‘Easy,’ Priya replies. ‘Poached eggs and avocado on sourdough.’
‘Which is what I think I’ll have today,’ I agree. ‘With a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice.’
‘Totally predictable.’ The distraction appears to have lifted Priya’s mood, thankfully. ‘I think it’s an eggs Florentine day for me,’ she declares as she sets down the menu.
‘I think I’ll join you,’ Rosie says. ‘Although I like the eggs Royale too. Oh, I don’t know. What shall I have?’
‘Toss a coin?’ I suggest. ‘Heads for the salmon and tails for the spinach?’
‘No,’ she states suddenly. ‘I’m going to have the eggs Royale.’
‘Sure?’ Priya is grinning now. Rosie dithering about what to order is as much a feature of our Saturday brunches as my predictability.
‘Of course she isn’t!’ I retort. ‘Quick, take the menu away from her before she has a chance to second-guess herself.’
‘So, what’s everyone been up to?’ Priya asks once we’ve given Rowena our orders.
‘We were talking about Tori’s Stuart problem before you arrived,’ Rosie tells her.
‘It’snota problem,’ I repeat strenuously. ‘It was a mistake and it won’t happen again.’
Priya narrows her eyes as she stares at me. ‘Who was that film star who kept marrying the same guy?’ she asks after a moment. Rosie and I just stare at her blankly, so she repeats the question to Rowena, who’s just arrived with our orange juices.
‘Do you mean Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton?’ Rowena says after thinking about it briefly.
‘They’re the ones,’ Priya replies triumphantly.
‘What have they got to do with Tori?’ Rosie is patently as lost as I am.
‘She probably said the same thing the first time they got divorced, and yet she went back to him.’
‘I think there’s a bit of a difference between a drunken one-night stand and getting married,’ I point out, still unsure what Priya is trying to get at.
‘Semantics,’ Priya says. ‘I agree that marrying someone you’ve divorced once is strange, but the reasoning behind it is probably similar to your setup.’
I sigh. I can tell she’s warming to her theme, so there’s zero chance of getting her to drop it. ‘In what way?’
‘It shows that the door isn’t completely closed. There’s still something between you.’
‘Or,’ I counter, ‘it could just show that I wasn’t making good choices.’
Rosie laughs. ‘I think we can all agree that you made a bad choice. The question we’re trying to answer here is why?’
‘I told you,’ I say testily. ‘I’d had a few drinks, he was there, things spiralled.’
‘Was he the only man in the place?’ Priya asks.
‘Of course not. What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘How many men do you think would have been in there?’
‘I haven’t a clue. Could be fifty, could be two hundred. I didn’t count them.’
‘Statistically, that puts the chance of you shagging Flipper at anywhere between fifty to one and two hundred to one. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t be tempted to place a bet given those odds. And yet you did, so there must be another factor in play.’
‘I didn’t know any of the other guys there.’
‘Which is a point in their favour.’ Priya may not be a barrister, but she’s running verbal rings around me this morning and I’m starting to understand how witnesses feel when they’re being cross-examined in court.
