“Well, it is and it isn’t. You shouldn’t have said what you said to me. I stand by that. But we both messed up. We used each other. We got so caught up in each other that we never…well, I guess I can’t speak for you here, but at least I…I never really stopped to think about Claire in any sort of real way. I let myself think that she wasn’t real, that if she was, if you were truly happily married, we wouldn’t have been able to get as close as we did. Ikept her in this weird, like, phantom realm, not allowing her to dictate what I did or what I felt about you. And I think you did the same thing.”
“Yes, exactly. That’s exactly why I never brought her up. You made me so happy and she made me so sad and I didn’t want to take the hard next step of doing something about that. Selfishly, I was hoping that she’d do it for me. Or that you would. And that makes me a bellend of the highest order.”
I sigh. “Yes, it does. But I get it. I really do. I just wish both of us,allof us, had been adults about the whole thing. We could have saved ourselves a lot of angst.”
“God, for real. I was so fucking miserable, mostly because I couldn’t believe I had put you in that position. I was so mad at myself and so ashamed that I’d been too cowardly to have a real conversation with you. Or with my wife, for that matter. Ma was fucking fuming, by the way. She almost drove down on New Year’s Day to apologize to you in person for raising a son who could do such a horrible thing.”
“Yeah, she told me.” I have to laugh at that, the idea of Moira Ramsay bombing down the motorway with a chagrined Lachlan cowering in the backseat. And when I laugh, he laughs, and it’s like cracking the door open from a really dark room: Let there be light. “I’ll tell her that if she keeps sending me cookies, all will be forgiven.”
“Good plan.” He shifts in his chair, like now that we’re out of the trauma-dumping phase of this conversation, we can move to the solution phase, but I’ve just remembered what else I need to tell him.
“Uh, one more thing,” I say. “In the spirit of full disclosure: I hooked up with Kieran.”
Lachlan blinks, but though he’d have every right to get in myface and scream “Iknewit!” he correctly reads the room and avoids that impulse. “Oh,” he says instead. “Okay, wow. I wondered, you know, because he was always hinting that you had…I mean, good for you. Good for him. Good for everyone.”
“Yeah, thanks.”
He’s extremely uncomfortable; he can’t quite meet my eyes. “So is that still going on? Like, are you guys dating?”
“No, it was just the one time. And we didn’t…you know…” I make a sound like a farmer calling his sheep dog and a hand gesture that has no relevance to any known human action, but I’m guessing that the redness in my face alone will convey to Lachlan that I’m saying Kieran and I never had sex.
He swallows and bobs his head.
“Anyway,” I continue. “He’s wonderful, but I felt like I couldn’t ruin his sweet young life by bringing all of my crazy into it. I actually broke him off a piece of the crazy and I think I melted his brain a little bit.”
“Ah, to be twenty-two again.” He pauses. “Sorry, I know it’s none of my business, but was it that night after the club?”
“Yes.”
“Cool, cool.” There’s another excruciating pause. “Do you want to talk about it, I mean, like, should I ask you if he’s a good kisser or whatever?”
“God, please no. Please, for the love of everything holy, do not ask that.”
“Okay, check. Not that kind of friends. Or maybe not yet.”
“Maybe one day, but maybe never.”
It takes him a minute, but his lips curl into a smile as he remembers. “The Riddlemaster returns.”
I want to relax into this memory, our very first inside joke. But I’ve realized that everything up until now was trivial compared tothe question I still have to ask, the final piece of the riddle: “But Lachlan…we are friends, right? Because I miss you.”
In an instant, he reaches across the table to grab my hands. “Are you kidding me? I miss you so fucking much. Of course we’re friends.”
“Even though we’ve both violated the ‘no apologies’ rule about a thousand times today?”
“Even still.”
I want to throw my head back in relief. I want to hire a skywriter to spell out THANK FUCKING GOD in the clouds. I want to put all the messiness of New Year’s behind us and move forward as friends, because my life isn’t the same without him.
And yet, even though the whole point of this conversation was both of us acknowledging that we should have been more honest and less cowardly, I know a lot remains unspoken. The long-hypothesized divorce is really, actually happening. What does that mean for “us”—and is there even an “us” to discuss? We’re leaving things hanging in the air, like the lights from a firework floating slowly to the ground. Except there’s all this smoke everywhere and we have to wait until that blows over before we see the shape of the sparks left in the sky.
But here’s something I know to be true: We will talk about it. If my time in Liverpool has taught me anything, it’s that I can’t let the important stuff go undiscussed, no matter how hard or uncomfortable it may be. The first step was easing ourselves back into each other’s lives, and it was painful but it was good. So, yes, for now: friends. I’m content for us to spend a while reestablishing our footing. But if we ever veer in the direction of “more than friends” again, I know now that I can be—mustbe—an advocate for myself. I owe that to myself—we owe that to each other.
Chapter Forty-One
The road back to realfriendship is mostly smooth. We don’t have to start from scratch, we just have to start from a place that feels right. It’s a bit like coming back to college after summer break: We’re excited to see each other, nervous about whether we can pick it right back up, and pretty unwilling to have yet another rehashing of what we did in our three months off.
Perhaps subconsciously, we both invite third parties the first few times we hang out outside the “office” (such as it is). Phil and the physios join us for drinks at the pub, Bashie and Sadie come over for dinner. One Sunday morning, Amina has us round for brunch. She says it’s so Lachlan can meet the baby, but I know it’s really so she can side-eye him until she’s satisfied that he’s changed.
