The Perfect Wife by Hannah Price

Author:Hannah Price [Price, Hannah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Swan Digital
Published: 2025-12-05T00:00:00+00:00

14

Isla arrived just before noon with a bag of pastries from a bakery near the station and the suspicion that she was bringing sugar to a wound.

“Paul’s still out,” Emily said, kissing Isla’s cheek and taking the paper bag. “Some corporate golf thing. It’s work, but the word ‘work’ does an awful lot of heavy lifting in Paul’s sentences at the moment.”

“Corporate events are like hell on earth,” Isla said cheerfully, shedding her coat. “Don’t quote me.” She clocked the neatness of a salad already made with watercress, fennel, pomegranate seeds like rubies, and the bowls warming in the oven for what smelled like parsnip soup, and the cutlery set out without fuss. Emily even made tidiness look tender.

“Will Dorothy be joining us?” Isla asked, casual, looking towards the doorway that led to the morning room.

Emily’s smile thinned. “No. She’s not hungry apparently. I made her a sandwich, and she took it up. She prefers to eat in her room. She says she’s already ‘had enough of chatter’.” The phrase arrived in Dorothy’s voice, a crispness Emily could imitate perfectly without meaning to.

“Right,” Isla said, and let it rest. She had learned not to interrogate absences as if they were crimes.

They ate at the little table by the window, knees almost touching. The river showed in the distance, silver where the light found it. Isla listened as Emily told her about the chart Dorothy had proposed drawing for duties Emily had already memorised so completely she could have taught a course. They talked about the move downstairs that was being contested not because it was wrong but because it had been suggested. The words had the texture of small stories, they were precise, and the sharpness was softened with rueful smiles. Isla heard her friend’s voice and then, beneath it, the engine of something else, steady as a metronome.

“She’ll come round,” Isla said, because it was a sentence that didn’t make anything worse.

“Paul says she always does, eventually.” Emily’s smile was dutiful and sad. “But I don’t know. I try. I keep trying. Every day I wake up and decide to try again.” She said it without self-congratulation, and yet Isla felt the sentence arrive with a curated weight, as if it had been polished by repetition.

“So,” Isla said, risking the lawyer’s question wrapped in a friend’s tone. “Does she ever say anything kind? A thank you? A moment of, I don’t know, anything normal?”

Emily’s spoon paused, a fraction.

“Not to me,” she said lightly, and then, quickly, to soften it. “On good days, she tolerates me. And when she’s tired, she says less rather than more. That is almost kindness in this house.”

The answer sat between them like a placemat laid for an absent guest. Isla nodded and sipped her soup. She remembered how her own gran was a terror as she shrank. She hoarded sugar in her dresser and told the vicar to take off his hat in her sitting room and once rang the police because the cat

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