“Nah,” he said, taking hold of her arm. “Rather hang out with you for a bit.”
He would have stayed for the meeting if he’d lost weight.
“I’m really sorry I was late,” she said, walking with Zack toward the exit.
“All good. Sounds like a big day.”
“It was.” She remembered what happened before she left the office. “And guess what? That job—it’s come up again!” She turned to look at him, eyes wide with nervous excitement.
“The investigative one?” He raised an eyebrow. “Starting when?”
“End of November.”
He pushed the big oak door of the church open and held it so Daisy could step out onto the street ahead of him.
“Babe,” he said. “I love you and I think you’d be amazing at that job, you know I do.” He let the door slam behind him and Daisy imagined Denise glaring toward them. “But we’re getting married in January. Or had you forgotten?” He smiled across at her.
“No, of course I hadn’t. It’s just it doesn’t come up that often. It’s more money too...”
Zack started walking away from the direction of his work. Daisy was fairly sure she knew where he was going and fell into step beside him.
“More money can quickly turn into no money if you don’t keep the job,” he said, taking her hand and squeezing it. “You didn’t want it last time it came up. You said maybe it wasn’t right for you, and you were happy where you are. I just don’t want you taking on something that you’re not completely sure of. It’ll put too much pressure on you and that’s never been good for you, remember?” Zack fixed his eyes on Daisy’s face, as if trying to transfer a memory. She looked away.
“Plus,” he continued, “we’ve got a wedding to plan and we’veboth said we don’t want to wait much longer after that before we try for a baby. And it’s a big job, isn’t it? Loads of travel. Crazy hours—more crazy than you do now. You’d just be getting started and you’d have to stop again.”
As much as she hated to admit it to herself, he was right. If she did ever get the job, she wanted to stay in it. She wanted to put her all into it. She wanted to be the best investigative journalist News Now! had ever had. She wouldn’t be able to do that if she was also planning a wedding, or pregnant, or under pressure.
“You’re right,” she said, lifting his hand to her mouth, kissing it. She’d always wanted this. Someone to talk through plans with and build a life with, together.
“We’ve both had to make sacrifices and I know it’s frustrating,” he said, looking down at her, eyebrows furrowed. “But like we keep saying...”
“One day,” they both said in unison.
Zack stopped at a bin spilling over with fast-food wrappers and discarded leaflets.
“Shall we sack it off?” he asked, looking pointedly at theirWeighing Downbooklets.
Daisy didn’t want to go back. She’d never wanted to go. Zack was just one of those people who pushed for explanations for every moment of her unhappiness and the last time she’d been feeling low and couldn’t put her finger on why exactly, she’d thrown out there that maybe she was unhappy about her weight ahead of their wedding. Zack had set about organizing an immediate fix for it and here they were, three months later, guilty about bailing on something she’d thought up on a whim.
He took the book from her and flicked to her page, scanning the numbers. She had fluctuated by the odd pound here and there, but mostly she had remained the same weight. A weight she was broadly happy with. A weight she had no real intention of changing.
“We probably don’t need to keep going if you’ve leveled out,” he said, and before she could answer, he threw both their booklets into the bin. “I’ve got time for a quick curry before I go back to the hotel if you fancy? We can go through the flowers we want for the wedding. That’ll cheer you up.” He grinned and took her hand, leading her up the road to the curry house they’d already been walking toward.
Daisy wasn’t that keen on curry, but just as Zack had given up his lunch break once a week to go toWeighing Downbecause it was important to his fiancée, she made compromises too. Early on, they’d spoken about what the key was to a successful relationship and what was important to them. Making sacrifices—or compromises, as Zack had reframed it—was one of many that had come up in the hours they’d spent discussing it. Now they held regular relationship audits under his guidance to discuss whether each of them were meeting those needs and what they could both improve on.
Daisy wasn’t sure whether that was what other couples did, or if it was just what happened when you ended up engaged to your therapist.
Chapter Two
Tom
There were many moments in Tom’s life that he wasn’t proud of, but the month after his breakup (or The Worst Day as he liked to refer to it) held a good percentage of them. There was the night—a whole night!—where he parked outside Sophie’s flat singing different songs on repeat, so that she’d hear him as she tried to sleep.
He was actually quite impressed with the number of high notes he hit during his rendition of “Cruel Summer” by Taylor Swift, but he let himself down as he cried while spitting out the line about loving someone being the worst thing anyone’s ever heard. He got through “I Will Wait” by Mumford & Sons, putting extra emphasis on the “for yooouu,” and mastered his impression of Celine Dion during a good few rounds of “Think Twice” before one of Sophie’s maroon Converse trainers landed, with force, on his windscreen. He’d bought them for her for her most recent birthday, and he wasn’t sure whether he should read into that or not, and whether her choice of shoe was a good or bad thing if hewereto read into it. She’d always been a scarily good shot.
He sang a very impassioned version of “I Can’t Make You Love Me” at around 4:00 a.m., at which point Sophie appearedat her front door and, approaching the car window, slammed her palm against the glass. There she was before him. Her light brown wavy hair messy from, most probably, all the tossing and turning he’d caused her, and her purple M&S dressing gown pulled tight around her gray pajamas that she insisted saved the planet because they were made from bamboo. Her sparkling blue eyes that, through the glass, were less sparkling and more blazing. She had put makeup on though. He knew for a fact that she removed it before bed, yet here she was, her signature black liquid eyeliner framing each eye. He pressed the button to lower his window and, for the first time in nearly a month, was face-to-face with her.
“Go home, Tom,” she said, and then she turned her back on him and walked away, cruelly wafting a blast of Gucci Rush through his window as she left, which lingered for days. It was, however, a reminder that it wasn’t totally over. If it was, why the makeup and perfume?
