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 straplineDo 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 thinkanymore.
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 ifShoreley 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.”
