by Holly Miller
I confronted Max that afternoon, under a vast cedar tree outside the law school. He was already edgy and tense, thanks to a ton of coursework he’d just been given on intellectual property law, and the logistics of arranging another internship at HWW for the Christmas break. He refused to ring Rob—as I wanted him to, right then—to tell him unequivocally he’d be moving in with me next summer.
Convinced he was being untruthful, I walked away, told him over my shoulder I was canceling Tash, who’d been due to come and visit us in Norwich that evening. She was planning to drive up after work, and we were going to spend the weekend together.
I messaged her not to come, then stayed out late with friends, not wanting to return to the flat I shared with Max. The future I’d been so certain of seemed suddenly to be under threat—but was it my fault? Had I overreacted, behaved unreasonably? Was Rob simply getting ahead of himself, misunderstanding the conversations he’d had with Max?
By the time I got back to the flat in the early hours, I’d convinced myself I was in the wrong. Max was just too popular—hardly his fault. Of course his friends would want him to move in with them next year. That didn’t mean he would. I planned to crawl into our bed, cover him with kisses, whisper my apologies, and make it up to him the best way I knew how.
But it seemed the damage was already irreversible. Max pushed me away that night, turned his back, wouldn’t speak to me. And for the whole of the next week or so, he was distant, closed off. He refused to discuss our fight, wouldn’t mention the future, flinched from the subject like it burned. And then, on the following Friday, he ended it. I don’t remember much about that conversation, I felt so dazed with disbelief. But I do recall hearing him say perhaps he would move in with Dean and Rob next summer after all.
It was like handing him my heart, then watching him snap it in two.
* * *
—
I never got your message that night,” Tash says pleadingly now, her blue eyes wide, like a baby’s. Her voice is thick and clammy. “I drove up to Norwich like we’d arranged, and turned up at your flat, but you were out. Max said you’d had a fight.”
I shake my head. Despite the full month I’ve had to process all this, I’m still not sure I can bear to hear the details of what happened next, between my sister and the love of my life.
“We got drunk,” she says. “Like, crazy drunk. He had a bottle of gin.”
“You don’t even like gin,” I say, stupidly.
Briefly, she shuts her eyes. “No, because that night put me off it for life.”
A memory drifts back to me—seeing an empty gin bottle in the bin the next morning, partially hidden beneath a pile of eggshells. It struck me as odd—firstly, because Max had bought it only a few days earlier. But also because sinking so much gin seemed strange when I knew he’d had a long run planned for that morning, ten miles with a friend.
Tash is gabbling now. “I’d been having a horrible few weeks at work, and . . . I guess Max wasn’t having a great time, either. You’d had this fight, and he was worried about his exams, and his friends—”
“This isn’t seriously going to be your defense—that you were both stressed?” My voice feels hollow and flimsy, like I’m seconds from being sick.
Through the open window drifts the urgent scream of brakes on the street outside, followed by the sharp blast of a horn, doors slamming, swearing.
Tash’s forehead crimps into a frown. “I want you to know, Lucy, it was hardly even . . . The whole thing lasted less than five minutes.”
Unbearable images begin to ricochet through my head. Kissing. Clothes coming off. Hands, body parts, noises, breathlessness. “Who came on to who?”
“He was reaching over to take my glass, and . . . I thought he was going to kiss me.”
“Why would you think that?”
“Like I said. We were drunk.”
As I look at her, it suddenly strikes me, the worst part about all this. It’s not—hard as it might be to believe—the physical act of them being together, although that, of course, is horrible. The worst part is finding out that my sister is a complete stranger. That the person I thought she was—honest, kind, principled—doesn’t actually exist. That she never did. That every single interaction I’ve had with her since that day has been a lie. Yes—there was a period after I returned from Australia when I pushed everyone away, including her. But in the years since Dylan was born, we’d been closer than ever, and I can honestly say rebuilding our relationship was one of the things that made me most proud.
“I quit uni because Max finished with me, and I was too much of a mess to carry on. I went traveling and . . .” I catch my breath, push away the specter of Nate. “And then I went for the first job I could get because I didn’t have a degree. I could never understand why Max had finished it. It just . . . didn’t make sense. He was the best thing in my life, and we missed out on . . . so much, after we broke up. And you watched all that happening, when the whole time, it was your fault. You let me live with you . . .” Hot tears are tumbling down my face now, wetting my lips as I speak. “You’ve had nearly ten years to tell me the truth. You’ve watched me grieving what we had, everything I lost . . .”
She’s crying again too, now. “I know. I’m so sorry. I should have told you straightaway, but the longer I left it . . .”
I find myself distracted for a moment by her earrings, a pair of ostentatious drop pearls that Simon gave her for their third wedding anniversary. Posh to the point of pompous, hardly befitting a woman who’s shagged her sister’s boyfriend. “Does Simon know?”
She shakes her head, wipes away more tears. I get a petty twist of satisfaction from watching her smudge mascara and eyeliner all over her face. “Not yet.”
Simon and Tash met after all this happened, so technically it’s irrelevant—but I guess she’s kept it quiet because she wants him to think she’s principled and virtuous, morally flawless.
Well, maybe I’ll tell him, I think savagely. Just so he can be aware of the type of person he married.
“You know, it’s funny,” I say. “When I came back from traveling, you said I was a different person. Like I’d changed, forgotten how to have fun, or take risks.” She nods but says nothing, clearly too ashamed to speak now. “And when Max came into my life again, I remembered what you’d said. And I thought, I’m going to take a risk, and go for it with Max.” I shake my head. “What an idiot. I should never have risked my heart with him again.”
She exhales and goes to speak, but no words leave her mouth. So we just sit in silence for a few moments, like two completely broken people.
“You need to leave now,” I say.
“Please, Lucy. We can’t—”
“Get out,” I say, not looking at her. “I don’t ever want to see you again.”
* * *
—
Jools must have wondered why I’m not up when she gets home a couple of hours later, because she taps my door, opens it, and sticks her head through the gap. “Morning.”
I’m back in bed, where I’ve been flicking through the notebook from my travels, my sole souvenir from that time, containing the sketchy first seeds of the novel I’d wanted to write. I’m recalling afresh how every page was colored with self-recrimination about Max, with heartache and regret over my lost soulmate. And now those words have taken on a completely different meaning, like the language I wrote them in is obsolete. Because all my confusion about the way Max and I ended seems foolish suddenly, childish and naïve.
I shut the notebook, shuffle into a sitting position, draw my knees into my chest. I rest my chin on top of them. “Tash was here earlier.”
“Oh God.” Jools sits down on the edge of my bed. “Did you talk to her?”
I nod. “She said it meant nothing, her and Max. That it lasted less than five minutes. Like that makes it okay.”
I
stopped crying an hour ago and my head just feels blank and woolly now, like I’ve swallowed a sedative. My brain’s way of shutting down, I guess, when I’ve been thinking for too long and too fast.
“Oh, Luce,” Jools says, taking my hand. She looks exhausted from her night shift, and I feel instantly guilty. She needs to eat and sleep, not listen to me complain about my ridiculous life.
“Sorry,” I whisper. “How was your shift? Shall I make you some toast?”
“Shut up and come here.” She pulls me into a hug. “Make me nothing, and tell me everything.”
So I relate the conversation to her, and afterward we sit quietly together, like we’re surveying the broken glass of my relationship, trying to figure out how best to clean it up.
“So, what’s worse,” I say, eventually. “A meaningless, drunken shag, or a passionate affair?”
“Neither. End result’s the same, isn’t it?”
I’m so glad Jools is here. As well as my closest friend, she’s also a longtime expert in familial drama. Literally nothing can shock her.
“You know, since I got back from Australia, Tash has always made such an effort with me. You know—like she’s been so desperate for us to be close. I thought she was just worried about me . . . and sometimes I even felt guilty for not telling her what happened with Nate. But now I realize she did all that because she felt guilty, for what she’d done.” I brush away a fierce tear, trying not to picture Max’s face. Max, who I thought—until a month ago—was my soulmate, fated to come back into my life. Who I would look at in bed, thinking, This is exactly how it’s meant to be. The man I was falling in love with all over again, unable to quite believe he was mine for a second time around.
“Jools, can I ask you something?”
“Always.”
“Am I overreacting?”
Her eyes narrow. “About your sister and your boyfriend . . . sleeping together?”
“It was nearly ten years ago. Max and I were twenty-one. Don’t we all do stupid things when we’re young?”
“I mean . . . a stupid thing is nicking a lip balm from Boots. Or drink-dialing someone shady. Or eating a kebab from that dodgy chicken shop. What Tash and Max did . . . It was cruel.”
It feels unusual, to hear Jools speak out against Max. She’s always been so good at treading a neutral line.
From out of nowhere, an image of Dylan floats into my mind, and I feel heat rise behind my eyes. What the hell do I do now? Because I can’t just cut my nephew out of my life. And I don’t want to. But I can’t face talking to his mother again, either.
“Time,” Jools says, like she’s reading my thoughts. “That’s the only thing that’s going to fix this.”
“I’m not sure it is fixable.”
“You just need space. Won’t happen overnight, trust me.”
I feel exhausted suddenly, like I haven’t slept in a week. “I know. You’re right.”
“What about Max?” Jools says. “How do you feel about talking to him, now you’ve spoken to Tash?”
The only thing I know is that even hearing his name is enough to make me cry, and right now, I’m too weak to fight it. So I just stay where I am in bed and sob while Jools holds me.
Once I’ve pulled myself together and Jools has gone to shower and get some sleep, I open my laptop and do some healthy living brainstorming for the morning, eventually deciding there might be something in the strapline Do it for you. (Don’t get healthy to impress your friends, or your colleagues, or your cheating ex, or your lying sister. Do it for you.) I triple underline it so I don’t end up pitching the wrong idea to Seb tomorrow, then start to work up some potential creative routes.
I must have fallen asleep after that, because the next thing I know, the room is an avalanche of bright light and my Monday-morning alarm is drilling through every cell in my body, and there’s no time to think anymore.
Ten
Stay
“I’ll stay in Nigel’s room. You guys have mine,” Jools says, almost as soon as we’ve walked through the front door of her house in Tooting.
Jools and Nigel, the financial auditor who brought muffins along to his viewing, have been seeing each other for a couple of months now. It’s going well, because Nigel, apparently, is as normal and sensible as they come—in other words, Jools’s ideal man. He works in financial services, has no dirty secrets involving rehab, revenge porn, or dubious opinions he’s aired on social media, and—like Jools—has staunch views on people who claim to love immersive theater (shorthand for not having a personality), courgetti (an insult to pasta), and road bikers in Lycra who think they’re the next Bradley Wiggins (they literally never are).
“My sister thinks he’s boring,” Jools told me last week. “But if boring means he’s sweet, and mature, and doesn’t say arsehole things just to spice up a conversation, then I’ll take it.”
* * *
—
I wasn’t sure about inviting Caleb to London, when Jools first suggested it. The IVF revelation had a strange effect on me for a few days, to the point where I even started wondering if I was emotionally ready to have a relationship with a man who’d been in as deep as it can get with someone else—bar actually having the kids to show for it. During the month since that conversation, we’ve seen each other a few nights a week, and in every other respect, spending time with him has been as intoxicating and pleasurable as ever. And yet . . . the Helen thing has been itching incessantly in the back of my mind. Sometimes I find myself mulling over the worst kind of questions: Does he wish the IVF had been successful? Does he still love her? Does he actually have any plans to get divorced? And worst of all, Am I the consolation prize?
But I don’t really feel comfortable asking him any of this, partly because I don’t want to risk stirring up emotions he might not yet have confronted. Eventually I had to conclude that no matter what, I’d rather have Caleb, and if that means some questions going unanswered, then that’s how it’ll have to be.
Inviting him to London for the weekend did feel a bit strange, given that less than a year ago, it had been his home with Helen—the place where they thought they might have a future and family together. But as Jools pointed out, he goes back there for work occasionally anyway, and it’s not as though we’re staying next door to his old house in Islington. There’s a whole river and several boroughs between us.
After drinks at the house, where we’re joined by Sal and Reuben, and Reuben’s girlfriend Beth, we head out to Jools’s favorite Lebanese place, a few minutes’ walk down the road.
Outside, the air is swollen with July heat. The street is humming with traffic, a flurry of moving faces and bikes zipping past. Even if Shoreley were on amphetamines, I’m still not convinced it would ever come close to London, with its constant whirl of stimulation, the city like a tide that takes you by the feet.
“Do you miss this?” I ask Caleb tentatively as we walk, sensing him observing everything almost as though he’s seeing the city for the first time. We’re walking hand in hand a few steps behind Jools and Nigel, who are loping along the street with their arms wrapped around each other, occasionally pausing to kiss and giggle and nuzzle in a way that all looks amusingly postcoital.
“Actually,” Caleb says, voice low like he’s worried Jools and Nigel will hear him, “I was just thinking about how relieved I am to be living in my tumbledown little cottage on a back street in Shoreley.”
I feel my heart lift slightly, like a kite breaking free in a breeze.
“There’s a reason I left London,” he says softly, squeezing my hand.
We sidestep a sullen group of people who look as though they’ve just been forced at gunpoint to attend the world’s worst work night out.
“How about you?” Caleb says.
“Me?”
“Well, you said you almost moved here with Jools. Ever have regrets?�
�
It feels strange even to think of it now—that I might have moved to London, and not ever contacted Caleb again. “No,” I say. “And just think, if I had taken that room, Jools would never have met Nigel.”
Caleb laughs. “Okay. I was hoping there might be something else you’d regret more than that.”
I laugh too, and glance across at him. “Sorry! Of course. Thought I already said that.”
He’s smiling, but I detect the faintest shade of bemusement in his eyes. “No . . . you definitely didn’t.”
“Of course I’m pleased I stayed in Shoreley. That I get to be with you,” I say, squeezing his hand.
“Moment’s gone, Lambert,” he teases, whispering now because we’re joining the queue for the restaurant. The thought that I might have hurt his feelings is suddenly so alarming it’s all I can do not to pull him into the nearest alleyway so I can smother him with kisses, and tell him over and over again just how happy I am that I made the choice I did, on that day three months ago.
* * *
—
The restaurant is small and unfussy, with hard seats and tiny tables, so popular we had to queue for our own reservation. It’s just two small rooms connected by a narrow corridor passing the serving area, and the space is packed, so we have to raise our voices to be heard.
Our table is crammed with plates and dishes—grilled fish and charcoaled chicken, flaky pastries and yellow rice, bowls of creamy hummus and the fluffiest of flatbreads, all adorned with fresh herbs and golden splashes of oil, plump pomegranate seeds, shards of lemon.
Jools is asking Caleb how long he’s been a swimmer.
