‘No! I mean, yes, sometimes, he’s pansexual, but – look at how hot he is!’
I’d only encountered Kieran a few times, but even setting aside the time I’d seen him going at it with Satoshi in the alley, he was hard to forget. He worked at the day spa across the street from Tsundoku, and he was one of the most ethereally good-looking people I’d ever laid eyes on. He and Satoshi together had reminded me of elves fromLord of the Rings: tall, blond, willowy, effortlessly charming.
‘And you, famously,’ Sadie said dryly, putting my phone down, ‘are a troll who lives under a bridge?’
‘No. But that doesn’t mean I can compete.’
‘You don’t need to. They’re exes. Competition concluded.’
‘Yes, but…’ I’d reduced my piece of croissant to crumbs, so I tore off another one. ‘It’s less about the specific person, and more about the genre. You don’t go from a ripped young massage therapist to a thirty-something single mother who isn’t even properly divorced yet.’
‘Sounds like he did, though.’
I looked at her. Sadie waggled her fingers at me. I squeezed my eyes shut and made a noise of pained protest.
She chuckled. ‘Seriously, though,’ she said. ‘You like Satoshi – and no matter how hot his ex is, Satoshi obviously likes you. I know your marriage left you with a ton of shit to deal with and I don’t want to minimise that, but you’re never going to have a softer landing place than with him. What have you got to lose?’
A million different images went racing through my head.
Satoshi against me, behind me, below me, above me, pressingmeup against the wall in the alley this time. Satoshi moving inside me, his breath hot and hungry behind my ear, fingers laced tight through mine. Satoshi holding me close after, laughing at the ridiculous things that came out of my mouth as he stroked my hair, pouring me a post-coital drink.
Me loving it.
Me trusting it.
Me starting to believe I could keep it.
Someone from school spotting us. The WhatsApp groups catching alight.Did you hear Fiona’s fucking a bartender who’s barely out of high school? She really is having a nervous breakdown, poor thing.
Satoshi meeting some new beautiful person like Kieran and doing his best to let me down easy.This has been fun, Fiona, but I think it’s run its course, don’t you?
Me losing everything I had left, all at once: the only place Matt hadn’t taken from me; Lex’s hero; and the person who had somehow become my best, truest friend.
And everyone seeing it happen all over again – Fiona Fisher smashed to pieces.Poor Fi,Jonah would murmur to Sadie in the dead of night, two true, equal partners, curled up in bed together.I love her, obviously, but god, she makes some fucking terrible choices.
‘I can see you overthinking it,’ Sadie said. ‘What if you simply didn’t do that?’
My laugh was so short and sharp it sounded almost like a bark. ‘Too late.’
‘Look.’ She sipped her coffee. ‘Let’s come at it from another angle. You’ve already – let me find the right metaphor… you’ve already popped the cork, right? The genie is out of the bottle. You’ve already seen the face of God once. So, you’ve got twooptions. You live the rest of your life knowing that he could show you the face of God again, but you deny yourself; or you sayfuck itand get railed.’ She paused. ‘Not that I’ve ever thought of Satoshi as the railing type.’
‘I think he is,’ I admitted. ‘He hides it well, but he can be quite, um… authoritative.’
Sadie grinned. ‘So the nice boy with the silly glasses has a dominant streak. Well, well, well.’
For what felt like the thousandth time, I felt the blood rushing to my cheeks. ‘Can we please change the subject?’
I’d managed to get her talking about the plans for the wedding – and she’d only suggested that Satoshi be my date about four hundred times – when Jonah pulled the car into the driveway. ‘We can talk more about the Satoshi thing later,’ Sadie said. ‘Or not. It’s up to you. But I’m here, Fiona. If you need me, I’m just a text or a phone call away.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
Jonah turned off the engine, then jumped out to open the door for Rosie and Georgia. ‘Fi, we need to have a chat,’ he called. ‘Something happened at the—’
The rest of the sentence was drowned out by the girls exploding out of the car. ‘Mummy, guess who we saw at the markets?!’ Georgia exclaimed.
Even if Rosie had left me a nanosecond to guess before joyfully screaming out the answer, I wouldn’t have needed it. My stomach fell out of my body and plummeted into the depths of hell.
‘We saw Daddy!’
