‘Well,’ I said slowly. I smiled, and my smile turned into a yawn. ‘This is going to take a while. But I’m happy.’
Jo stared down at Tommy’s hand, folded tightly around her own. ‘That’s what I want, too,’ she said. ‘To be happy. That’s all I care about these days.’
My heart cramped. Jo never spoke like this.
I wasn’t anywhere near warm enough, sitting in just my running shorts and vest, but in that second I wanted this moment to go on and on. I loved these two people. Loved that they loved each other in ways I’d never know. Loved that they’d been so desperate to see each other they’d smuggled Jo in here after I’d gone to bed.
‘I’m going to have to go and finish my packing,’ I said. ‘I wish I could stay.’
‘OK.’ Tommy yawned as I pushed back my stool. ‘ Although . . . Sarah. I have to ask. Do we need to worry about you?’
‘I . . .’ My voice trailed off. ‘I have kind of scared myself a bit lately.’
‘Us too,’ Jo said. ‘You’ve been pretty weird, babe.’
‘I assume you know about the football?’
She nodded.
I raked my hands through my hair. ‘When I walked into that changing room, I had a horrible moment of realization. It was like I was finally back in my own skin. And I was scared.’
Jo said, ‘Maybe you should go and talk to one of them therapists.’
Ferapists. I smiled. ‘Maybe. There’s no shortage of them in LA.’
Tommy’s eyebrows softened. ‘You’ve never done anything unbalanced like this before,’ he said. ‘Remember that.’
‘But maybe that’s because I didn’t own a mobile phone when I met Reuben. Maybe it’s because the Internet barely existed back then.’
‘No – you’re not crazy, Sarah. If even half what you’ve told us is true, Eddie should have called you.’
I walked round the kitchen island and hugged them both. My friends, the lovers. ‘Thank you, my dear Tommy, my dear Jo. Thank you for not deserting me.’
‘You’re my closest friend,’ Tommy said. ‘Aside from Jo,’ he added quickly.
They were still there when I reappeared forty minutes later with my suitcase. Eating toast made of sliced white bread, the sort Zoe would never tolerate. They looked like they’d been together for years.
I parked my suitcase by the door. ‘Right, then. ’
Tommy stood up. ‘Hey, look, Harrington. One last thing before you go. I . . . well, I have to say, I’m still suspicious about Eddie.’
‘Oh, you and me both, Tommy. You and me both.’
He paused. ‘I just . . . It just seems like an enormous coincidence that you met him in that place, at that time.’
A bird tried its first woolly song in the tree outside Zoe’s flat.
‘What do you mean? Do you know something I don’t?’
‘Of course not! I just mean, think about what you were doing the day you met him. Marking the anniversary of the accident, walking along Broad Ride. I think you need to ask yourself why Eddie was there, too. On that day, of all days.’ His eyebrows had taken on a life of their own. ‘Has he got something to hide?’
‘Of course he . . . No. No, Tommy.’
I gave the idea a minute or two of my time and then dismissed it entirely. There was no way. No way on earth.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Dear Eddie,
I’m writing to say I’m sorry.
I ignored all of your signals and instead I bombarded you. I should never have written, and I should never have called you. And I certainly should never have turned up at your football match last night. (I’m guessing you’ve been told.) I cannot tell you how embarrassed I am. I know it won’t make any difference to anything now, but the tiny speck of pride I still possess urges me to tell you I really don’t behave like that normally.
For reasons I don’t fully understand, our meeting and your subsequent silence seem to have brought up a lot of old feelings connected to the car accident I was in nineteen years ago. I think that’s contributed to my insane behaviour.
I’m at Heathrow, about to board a plane to LAX. The sun is shining and I am desperately sad that I’m leaving like this, knowing that I will never see you again, but relieved to be going back there, where I have a busy job, friends, a shot at a new life as a single woman. I will work on whatever happened, and why I behaved the way I did around you. I will fix this. I will fix me.
Still, it would be remiss of me not to say that I found you cowardly and disrespectful for going silent on me like that, and I hope that you will think twice before doing that to another woman. But I accept that that’s what you chose to do on this occasion, and I accept also that you must have had your reasons .
Finally, I wanted to say thank you. Those days we had together were among the brightest of my life. I will remember them for a very long time.
Take care, Eddie, and goodbye.
Sarah x
Chapter Twenty-Eight
DRAFTS FOLDER
Please don’t go. Don’t leave.
I stopped writing there to call you, only I couldn’t.
You’re probably in the air now. I’m going outside to watch the sky.
Eddie
✓ Deleted, 10:26 a.m.
PART II
Chapter Twenty-Nine
‘Welcome home!’ Jenni shouted, as she opened her front door.
In all the years I’d been flying across the Atlantic I still hadn’t mastered jet lag. The bursting pressure in my chest as I emerged into blinding sunshine and cement-like heat, the zigzags skirting my vision as I sat in a taxi on the 110. The first time I’d flown out here, in 1997, I’d been convinced for the first two days that I was very seriously unwell.
‘I’ve missed you, Sarah Mackey.’ Jenni pulled me into a brisk hug. She smelled of baking.
‘Oh, Jenni, I missed you too. Hello, Frap,’ I said, stroking Jenni’s dog with a tired foot. Frap – short for Frappuccino, one of Jenni’s vices – tried to cock his leg on me, like he always did, but I jumped sideways just in time.
‘Oh, Frappy,’ Jenni sighed. ‘Why are you so determined to urinate on Sarah?’
I leaned forward and clasped her elbows. ‘Well?’
She couldn’t quite meet my eye.
‘The pregnancy test? Wasn’t it today?’
‘No, tomorrow.’ She turned away. ‘I’m super-nervous, so the less said about that, the better. Come in, get yourself on that couch.’
I stepped into a haven of cooled, chocolate-scented air and noticed that Jenni had bought another piece of artwork. This one was an abstract silhouette of a pregnant woman made up of thousands of tiny fingerprints. A coach she’d been seeing had recommended positive visualizations during the IVF process; this must be part of her response. The picture hung above the easy chair Javier used from 5.15 p.m. until he went to bed at 10.30 p.m. On the counter separating the living room from the kitchen, there was a two-layer chocolate cake, and a bottle of sparkling rosé in a bucket.
I smiled, exhausted and close to tears, as Jenni went into the kitchen and started throwing scoops of ice cream into the blender. ‘Jenni Carmichael, you are very kind and very naughty. We don’t pay you enough to be buying champagne and cakes.’
Jenni shrugged, as if to say, How else would I welcome you home?
She added more ingredients to the blender – few of which resembled food – and switched it on, yelling over the noise. ‘I had Javier go play some pool with his friends, so we could catch up,’ she bellowed. ‘And I couldn’t have you come back here without a sugar binge. It’d be wrong.’
I fell into her enormous couch, with its mallowy spread of cushions, and felt relief so sharp it was almost like a pain. I would be safe here. I would reflect, recalibrate, move on.
Jenni switched off the blender. ‘I went for bubblegum flavour.’
‘Jesus Christ. Really?’
Jenni laughed. ‘I’m not messing around today,’ was all she said.
A good couple of hours later, when we had drunk our thick shakes, eaten several slices of the gigantic cake and binged our way through a large packet of pitta chips, I lay back and belched. Jenni did the same, laughing. ‘I never burped before I met you,’ she admitted .