‘I suppose a drink after work would be okay,’ I said, aiming for breezy and failing miserably.
‘Great. Why don’t I give you a call in a couple of days? There are some nice pubs not far from here.’
‘That sounds good.’ And it did. Very, very, good.
The smile took a long time to fade after we hung up. And when I passed the mirror hanging on my office wall, I noticed my cheeks were wearing an attractive flush. It clashed with my hair. The hair which he liked. As a child I’d hated the colour, hated the playground teasing, but today I was grateful to the woman whose genes had given it to me. Hers was threaded with grey these days... at least I think it was. With a frown, I reached for my phone, not sure why I was suddenly overcome with a need to hear her voice. I summoned up her number from my phone book before giving myself time to question my motives.
The phone rang six times before I heard her familiar voice in my ear.
‘Hello.’
‘Hi, Mum.’
‘Well, this is a bit of a nuisance for you, but I’m afraid I’m not here right now. Although I imagine you’ve already worked that out for yourself.’
I blinked at the phone as though it was guilty of pulling a particularly cruel practical joke. Voicemail. Was this a new outgoing message? I had no idea.
‘I’ll call you back,’ my mother’s voice continued. ‘Just leave a message at the beep.’
It was hard to reconcile the warring feelings of disappointment and relief that she wasn’t around to take my call. Maybe it was just as well. Trying to hide the lightning strike from her would have been pointless. She had a knack of unearthing secrets almost as effectively as she managed to keep them.
Chapter Seven
The café had a few outdoor tables, and I was there early enough to snag one ahead of the Saturday morning brunch crowd. I fiddled nervously with the menu in its stand and rearranged the bowl of sugar sachets and the condiments so many times I fully expected the waitress to swoop down and take them from me.
He’d been shocked to hear from me when I’d phoned this morning and hadn’t bothered disguising it with his opening words.
‘Well, hello there, stranger. It’s been so long, I was beginning to think you’d died.’
I deserved that one, so I didn’t tell Jackson that two days ago I very nearly had. That would have just been mean.
‘What’s it been? Nine months since we’ve heard from you? Were you going for some sort of record?’
I bit my lip guiltily because that was a hell of a long time to ignore your friends, and also because I had no recollection of when exactly we’d last been in contact.
‘Something like that,’ I mumbled.
It might have been even longer if it hadn’t been for Rhys. When he’d called the previous night to arrange our ‘definitely not a date’, one of the pubs he suggested was a place I used to visit all the time with Jackson. The memory had caught me off guard, and I was sleepy, which perhaps was why I accidentally let slip that I’dnot seen either of my two closest friends for longer than I cared to remember.
‘Why?’ Such a reasonable question, but I had no acceptable answer to give him.
‘Like I said, I’ve been kind of absorbed with work for a while now. The business was taking off, and keeping the social media side of it going takes up practically all my free time.’ I gave a wry laugh. ‘I guess I pushed some things onto the back burner.’
‘Things like your friends?’ Strangely there’d been no judgement in his tone, as though he understood the trap I’d fallen into. But that didn’t change how bad I felt about neglecting the two people who’d always been there for me.
‘Why don’t you reach out to them now?’ It was a good question, and one I’d already asked myself about a thousand times.
‘Because they’re going to be mad that I’ve ghosted them for so long.’
‘And will that get better the longer you keep up the silence?’
He had me there. ‘No. It’ll just get harder as even more months slip by.’
‘I can’t tell you what to do, Ellie,’ Rhys said, in a way that made me realise – as if I hadn’t already worked it out – that he must be a really good dad. ‘But I think that’s your answer right there. It will be even worse if you let those months slide into years.’
That had shocked me and been the prod I’d needed to finally set aside my fears and contact my friends to do some serious grovelling.
I tried Mel first, because those bonds were stronger, and the roots of our friendship went deeper. Perhaps that’s the way it always is with the first friendly face you find on Day One at university. There’ll always be an unbreakable connection with the person who’d unfailingly held back your hair when you’d drunk too much cheap cider, and who’d venture out in the middle of the night tobuy paracetamols for your crippling stomach cramps. They would always be your forever person... even if you hadn’t spoken to them in what felt like forever.