Oh God. I’m so sorry.
It’s brutal, honestly,she said.The virus numbers are climbing every day, and we’re just getting slammed harder and harder & the PPE they’re making us work in is bullshit. I’ve worn that mask for four days straight. I’ll be lucky if I don’t catch the damn thing before the show starts.
Don’t say that!!
I feel so guilty about leaving when we’re already so understaffed, but I can’t go on like this,she sent.I had to send Noah to his dad’s. I can’t put him at risk. It’s killing me.
God. I wish there was some way I could help. Make things easier for you.
The three dots appeared, disappeared and reappeared a few times before her next reply came through.
Some things can’t be fixed,she wrote.Sometimes you just have to sit with it, no matter how badly it sucks.
Tears pricked my eyelids. I blinked them rapidly away. I wasn’t going to do this. I wasn’t going to take someone else’s very real, very serious, potentially life-or-death problems and make them about me and my stupid quicksand feelings.
Well, if you need someone to sit with,I wrote back,you know where I am.
Don’t tempt me, Frodo,she replied.Or I’ll run out of this hospital, jump on a train out your way, and land right in your lap.
My fingers hovered above my phone screen as I tried to figure out what to say next.
I tried to imagine Dylan here with me, in my childhood bedroom. Her seeing me not just sitting with my heartbreak, but wallowing in it.
Waiting.
… and there it was. The real reason I’d blurted out ‘Can I think about it, Murray?’ when he’d offered me a place on the show.
I was still waiting for Jac to come back. She didn’t love me anymore – and even if she did, she’d be way too proud to admit she’d made a mistake – but here I was, still. waiting. anyway.
Was that the kind of person I wanted to be? Was that the kind of person that a grown-ass woman like Dylan would ever want to talk about her actual serious adult problems with? Was that the kind of person anyone would ever want to come back for?
No.
Fuck that.
I was going to call Murray, and tell him yes.
Mum would be disappointed in me. Work would be annoyed with me. And I was going to have to deal with whatever came after – all the attention, positive and negative, even if I didn’t come out on TV.
I genuinely didn’t know if I was tough enough. Most days, I was one strong gust of wind away from being blown right into the quicksand and never resurfacing.
Future Mandie was going to have to deal with that,though. Because Present Mandie wasn’t going to hang around dreaming of having Past Mandie’s life back anymore.
Soon,I wrote back to Dylan.You, me, Juliet Villa. I’ll sit with you as much as you want.
Much as she asserted over and over again that she was one hundred per cent absolutely definitely going onMarry Me, Juliet, I was worried Dylan wouldn’t be there when I arrived at the lockdown hotel for two weeks of quarantine before shooting. Our text convo was nowverylong, so I knew how guilty she felt about leaving her job. I also knew how badly she was missing her son. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if she’d ditched at the last minute and chosen to spend the next eight weeks with him instead of on TV. It would have been a very sensible, completely reasonable thing to do, even though the thought that she might do it made me feel a bit sick.
Which was very selfish of me. Surely even I wasn’t so pathetic that I’d put my desire to go through this experience with a friend over her getting to spend time with her child.
I stopped myself. That was a quicksand thought pattern.
Dylan had sent me a few more ‘How To Get Over Your Ex’ articles. (Let me know when you’re done with these,she’d texted.Plenty more where they came from.) One of them had specifically been about being dumped, and described strategies for building your confidence back up. One strategy it suggested was that when you slipped into being negative about yourself or calling yourself names, you countered that by identifying one thing you liked about yourself.
6) I am good at making friends,I added to my best features list in my mind. It had only taken me an afternoon to become friends with Dylan. If she didn’t turn up, I could make other friends. It would be okay.Iwould be okay.
But I didn’t need to worry, because Dylan was there. ‘Mandie!’ she said when I walked into the conference room for our pre-lockdown briefing. She was wearing a bright pink mask, so I couldn’t technically see it, but I knew she was smiling. ‘You made it!’
‘Of course I made it!’ I replied, smiling back at her and giving her one of those awkward six-feet-away pandemic air hugs. ‘What, you thought I was going to bail?’
