Tad's POV

Mommy looked a fright, I can tell you. I don't think she'd even applied her makeup or straightened her hair that morning when she came to visit me. She even wore poor person's clothing - not a Burberry label in sight! What had gotten into her? It wasn't as though she wouldn't get a decent divorce settlement once it came through. Even Lola could keep herself well presented, after all, and she didn't even have staff! Still, I was happy to see a large bag by her side - perhaps she'd brought me some candies, something to read.

"Tad, darling," my mother said gently. Her voice was quiet - a fizz of champagne. "I have to ask you something. I promise I won't be angry with you..."

Oh God.

"What would you be angry about, Mommy?" I asked incredulously. Angry, indeed. Here I was, bandaged up like a spool of ribbon, black-eyed, bloodied nosed and waiting on a false tooth, and she was telling me that she wouldn't be angry. What would she have to be angry over? Angry, indeed.

She bit her lip and when I looked at her hands I noticed she had her finger and thumb clamped on her finger, as though trying to twist her missing wedding ring around and around - an old habit of hers that my father abhorred.

"I've been talking to your friends and they say that you've been a little out of sorts, lately. Apparently you've been fighting these other boys for a very long time. And what's more - " She looked down as though she'd walked in on someone nude and wanted to pretend the sight away. "they seem to think you've been messing around with - "

"Mommy, first cousins is legal."

"What?"

"Oh... Never mind."

She blinked, then shook her head and explained: "Alcohol. Have you been drinking recently?"

My tongue crumbled. I wanted to splutter. I wanted to lie, but I didn't dare open my mouth. My throat was so dry it felt sorer than if the truth was clawing its way up using every ridge of my esophagus like the rungs of a ladder. Mother was looking at me. Staring. Her brown eyes, so unlike my fathers, so warm and yet so wary, were giving me that look, that unspoken promise, that terrifying threat: I'll know if you lie.

"Mother, who told you that?"

She faltered, clutching her hand.

"Answer the question, Tad."

Maybe she wouldn't know, I began to hope. I never lied to Mommy, or at least very rarely. Admittedly, lying to Father, that was another matter. Father was more composed, more apathetic - not easier to fool as much as harder to worry. Father let me get on. But my mother... She won't know, you don't ever lie to her. Look at that bag beside her, she wouldn't have brought you anything if she suspected that. You're her son. Her darling. She won't know. Just this once, Tad. She doesn't need to know. She doesn't need to be disappointed.

"Tad, I'm not going to stop asking, darling," she said quietly.

I took a deep breath.

"No. No, mother, I don't drink." The lie shot out like a hairball. I'd done it. I'd said it. Job done. So why was she looking at me like that? "Mother?"

"I went to Harrington House for your clothes," she said quietly, looking down at the bag. "I went to get your pyjamas." In a fast, shaky movement she grabbed the handle of the bag. "And underneath them I found these."

The bag clinked on the bedside table, tinkling as she pulled out a bottle: Dom Perignon, empty. It was joined by another bottle: malted whiskey, aged fifteen years.

"There were others there, too, young man," she managed to say, her voice trembling as much as I was. Oh God, what had I said? I should have just told her, gotten it over with. "I understand that you're a teenager. I understand that teenagers do stupid things. I expect that. But what I don't expect is to see you turn into your father, Tad. I won't have it." As she spoke, her face didn't match her voice. She looked hard, brittle, like one wrong word would break something beyond fixing.

"You-you had no right to go through my-"

"Don't you dare, Tad. I know about the rest of it too; it's in the drain now. That's where this stuff belongs. Now, are you going to keep insisting you don't drink and you don't fight? Or are you going to tell me the truth?