“Don’t be ridiculous. I want the salmon thing. And besides, I make you look good. You need ex-dates to see you out with smoking-hot competition.”
“Lactating smoking-hot competition.” Jenny let out a giggle.
“Thinking about it, you really should add to your profile that you have a best friend who will kill anyone who fucks you over.”
“You set the friendship bar really high.”
I held up my hand, and Jenny high-fived it.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Fox
That morning, I’d made themistake of announcing to Haze that I’d unloaded and loaded the dishwasher and wiped down the kitchen surfaces.
“Do you want a fucking medal? For doing the bare minimum? Imagine being me. Do you have any idea what it’s like to have a human baby gnawing at you? Do you realize how exhausting it is? Why couldn’t you have the babies? Why does nature hate women? It’s our bodies that bear the children, and then we have to sodding feed them! Why should we then also be loaded up with the domestic shit you avoid by being lucky enough to leave the house! You cleaning this house is the least you could do after all I’ve been through bearing YOUR children.”
I’d tried offering to hire a cleaner, and she’d shouted that with everything else we had going on, we didn’t even have the time to find one—and if I wasn’t such a selfish pig, I would already know that.
Then she threw a dog toy at my head. But it was one of the soft ones, so I knew she wasn’t really trying to hurt me.
I’d backed out of the house shouting that I loved her, that I appreciated her, and that I’d bring her back treats. All I could think about was how if this was the reaction she had to me being insensitive about housework, what kind of hell would be unleashed when I broke it to her I’d been secretly talking to her father?
I was in a taxi five minutes away from my office when I sawJenny. She was holding a takeout coffee and walking down Park Lane. Was she coming to see me? I rang her cell phone.
She answered on the second ring.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“Fox? I’m with my mum. I just got to theirs, as they need help with getting some things down from the loft.”
“I see.” I frowned as I kept staring at her departing back.
“I can’t come meet you guys anywhere right now.”
“Right. Okay. Don’t worry—I was just checking if Haze had filled you in on my meeting.” I outlined the Norwood and Restore Glory link.
“She told me last night. I’ll look into Norwood in case there’s any reason he’s come to you as a client.”
I hung up and watched as she turned the corner. It was definitely Jenny. She was even wearing the same blue-and-white spotted raincoat that Haze was always ribbing her about, saying she dressed like a “fucking toddler.”
Why had she just lied to me?
—
“You must’ve got her confused with someone else,” said Haze. “Jenny wouldn’t lie about where she was.”
I’d told her about seeing Jenny as soon as I got home. Despite my repeated assurances that it really was Jenny, she had brushed it off, saying I’d been mistaken. She was so certain it made me unsure of myself. Maybe it was just a woman wearing the same ugly coat, and my mind had presumed it had to be Jenny?
Haze was more interested in the Tupperware box of leftover cookies and croissants from yesterday’s Norwood meeting than she was in wondering if her best friend had lied to me. Richard had insisted I take them all home, explaining that his four kids were “mental enough without all that sugar.” Haze ate three of the cookies as I kept staring at the box, imagining how good they tasted.
Haze shrugged. “None of it makes sense. Jenny thinks we needto work out who in our lives could be in a position to report on what we’ve been doing.”
I considered this. “I can’t think of anyone who would know everything about us. It’s not like we go around telling people our business.”
Haze was reaching for a fourth biscuit, but she stopped. “What about someone you started seeing in the last few months? Someone you’ve opened up to?”
I frowned. “I don’t get who—”
