When the food arrives, I have to admit it smells incredible. Shiny red sauces and sticky battered chicken and fluffy egg-fried rice. Mum seems pleased to see me shoveling it down, as though enjoying the meal Nick’s paid for is the same as liking him. With the glow of food in my belly, and the drop of cider Mum lets me have, I begin to soften. A couple of times I accidentally laugh at his jokes.

My smile dies when I notice that Mum’s hardly eaten. Nick keeps looking at her plate too: “Not hungry, babe?” I wonder if he’s annoyed she’s hardly touching the banquet. Mum says she’s got a stomachache and he suggests she just have some plain rice, so she chews slowly while Nick watches every mouthful. I feel my own appetite nosedive.

After tea I offer to do the dishes because I always do them on a Saturday; Mum usually dries. Tonight, though, Nick grabs a towel and orders Mum to put her feet up. She glances uncertainly between us. “Well . . . I am a bit knackered . . .” Still she’s hesitating. I wonder if she thinks I’m going to drop the friendliness as soon as she’s out of the way. I long to do the dishes with her instead, hip to hip at the sink, slipping into a familiar washing-drying rhythm.

Nick makes a shooing gesture, and she relents. “If you insist, then . . .” She leaves the room and I hear the TV crackle on as I plunge our plates into the lemony suds.

For a while the only sounds are the clink of crockery and the slosh of water, Nick humming something repetitive and tuneless. We’re rarely alone together. The itchiness creeps over me, same as when I watch him cup his palm around the back of Mum’s neck. I try to relax, try to recall the funny thing he said that almost made me choke on my black bean pork.

“You don’t need to worry about your mum, you know.”

A cup slithers out of my grip and splashes back into the water.

“She’s still not quite recovered from that bug she had,” he adds. “That’s all.”

I frown over at him. “What bug?”

“She was under the weather last week.”

“I . . . I didn’t know anything about it.”

“Well, she knows you worry about her. She probably didn’t want to make a big deal of it. But that’s why she seems a bit tired.”

I squeak my cloth around the inside of the glass, trying to cast my mind back.

“I’m just saying,” Nick continues, leaning on the edge of the draining board, “you shouldn’t worry. Because I’m around now. I’m here to make sure you’re both okay.”

Sourness floods my mouth, like a reflux from all the rich food. I yank the plug out of the sink, watching the murky water slip away.

—