“I’m sorry you found out about Graeme and me like that—”
She holds up a hand to cut me off.“I’m going to need coffee for this conversation.And maybe a full Scottish breakfast to go with it.”
* * *
“All this time?”
Drew and I are sitting in a restaurant near MacKinlay Tower.Neither of us said a word to each other as we came in, took our seats, and placed our orders.Drew was her usual friendly self with the staff, but she barely looked at me.Experiencing what felt like the silent treatment from my usually chatty, affectionate best friend made my stomach do continuous somersaults.
The second the waitress left with our orders, Drew turned to me and said, “Tell me everything.From the beginning.”
And so I did.I started with the day Graeme and I met, and ended with our conversation last night, which led to what she walked in on this morning, only pausing when our food arrived.If I thought I word-vomited with Graeme last night, it was nothing compared to catching Drew up on sixteen years’ worth of history.
“I’m sorry,” I say, taking a swig of orange juice to soothe my dry throat.“I’msosorry I didn’t tell you.”
Drew spears a mushroom with her fork and pops it in her mouth.She remained silent the entire time I was speaking, although her expressive face displayed a range of emotions and reactions to what I was saying.Now, as she chews and stares off into the distance, I can’t anticipate what she’s going to say next.
“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry,” she says.
“You can do both,” I say.“And you can yell at me.Or go back to the silent treatment.”
Confusion flashes across her face a second before she presses her lips together and nods.“I wasn’t purposely giving you the silent treatment so much as I was processing.Big Feelings, you know?”
“Big Feelings,” I agree.
“I’m trying not to make this about me, but I can’t help wondering if I’ve failed you in some way,” she says, her attention focused on the sausage she’s cutting into tiny bites.“If there was something about me that made you feel like you had to hide this huge part of your life from me for all these years.”
The bite of tattie scone I just swallowed feels like a cannonball in my throat.“Drew.”I move my plate aside and lay my hand on her arm.She drops her cutlery with a clatter and looks at me, her hazel eyes shining with unshed tears.“You haveneverfailed me.Notoncein any way, shape, or form.You’re my platonic soulmate and my sister and the best damn thing that’s ever happened to me.”
She lets out a pathetic little sniffle that nearly breaks my heart.“So why did you hide this from me?”
All of my reasons seem so stupid when faced with the hurt on Drew’s face.“When Graeme and I met, and I realized I could easily develop feelings for him, I forced myself to put a lid on it and bury it deep.Then when we admitted our feelings for each other and he convinced me to stay in Scotland, it felt like something that was just for us.We were in our own little world for those two weeks.I can only speak for myself, but I underestimated the depths of my feelings.I convinced myself I needed to go back to Canada and carry on with my carefully-laid-out plans.I also convinced myself that if you knew about Graeme and me, you’d try to persuade me to move here and be with him.”
“Would that have been so bad?”she asks.
“At the time, it seemed like it, yeah,” I say.“You have first-hand knowledge of what it’s like to want to control things after a childhood that felt completely out of control.In my mind, I’d constructed the perfect plan: finish university, get a good job, find a place to live, and create the stability that was fleeting up until that point.I needed to see it through.Scotland was meant to be a short, fun trip with my closest friends before we went out into the real world.I never could have anticipated it would include a twist of fate that changed my life forever.”
With a thoughtful nod, Drew picks her cutlery up and returns to her breakfast.I do the same, even though my whole body still feels like a live wire.I’m adding extra raspberry jam to my toast when Drew makes a sound that has me jerking my head up to see her hunched over her plate.For one horrible second, I think she’s choking.Then she bursts out laughing.
Relief rushes through me, even though I have no clue what could possibly be so funny.My friendship with Drew has always been the easiest thing in the world.Sure, we’ve had disagreements, but we’ve never had any huge fights or come to those moments that feel like we’re on the brink of holding on or letting go.Hearing her laugh now fills me with certainty that everything is going to be okay.Thatwe’regoing to be okay.
“Oh god, I’m a hypocrite.”She lets out a long sigh and wipes the tears of mirth that have collected under her eyes.“I’ve been keeping a secret of my own: Brodie and I are planning to move to Scotland.”
And just like that, my stomach sinks again.“Wait,what?”
“We’ve talked about it since before we got married, but it never felt like the right time.We moved back to Kingston when he got that job, and we found our dream house and settled in.We decided to put Scotland on the back burner as a ‘someday’ dream, but it kept coming up, especially when we started talking about having a baby.”
Drew has only ever casually talked about having children.Unlike me, it was something she was open to, but it was in the same ‘someday’ context she just mentioned.
“I’ve feltsoguilty about not talking to you about any of this,” she says.“But hearing you talk about Graeme and this huge thing you experienced together, I started to understand.It had nothing to do withme.You had this thing that felt sacred in a way, and you wanted it just for yourself.”
“And that’s how you feel now?”I ask.
She tilts her head back and forth.“Yes and no.Obviously, it’s not something I could hide forever, and I wouldn’twantto, but I found it impossible to talk about with anyone but Brodie.The genuine desire to have kids came out of the blue for me, and it scared the shit out of me.All my childhood trauma reared its head, and I got hung up on that for a while.”
“What changed?”I ask.
“Brodie, of course.”The smile she gets when she says his name makes my heart squeeze.“He said all the right things, as always.He pointed out I have a huge capacity for love, and I’m not what happened to me in my childhood.He reminded me I wouldn’t be doing it alone because he’d be with me every step of the way, and so would all of our people.That’s when we really started talking about moving here.He said he was ready at any time, but he knew I wasn’t.”
