One
Isha
I pushed the house plans across the table to Dom, my business partner and closest thing to a BFF I’d ever had. “Don’t give me that look. I told you this was happening.”
“No, you said you were thinking about building a house outside of the city. Not that you’d snapped up a plot a mile away from the land we bought before Christmas. You know that’s smack in the middle of hunting territory, right?”
“How could I forget? You’ve only just stopped talking about it. Besides, the local hunt is shut down. Your mate Cash saw to that.”
Dom’s eyes flashed, and I regretted the low blow. Cash had become my friend too, and he’d nearly died trying to prevent illegal fox hunting in the village I was determined to call home one day.
“Sorry.” I kicked him contritely under the table. “I didn’t mean that to sound flippant. I meant it shouldn’t be an issue for a while.”
Dom was still scowling, but I was used to that from my surly pal. Trick was to let him think his death glare was killing me. Make him feel bad for being a grouchy twat. Then he’d let it go, and life—and the conversation—could move on.
True to form, Dom glowered for a full minute while I gave him my best wide-eyed look of regret, then he sighed and turned back to my plans. “This would cost millions in London.”
“Damn, you think?”
“Fuck off. I’m serious. If you can pull this off, and you genuinely want to live in the sticks, it’ll be amazing.”
I knew this. The plans Dom was seeing for the first time were three months old. I’d gone over every point he’d made in the last half hour a hundred times before I’d come to him. Our personal relationship was like that. It wasn’t that we didn’t trust each other…it was more that neither one of us trusted anyone. Over the past year, he’d got better at letting people in. Me? Yeah. I was still a reticent fuck.
“What about the kids?”
“Hmm?”
Dom rolled his eyes. “Your children, dickhead. How’s this going to work with them? You think Mina will be okay with you abandoning her in London?”
“I’m hardly abandoning her when I’m forty minutes up the road. It’s no farther than Chelsea to Chigwell.”
“You don’t live in either of those places.”
“Yeah, but I like the alliteration, and you get my point. Besides, she already knows and she’s cool with it. Mina’s the best.”
It was true. Mina and I had been divorced for years, but she was still my person. She knew me even better than Dom, and when I’d told her I needed to get out of London, she’d had my back, like she always did.
As if on cue, my phone rang. Her bitmoji avatar filled the screen of my iPhone X.
She was the only person in the world I never, ever ignored. I nodded at Dom, rose from my stool at the breakfast bar, and stepped away.
“Hey, girl. What’s up?”
“Don’t ‘girl’ me,” Mina retorted. “Twelve years and you never change.”
“Do you want me to?”
“No. What I want—actually, need—is for you to find a snake shop to host Tam’s birthday party, and then do absolutely everything to organise it, because I cannot be in a place that houses a bunch of creepy reptiles.”
I opened my mouth. Shut it again. It wasn’t the conversation I’d been expecting. Our usual exchanges consisted of arranging pick-up and drop-off times, and discussing what chaos my spirited daughter had caused at school this week. And I’d kind of assumed my son’s obsession with snakes had run out of steam. “Um…okay? Do snake shops even do that? And if they do, where? Cos as far as I know, there isn’t one in your hood.”
“Shame.” Mina’s tone was dry. “And to be honest, I have no clue where the nearest snake shop to me is. Strangely enough, I’ve never given it much thought.”
I imagined she’d given it as much thought as I had to my soon-to-be eight year old’s imminent birthday party, but I wasn’t in a position to debate the issue. Mina had endured years of me being the worst father in the world while I’d been consumed with my soulless career as a football agent. If she needed me to front a snake-themed birthday party, I’d do it. “Email me the details. I’ll look into it.”
“Really?” Mina’s obvious scepticism hurt. “It’s in two weeks, Isha. You can’t lose this at the bottom of your virtual to-do list.”
“It’s at the top of my list. Just email me, okay?”
