“I mean, we kind of are,” Vanessa says, “but I think this is more the way the world is going.Breaking up is hard, and text messages are easy.”
“I have to go to dinner, don’t I?”I ask.
“You should meet him before and talk,” Natalie says.“Then you can either go along, if you two work something out, or bail and let him handle his own friends.”
“That would be a great plan except?—”
Natalie straightens, and she swears, loudly.
“What?”Vanessa looks genuinely alarmed.“What’s wrong?”
“Probably left the oven on,” I joke.
Natalie shakes her head slowly.“The ball.”She bites her lip, and then she turns toward me.“Any chance you could, I don’t know, just table the whole baby-having thing until after New Years?”Her whole face contorts.
I completely forgot about the ball.
“Because otherwise, the fourteen guests who booked at the Fortwilliam Estate over New Years so they could attend your boyfriend’s fancy ball at Lismore are going to be pretty irritated.”She grimaces.“That might be a mild version of how they’ll react.”
I sigh.“Even if we break up, I know Richard well enough to know you can still go to the ball.”
“That’s going to be awesome.”Natalie sinks back against her wooden kitchen chair.“Escorting guests over to the castle of my sort-of-ex who just broke my best friend’s heart.”She shakes her head.“This issonot what we came here for.”
“It kind of is, though,” Vanessa says.
“Huh?”Maybe I misheard her.
She flattens her hands on my small wooden table.“You guys, I know it’s been a weird six months, but think about what we’ve done.”
“What?”I ask.“Ridden a lot of horses?Bombed out at two small, local horse shows?”
“Hey,” Natalie says.“You got second with Scout at the second show.And third at the first.That’s hardly a bomb out.”
I roll my eyes.
“Forget you two idiots,” Vanessa says.“I’ll just talk about myself.I’ve taken a chance on loving someone new, someone who wasn’t Jason, someone too young and too good-looking for me.That was scary, and you’ve stood by me through all of it.”She looks at Natalie.“You dated a guy, dumped him with a text, and started dating another guy who liked your best friend at first, until he got to know you.”
“Now, hang on,” Natalie says.“She had already started dating the guy I had dumped when I moved on to her guy.”
I hold up one hand.“You said it was fine.”
We all start laughing.
“When we came here at the beginning of this year, we were all falling apart,” Vanessa says.“Or at least, I was.”She looks around the room.“Now we own this awesome place, and we’re figuring it out, owning our own business in a new country.”
“That’s true,” I say.“And our horse-tours are actually profitable already, thanks to Cillian’s contacts and negotiating, and the influx of the insurance money.”
“It’s hard to be profitable with horse-anything,” Natalie says.
“We’re taking risks and gambling on our dreams,” Vanessa says.“It’s not easy to do that.Part of it is that we’re going to fail.That’s just what happens when you try.”
“Not to me, usually,” Natalie says.“I hate failing.”
“We can tell,” I say.“You’re such a sore loser.”
“Shut up,” Natalie says.“You’re worse than me.”
She’s right there.“But I can’t meet Richard before this dinner—I was already going to meet him at the restaurant right before dinner, because he’s in a big investment meeting for his dad in Cork all day.”
