‘You look terrible,’ he said – and Hannah knew he was stating fact, rather than casting a cruel aspersion.
‘Cheers,’ she sighed. ‘Good morning to you, too.’ She stepped aside to let him in, immediately annoyed by how fresh, fragrant and bright-eyed he was. Hannah wore her scrappiest sleep shorts and an ancient t-shirt with a photo of a grumpy-looking cat and the caption ‘Rage Consumes Me’. Even in her current state, she knew it wasn’t a good look.
‘Why aren’t you at work?’ Hannah demanded, keen to spend as little time as possible on the back foot.
‘INSET day,’ Ed stated blandly. ‘I’m working from home – well, Mum’s. Don’t need to dial in to my first meeting until ten.’ Then, without preamble or permission, he strode to the kitchen and set about making a cafetière of coffee. Though it was months since he’d been in Hannah’s flat, he knew precisely where to find all the things he needed. He set everything out on the counter, then eyed her as the kettle boiled, a pained expression on his face.
‘I’m sorry, Han,’ he said. ‘I should have spoken to you about the engagement first. You shouldn’t have found out alongside everyone else.’
‘No,’ she said firmly, ‘I shouldn’t. It was aclear violationof the Twin Code, which is supposed to be sacred.’ As she said the words, she discovered her outrage at Ed’s contravention of this childhood honesty pact was genuine. Nothing could justify a communications fail this significant.
Without answering her, he turned to pour hot water into the French press. The kitchen air sang with the rich, intense smell of coffee, and Hannah couldn’t help inhaling greedily.
While he waited for the coffee to steep, Ed leaned back against the worktop and looked at her. ‘Thing is, I’m not the only one guilty ofviolating the code, am I?’ His expression was gentle, despite the air quotes he made with his pointer fingers.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Hannah said, irritated, head still banging.
Ed folded his arms across his ridiculously broad chest and shook his head. ‘When were you going to tell me about Friday? About seeing Jude in Sheffield?’
‘I .?.?. Well .?.?.’ Hannah scrambled for a response that sounded less incriminating than ‘never, probably’. After a beat, she blurted: ‘How do you even know about that?’
‘Joe told me, of course. And Jude told him. For what it’s worth, it sounds like he’s in hell over the way he handled seeing you.’
‘What.Ever,’ Hannah spat, suddenly sounding fifteen years younger than she was. ‘He was a dick – too clever and important to acknowledge little old me, the hired help for the day.’
‘Is that honestly what you think?’ Ed said, frowning.
Hannah ground her teeth, but said nothing, so Ed went on: ‘Acting like he didn’t know you was shoddy, but you of all people know he was always prone to foot-in-mouth disease. I don’t think you can take one screw-up as a sign he’s developed some sort of superiority complex – more like proof he’s still better at dealing with numbers than people. Even Mum said he looked guilt-stricken at lunch yesterday.Like a death row convict awaiting his lethal injection, was the phrase.’
Hannah felt stung and annoyed by this assessment, which – if she removed her own hurt feelings from the equation – was both fair and reasonable. She hated the fact that she knew Jude well enough to concede he might have panicked, then stumbled into the sort of social faux pas that, in a different life,shemight have helped him out of.
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Maybe he hasn’t turned into Lord La-Di-Dah of Sydney.’
‘Glad we agree,’ Ed said, ‘because it means we can return to the point: you keeping a lid on how you felt. And I don’t just mean last week. I mean since Joe and I started seeing each other. I mean sinceChristmas Eve karaoke. It was only when I saw your face yesterday that I realised how cut up you still are.’
Hannah felt the reflexive urge to deny she was in any way ‘cut up’, only to discover she lacked the necessary energy. Instead, she hung her head. This was what she’d been afraid of – what she’d been desperately trying to avoid. Ed sounded gutted. It had finally hit him that pursuing his own happy future necessarily involved Hannah facing the most painful episode in her past.
‘It’s not for you to worry about,’ she said firmly.
‘Of course it is – we’re twins. I love you. I should have pushed you harder to talk about it, and long before now. D’you realise I still don’t even know what happened at the airport? Why you and Jude broke up? It’s like the fucking fishing trip.’
‘Fishing trip?’ Hannah was lost.
‘InGavin and Stacey,’ Ed explained. ‘The running gag: everyone knows something bad went down on the fishing trip, but hardly anyone knows what.’
Hannah just looked at him. She could see his point, but she wasn’t about to offer chapter and verse on what had happened right now.
‘I’ll admit it bothered me a bit when Joe and I first reconnected,’ Ed continued. ‘I didn’t like that you’d been so hurt, or that I didn’t fully understand why. But you were seeing someone. You’ve had a fair few boyfriends sinceJude left, even if none have lasted. As the kids at school might say, I had no idea it was still this deep.’
‘I’m not sure I fully knew it myself until recently,’ Hannah admitted.
Belatedly, Ed depressed the cafetière’s plunger, then gingerly poured the coffee. He put a lump of brown sugar into Hannah’s favourite mug, stirred it and passed it to her.
‘Thanks,’ she said, massaging her left temple with her free hand. ‘I need this.’
‘You need at least two of these, and a bacon sandwich,’ her brother countered.
‘Actually, I bet there’s some in the—’
