‘I didn’t know it was going to happen this quickly,’ Mats said. ‘I would rather be helping you than going to work, but I don’t have a choice at the moment. Sorry.’ He felt bad about it, but the work he’d been doing with Ole was about to turn from strategy into a live project, and he had to be there.
‘It’s okay,’ Becca said. ‘It’s all for the best in the long run. The sooner the project starts, the sooner you can be there all the time.’
His phone buzzed with a message, and even before he pulled it out of his pocket, he knew it would be Lotta. They’d been messaging all day, starting with one from her telling him her triphad been weird, and he wasn’t sure what to make of that.Good weird?he’d asked. Different to what she’d planned, was all she said.
Lotta: What are you doing now?
Mats: I’m in Bergen. Having dinner with some friends.
He wanted to tell her about the island, about the hotel, about everything, but it was too much over text. He wanted to talk to her, to see her face. Without waiting for a reply from her, he texted again.
Mats: Could we have a call tonight?
9
Lotta met her sisters off the train at Paddington Station on Friday evening. She’d had time to drop her luggage at home and have a cup of tea before she’d headed out again. The three of them headed back to her place on the Tube with a bag of food and a bottle of wine. She loved these station reunions. The anticipation of waiting and trying to spot them in the crowd of passengers that surged from the trains was so much more fun than waiting in her flat for them to arrive.
London was finally showing signs of spring, and the forecast for the weekend looked dry, which is all anyone could hope for in April.
Joanna was the eldest of the three of them at thirty-four, and lived in Oxford with her husband Rob and their son, Freddie, who was six. Freya was the youngest. She was twenty-eight and lived with her boyfriend, Ben. They were still close, even though they led such different lives, and that meant a lot to all of them.
‘Are we shopping tomorrow?’ Lotta asked as she pulled a baked Camembert from the oven, followed by a loaf of sourdough studded with olives.
‘Can we go to Camden?’ Freya suggested. She was lying in the corner of the sofa, still managing to sip her wine from a horizontal position.
‘It’ll be busy, especially if it’s nice weather,’ said Lotta.
‘That’s okay. There’s a place there called Humble Crumble that only sells crumble and custard, but they brûlée the custard. It looks insane.’
‘I could eat a crumble,’ said Jo.
‘Okay, Camden it is.’ Lotta didn’t mind what they did. Freya usually had a plan before they even arrived, and it took the pressure off having to entertain them, especially when she’d had such a busy week.
‘How was your trip to Oslo?’ Jo asked, pulling off a chunk of bread and spreading the runny cheese over it.
‘Come on, Freya,’ Lotta said, calling her sister to join them at the table. ‘Or there will be no cheese left. It was great, although the work is going to be more involved than I’d thought, but that’s okay. I loved Oslo, and I met a nice guy.’
Freya came to the table with her wine. ‘Spill,’ she said.
‘His name is Mats, and we met in the airport lounge.’
‘You paid for an airport lounge?’ Jo asked.
‘No, the company paid for it.’
‘So, is he a rich businessman?’ Freya said.
‘I don’t know. He looked normal at the airport, but then I saw him in Oslo on my last night, and he was wearing a very nice suit. He’s good-looking anyway, but the suit took it to another level.’
‘Finally, Lots. You’ve found a man who might not be a loser,’ said Freya. She took the wine bottle and topped them all up.
‘Curtis wasn’t a loser.’ Lotta watched as Jo and Freya exchanged a look, as well they might. Lotta didn’t know why she cared what they thought of her ex-fiancé to the point of defending him. ‘We were in different places.’
‘He took advantage of you and manipulated you out of your job.’ Freya could be brutally honest sometimes. That was exactly what had happened, but her sisters didn’t know the whole story. It was far too shaming to share just how badly she’d allowed him to treat her in the end.
‘Mats sounds promising, but presumably he lives in Norway.’ Jo said.
‘Exactly. But it was nice to be kind of… pursued. We swapped numbers, and he’s nice to talk to, so…’ It was so much more than that. It had felt amazing, but she didn’t want to sound like she’d fallen for a man she’d met at the airport and spent a couple of hours with, even if it was true.
