She sighed. Mum always said you couldn’t make newoldfriends, and she was right – but you could choose to let new people in. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Seeing Jude today was terrible .?.?. and exhilarating. It was painful and embarrassing, and I wish it hadn’t beenanyof the above. I wish I hadn’t cared, because I shouldn’t by now – and it’s obvious he didn’t.’
‘You don’t know that,’ Charlie said gently. ‘Maybe he just .?.?. freaked out?’
Hannah replayed the awkward handshake in her mind, remembering the stricken look on Jude’s face after Clive ‘introduced’ them. Resenting the sudden pang of sympathy this inspired, she said: ‘He still fucked up his first chance in four years to have an honest conversation with me. Declined to explain why I was chucked out like yesterday’s chip paper the second I stopped being his girlfriend. I’dneverhave done that to him. He meant too much to me. He was too important.’ The words burst out of her like long-forgotten items tumbling from an overstuffed cupboard. One that she’d shut tight, fully intending never to open again.
Charlie sipped her wine but said nothing, giving Hannah space to continue.
‘He was important to me from day one,’ she said after a moment. As someone who’d never been prone to gushing about her feelings, the words felt strangely resonant, like a confession. ‘I had no ideawhy,’ Hannah went on. ‘He was totally hapless back then. I used to watch nineties romcoms with Mum every weekend when she wasn’t on shift. All the classics, you know?Notting Hill,Bridget Jones.?.?. I remember thinking the moment I first saw Jude that he was just like one of those goofy Richard Curtis characters: all plummy vowels and tripping over something every five minutes.’
‘Sounds cute,’ Charlie said. ‘And –sorry– but you can tell just from looking at him that he grew up into Mark Darcy.’
‘What?’
‘You know, flawlessly polite on the surface with hidden, extremely horny depths. Fully capable of sexing you into oblivion and then making you a lovely, post-orgasmic cup of tea.Nice boys don’t kiss like that,’ she said, quoting from the film. ‘Oh, yes, they fucking do.’
‘Great, Charlie. Thanks,’ Hannah said, feeling her face redden as she remembered how true this was. ‘That was super helpful.’
‘Ididsay sorry. Go on with your story. Please.’
‘Fine,’ Hannah grumbled. ‘He joined our school on the first day of year nine – we were in the same form, and the teacher announced it wasmyjob to stop him getting lost. I wasn’t happy about being lumbered with the new kid: I’d spent most of the summer helping out with Claire and Livi, so the last thing I wanted was someone else to take care of.’
‘What changed your mind, then?’
‘He could tell. Even though I didn’t say it, he saw how annoyed I was that I’d been made responsible for him. And he was .?.?. decent about it. He told me I didn’t have to do it, that he could find his way on his own and he wouldn’t tell on me. I got the impression he was used to taking care of other people, too, even though he seemed completely clueless.’
‘And was he?’
‘Clueless?Yeah,’ Hannah confirmed, a wry smile she couldn’t hold back tilting her lips. ‘I basically kept him alive that year. He’d been at some private school in Surrey up to then, but there wasn’t a space for him in the one up here – it was the local comp or nothing. I stood between him and alotof lads who’d have liked to haze the posh boy.’
‘Interesting,’ Charlie said, raising an eyebrow. ‘But that wasn’t what I meant. I was asking whether he looked after a family member, like you suspected.’
‘Oh. Sort of,’ Hannah said, her cheeks turning pink. ‘Though it was less a case of looking after, and more a case of .?.?. managing. His mum wasunbelievablydifficult: moody and, now I look back on it, incredibly manipulative. His dad had left, like mine, but Lillian refused to divorce him. She had some mad idea that she’d eventually get him back, even though he’d deliberately taken a job that meant he worked abroad all the time. He was from near here, originally, and he’d never been happy living down south. Moving Jude and Joe to Derbyshire was a ploy to get their dad to come home to them, which never happened. When her plan didn’t work, she resented the fact that her kids had managed to adjust – make new friends, build proper lives for themselves here.’
‘That sounds .?.?. very messed up,’ Charlie said in open disbelief.
‘Yep,’ Hannah agreed. ‘She was a total nightmare. Still is, probably, though she’s supposedly a pillar of the community: head of the WI, active in the Rotary Club .?.?. all that stuff. She lives in the big old house at the bottom of my mum’s street, the one with the weeping willow and the massive bay windows. I was her least favourite person, when Jude and I were kids. Very much from the wrong side of the tracks.’
‘Come off it,’ Charlie scoffed, ‘this is the Peak District, not the Bronx. And you’ve just said you lived on the same road.’
‘I’m serious,’ Hannah said. ‘I’m from the council house end. Mum owns her place now, but it was rented when I was young. And we always struggled for money, even though she worked so hard. My dad would appear from time to time and throw some cash her way, but then we wouldn’t hear from him for months – or worse, he’d come askingMumfor a handout.’ At this, Charlie’s expression darkened. She shook her head in disgust.
‘Me, Ed and the girls probably seemed pretty chaotic, too,’ Hannah continued. ‘Very loud, and always either arguing or up to something we shouldn’t be. We weren’t bad children – but definitely not the nice, quiet, middle-class sort Lillian wanted hers to associate with.’
‘So you had very little in common, and yet became best pals,’ Charlie observed.
‘Yes,’ Hannah said. ‘I guess we just .?.?. recognised each other. It was almost like we’d met before. We both justgotthings about the other that nobody else did.’
‘Oh my god .?.?. you were, like,fated mates,’ Charlie murmured, theatrically fanning her face with her fingertips.
Hannah snorted. ‘You havegotto stop reading so much omegaverse smut on AO3. It’s rotting your brain.’
‘I will not stop, and you can’t make me,’ Charlie pouted. ‘Let’s say it was aRomeo and Julietsituation, then. Did the two of you get together across the barricades as teenagers? Was it crazy hot because you knew his mother would disapprove?’
Hannah laughed briefly, then said, ‘Not at all. It was slow. Scary. I spent years terrified to touch him, if I’m honest. By the time I realised I feltthatway about him, there was so much between us. So much to lose, if we messed things up.’
She’d been fifteen when she’d noticed the size and solidity of him – realised the sharp angle at which Jude, suddenly six feet tall, had had to lean over her to read from the GCSE history textbook they were sharing. It was after school, in the sitting room at Hannah’s house, and asthey sought an answer to the question of whether Thomas Cromwell should have foreseen his own downfall, Hannah had wondered whether she too was guilty of ignoring inconvenient facts. She’d been gripped by an abrupt, burning awareness of something she’d actually known all along: her best friend wasa boy.
The changes in him came thick and fast after that. Gawky, skinny limbs became lean and muscular; his shoulders widened and his jawline sharpened. He kept wearing glasses instead of trading them in for contacts, but chose ones with heavy, dark frames that highlighted the brightness of the grey-blue eyes behind them. By the end of the following year, he’d become someone other people noticed, too. Girls began to simper and flirt with him in ways that made Hannah – for reasons she didn’t fully understand then – want to throw things at them.
