It was bound to be bad because Mum made chicken risotto, and she only ever makes that when we have guests or if I’m sick or something, because it takes her hours and she has to stir it until her wrists go funny. I sat at the table and watched her stir and stir, her face tipped down into the steam as if she could see something else apart from risotto in the saucepan. Everest sat at her feet and gazed up, trying his best to psychically levitate some of the chicken out of the pan and into his paws. “What is it, Mum?” I finally asked her. I was pulling my fingers through my hair, which, although it smelled nice, was not any blonder than it had been this morning. Mum looked up at me and smiled, but it was one of those upside-down smiles that are really more like frowns. Like a mixture of both the comic and the tragic mask in the school badge. “Dad’ll be here in a minute and then we talk about things,” she told me carefully. “We just need to talk about things, Ruby, about how things are at the moment and how things are going to be.”
