Jones it was that there was no such thing as a free handbag. If something sounded too good to be true, in Melanie’s experience, it usually was.
She was about to put the woman out of her misery, tell her not to worry, it was all a misunderstanding, when Eve spoke again. ‘We’re meeting Tuesday week at seven. Starbucks on Carnaby Street. Come along if you’re free. You can meet the others and we’ll, you know, see how it goes…’
For several seconds the words didn’t sink in.
‘Unless you don’t want to?’ Eve said, slightly too quickly. Her tone was part-relief, part-irritation.
‘No, no. I do,’ said Melanie. ‘That’s…perfect. Just perfect. I’ll see you then.’
‘You remember Eve?’
The small blonde girl sitting cross-legged on an old rug peered shyly through her fringe. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I finished my book. It was good.’
‘Hello Sophie,’ Eve said. ‘I’m glad you liked it.’
‘Alfie hasn’t read his,’ the girl said, ‘He says it’s Venom’s vehicle.’
Eve smiled inside. Were small girls in some way programmed to tell tales? ‘That’s fine,’ she said. ‘It can be whatever Alfie wants it to be. Where is he anyway?’
A thundering on the hall stairs, in no way proportionate to the size of the shoes using it, answered her question. ‘Eeeeve,’ he shouted, launching himself into the room. ‘Have you bought me a present?’
‘Alfie!’ Ian said.
Eve just laughed, there was no way she’d get caught out like that again. Alfie was easy enough to buy presents for, but then she’d have to buy presents for the other two and that meant finding something Hannah wouldn’t reject.
‘No presents this time,’ she said. ‘It’s not a special occasion.’
Alfie cocked his head to one side as he processed the information. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘When is a special occasion?’
‘Christmas,’ Eve said, thinking on her feet. ‘Easter, your birthday, that sort of thing.’
His face crumpled in confusion. ‘But you gave