The Santiago Sisters. Victoria Fox

mouth. In the corridor, Emily giggled. ‘Oops,’ she trilled, ‘my mistake!’

      Post-climax, Lysander was unfazed. ‘All right … Mummy?’

      Lysander’s accent was so sharp you could skewer cubes of meat on it.

      ‘What on earth is going on?’ Simone rasped. The redhead jerked up, clocked their audience and flung herself off the bed. She grappled for her clothes, her breasts jiggling as she tried and failed to cover her modesty. From the front Simone saw she was older than Lysander—quite a bit older, in fact. Lysander lit a cigarette.

      Simone fought to keep her eyes off Lysander’s dying erection. He made no attempt to conceal it. It was huge. Why couldn’t Brian share that family trait?

      ‘You’re disgusting!’ Mortified, Simone turned on her heel. ‘Do not touch me, Brian!’ She flapped him off. ‘Whatever you do, do not bloody touch me!’

      Before she disappeared back inside the master suite, she heard Emily wheedle: ‘So, Daddy, can I please go to the party? See, I’m not as bad as ‘Sander …’

      And, predictably, depressingly, Brian’s castrated consent.

      ‘I just don’t understand why you can’t take control of them more!’

      In the back seat of a blacked-out Mercedes rushing through Piccadilly, Brian placed a hand on his wife’s knee. Simone resisted the urge to recoil against the window: after all, they soon had to put on a convincing show for the cameras.

      ‘I try,’ he said pathetically. ‘You know how strong-willed they are.’

      ‘Or how weak-willed you are.’

      ‘They’re yours, too, you know.’ Brian said it as if he were sharing a prized chain of Umbrian holiday homes, not a host of cancerous growths in the armpit.

      This time, she did flinch. ‘They already have a mother.’

      ‘But only one stepmother.’

      God, it made her sound like some gnarled old thing in Cinderella. Oh, for a child of her own! Simone dreamed of it night and day. A girl—yes, a daughter, it had to be a daughter—whom she could mould in her own image. The girl would be her legacy, her gift to the world long after Simone’s own legend died. She would raise her as the ravishing, well-mannered, and impeccably groomed young lady that Emily Chilcott wasn’t and never could be. Simone wished for this immaculate creature so fervently that she thought she might explode. Yes, she had fame. Yes, she had riches. Yes, she had a wardrobe, and a stylist, and an army of fans that could topple the fucking monarchy, but all she yearned for was that most prized possession: a girl.

      It would never happen. Simone was biologically unable, even before the first flushes of menopause. She hadn’t always been. No, it hadn’t always been that way …

      ‘Here we are, baby,’ said Brian, as they pulled up at the red carpet.

      Their driver opened the door and the wall of sound that crashed in almost knocked her off her feet. Simone gripped her clutch and pasted on a smile. Cameras flashed and sparked. ‘Simone! Brian! Let’s see a kiss for the fans!’ And so on.

      Simone had picked out her outfit personally, a Versace emerald-green drape dress with scoop neckline. Everyone said that, after forty, one should cover one’s décolletage, but Simone disagreed. She hadn’t been using five-hundred-pound face and neck creams the last twenty years for nothing.

      ‘You look tired.’ Michelle Horner, Simone’s manager and one of the most cutthroat women in the business, stole her at the end of the press queue. Simone had always thought Michelle resembled a whippet, especially tonight, in a grey trouser suit and pumps, her nose appearing even longer under the lighting. Michelle wore glasses on the end of her nose, amplifying the effect. ‘All OK on the home front?’

      ‘Same old.’

      They entered the atrium, where champagne was circulating. Heads turned. In certain spheres Simone was known as The Ice Queen. She wasn’t sure where or how she had picked that up, but it was certainly an easier façade to maintain than the poor joke-a-minute suckers who had cultivated a comedy precedent and had to spend the rest of their days working the room like a court buffoon.

      ‘Terry Sheehan wants you for January Fight,’ Michelle was saying. ‘I told him we’d consider the script but it would have to be something special what with the Jonasses ringing off the hook and Sindy Reinhold at Paramour calling every hour of the day. I said, “Terry, we’re not getting out of bed in the morning for less than ten, and if you don’t like it you can bite me.” Between you and me, he’ll be scrabbling in his toilet bowl for coins. This is a waiting game and we’ll wait.’

      Simone was only half paying attention. Across the space, a fellow forty-something actress had arrived. The woman was single, attractive if not ragingly successful, and in her arms she carried a gorgeously sweet black baby boy.

      ‘Where’d she get that from?’ Simone cut in.

      Michelle followed her gaze. ‘The kid?’

      ‘Of course the kid—I thought her husband ran off with that bit of fluff.’

      ‘He did. She wanted a child, though. So she adopted.’

      Simone narrowed her eyes. That sounded awfully simple. ‘Is it awfully simple?’

      ‘For ordinary people, I shouldn’t think so. For her, maybe.’

      ‘Where do you get them from?’

      ‘That one came from Africa.’

      ‘The internet? Are they in a catalogue or something?’

      Michelle stepped back. ‘You’re not considering it, surely,’ she said.

      ‘Why not?’

      ‘What does Brian think?’

      Right then, Simone couldn’t give a hooting crap what Brian thought. He wouldn’t know what it was like to go through life with no child to call her own. He wouldn’t understand. As with all else in their marriage, Simone would make the decision herself and then she would inform him of it. His opinion mattered not a jot. ‘Michelle, I want you to look into it for me.’

      Michelle was used to dealing with her clients’ whims—this one would blow over in a week. ‘OK,’ she agreed. ‘Do you want a brown one?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘A Chinese one?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Mexican? Filipino?’

      ‘I’m not ordering a goddamn takeaway. I don’t know.’

      ‘I’ll get you some information.’

      ‘Good. This could be the missing piece, Michelle. It really could.’

      Brian joined them. On a happy impulse, Simone leaned in to kiss his cheek. A passing paparazzo captured the moment. ‘Hello, baby,’ he said, chuffed.

       Hello, baby …

      Except it wouldn’t be a baby. She had her own reasons for that. It would be a child. Hello to the child who was somewhere out there, halfway across the world, waiting to be plucked from poverty to riches, from obscurity to the spotlight, from nothing to having it all. What little girl wouldn’t want that?

      She smiled. It would happen—and soon.

      For, when Simone Geddes put her mind to something, she did not fail.

4

       Argentina

      In the autumn, without explanation, Señorita Gonzalez was fired. Diego appeared to make the decision overnight, and Calida didn’t dare question