White Lies Read Online Free

step through. She knows. I have been following her for thirty-five years.

Chapter Three
    Alex died on my birthday, almost as if he’d timed it on purpose. Like he was making sure I wouldn’t ever forget.
    Angela had booked a table at a cheap Italian, picked up Dad from the nursing home, and insisted everyone order three courses, even though I knew she couldn’t afford it, and I didn’t want to celebrate anyway.
    “It’ll be good for your dad, too,” she’d said. “A chance to get him out for an evening, to get the whole family together - how often does that happen?” What she meant was: Alex had decided to come down for the weekend and my birthday was a convenient excuse to get him to see Dad, to salve his state of mind with the presence of his favourite son.
    But Alex hadn’t turned up, as I suspected he wouldn’t. We filled up on garlic bread and wine and he eventually sent a text to say he was on his way but traffic was a bitch and that he’d join us for dessert. I laid bets on a second text within twenty minutes saying he wasn’t feeling up to it and maybe he’d see us tomorrow, and that everyone would be okay with this. Disappointed, but not surprised, though somehow it was never his fault.
    “You’re paranoid,” Sabine said. She was still my girlfriend back then, with a weird affection for my dysfunctional past.
    “One day,” I’d said, “you’ll lose your blinkered optimism about my family all getting along and see what a manipulative bunch of fuckers we really are.”
    She used to laugh at my snarling, jaded rants. This time she just scowled. “Oh, I know exactly what you are. But you’re becoming worse than any of them.”
    My second glass of red wine set alight a glowing in my chest. The tea lights on the tables reflected double in the French doors at the back of the restaurant, transforming the £13.99 set meal into something more festive. Even the way my dad ate with his mouth half open didn’t seem to be quite as annoying as it usually was, until he said, “The one time Heather made meatballs, even the cat got ill.”
    Angela looked from my face to Dad’s with a frantic expression, as though reality would cease to exist if someone didn’t respond quickly enough.
    “Really? She… Heather was a bad cook?” Angela said. The rest of us stopped breathing for a second. Dad poked at his pasta.
    I felt Sabine’s hand slide into the crook of my elbow, heard her breath catch at the top of her throat. Clare gaped at her grandfather, disbelief cornered with the hint of a smirk - the prospect of a scandal.
    The acoustics in the restaurant were off-balance, somehow - too much glass in the aspirational modernist architecture that turned the clatter of crockery and echoes of speech into pressurised white noise.
    “Peter?” Angela prompted, “You were telling us about Heather’s meatballs.”
    Clare sniggered and Angela slapped her on the thigh in a reflexive movement, then breathed out a hushed apology.
    “Hmm?” Dad murmured.
    Sabine’s fingers clasped around my forearm with anticipation and I fought the urge to shake her off. This was not meant to be dinner and a show. I slammed my fork onto the glass table and everyone startled. Dad laughed around a mouthful of spaghetti as if we were all mad for gawping. “If you like your meat raw, eat at Heather and Peter’s. That’s what
    our friends said. Your nan was no better, you should remember that, Matthew. God almighty, ‘Beef Stew Thursdays’ at Alice’s used to give me chronic gut-ache.”
    The silence finally reached him and he looked around the table for a response. “You remember, Matt?”
    I suddenly wished Alex was there, knew exactly what he would say if he were: “If your mum was such a shit cook, why was she so fat?” Except it would have been a whisper in my ear, never within range of Dad. A lifetime of yo-mama-so-fat jokes to justify Alex’s angst that Dad might have loved my mum more than his.
    Sabine squeezed my arm