‘Jess.’
Lily knows her too well for this kind of crap. Still, it’s always worth a try. Her avoidance urge is powerful.
‘Now you’re not answering mine.’
Lily puts a forkful of tikka masala in her mouth and chews, making Jess endure silence the way Jess had made Lily put up with hers. It makes her itch, like an open bracket in a Word document which someone has forgotten to close.
‘We are happy, yes,’ she says eventually. ‘Broadly speaking. But there are hard patches, and there are things we have to address. This last year …’ There’s a catch in her voice. ‘It’s actually been really hard. We’ve been trying to get pregnant, and … Well.’
‘Oh, Lily. I didn’t know.’
‘I didn’t tell you, so how would you?’
Jess puts her plate down and joins Lily on the sofa, her hand on her arm. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘It’s okay.’
‘But it’s not. It sounds really rough. You can tell me these things, you know.’
Lily nods, hard. So hard that it’s not quite convincing.
‘Oh, I know. But you like things to be fun. And when you’re having a romance crisis, well … It never seems like the right time to tell you.’
Lily’s point earlier comes back to Jess. Perhaps pushing away the hard stuffhasn’talways served her well. It hasn’t served people around her well, either, because it’s stopped them coming to her, knowing she’s uncomfortable with any kind of pain, hers or theirs. It’s stopped her being as good a friend as she could be. As good a friend as Lily deserves.
‘I’m sorry,’ Jess says. She feels guilty about taking the bigger share of the peshwari naan now. Frustration over a man doesn’t quite compare with what Lily has no doubt been through. Has she done IVF? Has she had miscarriages? Is it even okay to ask? Jess doesn’t know. And every instinct she has is to offer to do something fun to take Lily’s mind off it. She doesn’t know how else to be a good friend.
‘It’s okay,’ Lily says, even though it’s not, not really. ‘I’m telling you this mostly because I guess what I’m saying is that even in a happy relationship, hard stuff happens. Things you can predict, things you can’t. And so, if you’re going to be with Alex, you need to figure out how to deal with the hard stuff. Sounds like you’reboth conflict-avoidant. He physically runs away every time something difficult comes up. And you just squash it down. And in the long run, that doesn’t make for a very healthy relationship.’
Jess tears of a piece of naan and savours it while she thinks. ‘I guess you’re right.’
‘I’m definitely right.’
‘This is not just advice,’ Jess says. ‘This is M&S advice.’
Lily rolls her eyes. ‘Drink your wine,’ she says.
Chapter Forty
Alex
‘And what’s going through your head when you walk away in the middle of a conversation like that?’
Alex’s therapist asks him this question in almost an offhand way, so casually that he makes it seem like a minor thing.
‘Panic, mostly,’ he says.
‘Blank panic?’
‘Yes.’
Just thinking back to the moment when he left Jess’s flat brings him right back there: his palms are clammy; his heart is thumping. He wills it to stop, but it won’t.
‘Did you try the grounding technique?’
‘The thing with the senses?’
‘Yes.’
