by Rebecca Reid
Rebecca Reid
* * *
TWO WRONGS
Contents
PROLOGUE
1: NOW
ZADIE
2: THEN
3: NOW
4: NOW
5: THEN
6: NOW
7: THEN
ZADIE
8: NOW
9: THEN
10: NOW
11: THEN
12: NOW
ZADIE
13: THEN
14: NOW
15: THEN
16: NOW
17: THEN
ZADIE
18: NOW
19: THEN
20: NOW
21: THEN
ZADIE
22: NOW
23: THEN
ZADIE
24: NOW
25: THEN
ZADIE
26: THEN
27: NOW
28: THEN
29: NOW
30: THEN
31: NOW
ZADIE
ONE YEAR LATER
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
About the Author
Rebecca Reid is the former digital editor of Grazia magazine. She is a columnist for the Telegraph Women’s section, and has written for Metro Online, Marie Claire, the Guardian, the Saturday Telegraph, the Independent, Stylist, Glamour, the i paper, Indy100, Look and the New Statesman amongst others.
She is a regular contributor to Sky News and ITV’s Good Morning Britain as well as appearing on This Morning, Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, LBC, Channel 5 News, World At One and the BBC World Service to discuss her work.
She graduated from Royal Holloway’s Creative Writing MA in 2015. Her debut novel, Perfect Liars, was published in 2019 and her second, Truth Hurts, in 2020.
Rebecca lives in London with her husband.
Also by Rebecca Reid
PERFECT LIARS
TRUTH HURTS
and published by Corgi Books
For my agent, Eve White
Prologue
Chloe knows that she should be dancing. She should be laughing and jumping around, not caring about the photographer recording the entire thing or the idea that someone might be judging her. She wants to. Really, she does. But she can’t bring herself to do it. The boning in her dress is digging into her waist, stinging her skin, and her feet hurt. She feels silly. The song changes, and she stills. She looks across the room to see if Rav has noticed, if he is sharing the same memory she is. But he isn’t looking at her, he’s dancing. Laughing. The sickly pop song hasn’t catapulted him back to that time, that place. She staggers back to the table, to sit down.
Chloe gulps at a glass of cold water, trying to steady her breathing. Thankfully, the song ends. But the tightness in her chest isn’t going anywhere. Rav is still drawing focus on the dance floor, doubled with laughter as he, his brother and his newly minted sister-in-law, Meghan, do some ridiculous dance, one that everyone knew in the noughties. The canopy above them is studded with fairy lights and everywhere she looks she can see flowers. Fat, sexy white roses.
Rav pulls his mother up on to the dance floor; she’s perfect and pristine in a pale yellow suit. To Chloe’s surprise, she allows it. All eyes are on them. Chloe can see why. They’re so beautiful, all of them, they manage to make the silly movements look good. Chloe slips off her shoes. They’re high, with red soles. An unsuitable Christmas present from her mother-in-law, worn today in an attempt to gain favour. What time is it? She and Rav had agreed that they would leave at midnight.
Chloe doesn’t want to be a killjoy. She loves Rav’s brother, and his new wife. Admittedly, she wishes that Rav’s parents weren’t quite so blatant in their favouritism, but that isn’t the happy couple’s fault.
She takes a sip of wine, smiling at her husband and his family as they throw themselves around. Rav looks lit up from the inside. They’ve been together for what? Fifteen years? But sometimes she can’t quite believe he’s hers.
Chloe feels a tap on her shoulder and turns, fixing her face into a smile. It’s a woman, about the same age as her. She’s wearing very high heels. Chloe’s face is level with her torso.
‘Hi,’ the woman says, gesturing at herself. ‘Corinne. I did Engineering with Max and Rav. I don’t know if you remember?’
‘Of course,’ lies Chloe. ‘How are you?’
The woman takes her reply as an invitation, sinking down on to the chair across from her. She leans towards Chloe, her breasts tipping forward, straining against the V of her shiny red dress, and puts her hand on Chloe’s thigh. ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ she says, a conspiratorial expression on her face, ‘but I just have to ask. We’ve been talking about it on our table – saying we’d always been curious.’ She stops herself, seeming to realize that she’s not making any sense. ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘What I mean is, we’ve been talking, and we were wondering.’ Corinne pauses, like she’s taking a run-up, and then asks: ‘What happened to Zadie?’
1
Now
‘What are the chances that they’ve forgotten all about tonight and they aren’t coming?’ moaned Rav from the sofa, limbs splayed over the pale blue velvet.
The major benefit of living in such a tiny flat was that they could have a conversation while in two different rooms.
‘Somewhere between zero and fuck all,’ Chloe called back from the bedroom, a mascara wand poised just below her eyelashes. Brown mascara was all she could face putting on. It was too hot for anything more than that. ‘Might I remind you,’ she said, smiling into the mirror, ‘that these people are our best friends? You do actually like them.’
‘They’re both total pains in the arse.’ Rav sighed.
‘Not mutually exclusive. Besides, if you had your way, we’d never see anyone.’
‘True,’ he replied. ‘If I had my way, I’d spend every weekend in bed with you.’
Chloe laughed as she pulled on a T-shirt. It was only Guy and Lissy coming over, to introduce their new baby. Ancient friends, so no need to make much of an effort. And, if she allowed herself an uncharitable thought, it wasn’t as if Lissy was exactly a style icon.
‘What if we just don’t answer when they get here?’ Rav suggested, poking his head around the bedroom door. His hair was mussed from spending all afternoon lying on the sofa reading the papers. ‘We could turn all the lights off. Close the windows.’
Chloe drew her hair into a bun, enjoying the relief of pulling the warmth of it away from her sticky neck. The ends were dry, but her roots were looking dark – the eternal tug of war that came with being a bottle blonde. ‘Too hot for that. We’d melt.’
‘Hide outside?’
‘Their house overlooks our garden. Remind me never to commit a crime with you – you’d be useless.’ Chloe pushed him into the kitchen. ‘Have a beer. You’ll be glad when they’re here.’ Rav did this a lot. Invited people over, cramming their diary with social engagements and then complaining about them just before they started.
Rav pouted. ‘Will I?’
‘Yes. You always are. You love Guy. You’ll be talking to him about rugby all night. It’ll be me who gets stuck talking mucus plugs and second-degree vaginal tearing with Lissy.’
Rav smiled. ‘We’ll never be like that, right?’
‘Not if we don’t have kids.’
Rav cracked open a bottle of beer. ‘Blasphemy.’
‘Oh, come on, we could be one of those really chic couples who have loads of money and a really small dog, or a bird or something.’
He laughed. ‘My mother would murder me.’
‘I think you’d find she’d murder me.’ Chloe reached up to kiss Rav on the lips. ‘She’d never hurt her little prince.’
The doorbell rang. �
��Fuck,’ said Rav. ‘Too late.’
Chloe hovered in the galley kitchen, then took a bottle of white wine out of the fridge and got glasses down from the shelf. Pouring the yellow liquid, she watched Rav pull the door open and throw his arms around Guy, who was handsome but had the shell-shocked look of a man who wasn’t entirely prepared for fatherhood.
‘Mate! Who is this?’ Chloe watched as Rav dropped to his knees to get face to face with the carrier. The extent to which Rav liked babies always seemed at odds with everything else about him.
‘She’s sleeping,’ said Lissy, clearly trying to sound like she didn’t mind whether Rav woke baby Claudia up or not. Lissy’s hair was still wet at the ends and the skin under her eyes was violet. So she was doing all the night feeds, then.
‘Hello, you,’ said Chloe, beckoning Lissy through into the living room and pressing a glass of wine into her hand. If she had asked whether Lissy was drinking, she would have had to endure a half-hour monologue about how Lissy had read all the breastfeeding research – not just the NHS guidelines, which were designed to cater to the ‘lowest common denominator’, but proper medical studies in the BMJ – which miraculously proved that Lissy was allowed to drink as much Sauvignon as she wanted. It was easier not to ask.
‘Shall we sit outside?’ asked Rav, pushing the sliding doors open so that the kitchen and garden became one long room. Chloe winced, knowing that once they got outside Rav would light a cigarette – downwind of the baby, but in the same postcode, which would make Lissy furious. Lissy would stew all evening then finally snap and say something before she and Guy went home. She beckoned Rav into the kitchen and told him not to smoke around the baby, at least not until Lissy had finished her first glass of wine. Leaving Guy and Lissy fussing over their sleeping daughter, she started to chop an avocado for the salad.
‘Hey’ – Rav caught her arm as she closed the fridge – ‘you didn’t mean that before, about the bird thing?’
‘What bird thing?’
‘Having a bird and loads of cash and no kids.’
‘Oh.’ Chloe fixed her face into a smile. What a time to ask. ‘Of course not.’
Relief flushed on Rav’s perfect face. ‘Phew.’
Chloe forced a laugh. ‘Can you imagine? What would you do?’
Rav laughed. ‘God knows. Come outside.’
‘I’ll be out in a minute – just let me put the fish in.’
As expected, Guy and Rav spent half an hour on cricket then another on rugby, or rather the upcoming rugby season, while Lissy recounted every moment of her birth, including a ten-minute monologue on how the midwife had said she was the ‘best prepared’ mother she’d ever delivered. Chloe smiled and nodded in all the right places, and tried to ignore the pang of sadness in the back of her chest at the knowledge that Lissy was lost to her, probably until she herself had children. It had happened slowly, over the course of the pregnancy. The questions ‘And what have you been up to?’ or ‘And how are you?’ seemed to have been subsumed by the growing life inside her. By the time baby Claudia was born, Lissy’s ability to ask a single question about Chloe’s life had completely disappeared. Lissy had been the longest holdout of Chloe’s friends, but it had been inevitable.
Zadie wouldn’t have been like that – though, Chloe realized, she might actually have children by now. Zadie was the type to either do it early, or late. Either she would have accidentally had twins with mad names in her early twenties, or perhaps she would have waited until she was forty and done with wildness, popping out a placid little thing without any of the fuss of IVF. Either way, she wouldn’t have been the type to transform in motherhood, Chloe was sure of that. She tried to quash the thought. She had resolved not to indulge in these little fantasies about her friend, about the life she might or might not have had. But something about the question Corinne had asked at the wedding had derailed her self-control. In the month since, Chloe had found herself wondering again and again. It was as if the question were a shovel, dislodging the tightly packed earth that Chloe usually kept on top of that corner of her mind.
A couple of hours later the sun had set and the plates of food had been practically licked clean. Claudia had, miraculously, stayed asleep for the entire evening so far and, in spite of herself, or rather in spite of Lissy, Chloe was having a nice time. She topped up each glass of wine, revelling in the cooler air, grateful that she might be able to sleep under the covers later.
‘Supper was amazing, Chlo,’ said Guy. ‘We’ve been living off ready meals for the last week.’
‘No, we haven’t,’ said Lissy sharply. ‘They’re not ready meals. They’re frozen meals I prepped before Claudia was born.’
He nodded. Clearly, he knew that arguing with Lissy while she was so hormonal you could almost see the oestrogen coming off her skin was a pointless undertaking.
‘You should come to us next time,’ said Lissy.
‘Of course,’ Chloe said. ‘I could cook at yours, if you wanted. We would have come to you tonight …’
‘No, no,’ Guy said. ‘We wanted to come here. It’s a treat to be out of the house.’
Lissy opened her mouth, probably to say that she had left the house every single day, actually. But Guy kept talking. ‘How’s next Saturday?’
Rav shook his head. ‘We’re busy. Week after?’ Everyone got their phones out and started the complex negotiation of attempting to make plans.
It didn’t use to be like this. When Chloe and Rav had first moved to London, two years into their relationship and desperate to be in the city, they’d rented a flat in the same Georgian house as Guy and Lissy. The four of them had been in and out of each other’s flats, sunbathing on the roof, getting pissed in the shared back garden, cobbling together roast lunches in their cramped kitchens. But then, eighteen months ago, something had shifted. It was as if Guy and Lissy had suddenly decided that it was time to be grown-ups. They had bought a house on the next street and Rav had decided that it was time to move somewhere smaller to save up for a house. Which was how they’d ended up living in this place. It was lovely – the kitchen led out into the garden, the ceilings were high and the windows were huge, but it was unquestionably small. Every cupboard was topped with boxes, every piece of furniture had suitcases and storage boxes shoved underneath it. She and Rav were almost literally bursting out of the place. ‘Soon,’ Rav kept saying, ‘we’ll buy somewhere bigger.’ Chloe sometimes looked at their joint bank account and wondered how Rav could be so sure when the numbers there stayed so solidly mediocre.
Occasionally, when Rav was out, Chloe would look on property websites as if they were hard-core porn. She would tease herself with the huge, comfortable places they could afford to buy if they weren’t locked into a prestigious postcode where only people with generous parents could live. Unlike most of their friends, they hadn’t ever had a loan from the bank of mum and dad: Chloe because her stepfather was so hideously tight, and Rav because – well, Chloe wasn’t entirely sure why. She assumed he had always been too proud to ask.
As she carried the blue-and-white plates to the dishwasher she turned to Rav and said, sotto voce, ‘Nice save.’
‘What?’
‘Getting out of next Saturday. I can’t do two weeks of birth chat in a row.’
Rav laughed. ‘It wasn’t a save. We’re out next Saturday.’
‘It’s not in the diary.’
‘Really? I’m sure I told you.’
Chloe shook her head. ‘No. What are we doing?’
Rav put the salad bowl down on the side, pulled a bottle of wine from the fridge and, as he headed outside, said, ‘Having dinner with Max.’
‘Excuse me?’ she replied to Rav’s turned back. But he was already in the garden, falling cheerfully into a chair. Chloe stared at him through the doorway, her lips parted and suddenly dry, her head painfully tight.
‘Chlo, Chlo, look what Claudia is doing!’ said Lissy in a stage whisper. Chloe picked up the jug of water she had refilled and, dazed
, went back into the garden to appreciate the spit bubble baby Claudia had created.
‘You’re pissed off,’ said Rav as Chloe wiped the garden table. Lissy and Guy had finally left. They had talked a lot about being exhausted but seemed to think it would be more fun to stay and get stuck into the wine than to take the baby home and get some sleep.
‘I’m fine,’ Chloe snapped. She wasn’t sure why she said it. It was such a cliché, claiming she was fine when she was so clearly angry.
‘I know you’re not his biggest fan …’
Chloe wheeled around to glare at him. ‘So why did you say we’d see him? Why didn’t you ask me?’
‘I didn’t think it would be a big deal.’
‘Well, it is.’
‘He was a mate, and he feels bad that we lost touch when he went to Australia. Now he’s back in London and he wants to see us. He’s got a new girl on the go, they’re getting married, and he wants the four of us to have dinner. Don’t you think it’s possible that he might have changed in over a decade?’
Chloe turned, knowing that what she was about to say would hurt Rav but no longer inclined to care. ‘Mates? You think standing on the side-lines laughing at his jokes and telling him how brilliant he is makes you “mates”?’
Rav blinked slowly and pushed his eyebrows together, clearly stung. She was being cruel. It shouldn’t hurt him, to think that someone he hadn’t seen since his early twenties hadn’t rated him. Hadn’t thought he was especially ‘cool’. But Rav was easily bruised.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean it.’
‘It’s fine.’
‘No, it’s not. It doesn’t matter whether he liked us or not – it was years ago. I should let it go.’
‘I can cancel. Tell him we’re double-booked. It’s just that—’ He stopped.
‘What?’
‘He was hinting at there being some work. Said he’d bought a big building near Melbourne and he was looking for someone to sort it out.’ He swallowed. ‘It’d be a lot of cash, Chlo.’
