Back at the flat I got into my car and drove over to my parents’ house. It was still raining buckets and the stick-on butterflies on the front of the house were flapping wildly in the onslaught. I rushed to the front door and rang the bell. The distinctive sound of Mum’s marabou-trimmed indoor wedges came slapping down the hallway. She was wearing a bright pink sweatshirt and offensively floral leggings, as if she was still clinging to summer. She took one look at me and her face fell.
‘Oh… sweetie.’
I didn’t quite throw myself into her arms, but it was close. Because she was so much shorter and slighter than me, she rocked backwards on her heels. Within a minute she’d hustled me into the living room and we were curled up on the blindingly cyan leather sofa she’d had specially made when I was a teenager. She picked up a white furry pillow and threw it at my dad in his armchair.
‘Make us some tea, love.’
Dad fled to the kitchen and I heard him rattling spoons and mugs with purpose. I knew from experience that he would bring the tea and then vanish again, either to the pub or to the shed, his two safe zones whenever emotional upsets were detected. As long as there was someone else there to offer support, he was eager to duck out.
‘What’s up, sweetie? Is it work?’ Mum asked, slowly stroking my back. I shook my head against her shoulder. Even though the shop was struggling and I had no idea how to fix it, or how I was going to even afford the rent on it in a few months. The awful feeling in my chest was not about pending financial ruin.
‘… Richard?’ Mum seemed reluctant to bring him up and I wondered if she was thinking of my hasty departure from her garden party. Maybe she did feel bad about that after all.
Dad returned with two cups of tea and moments later I heard his keys jingling as he left the house. It was probably too wet out for him to go down the garden to the shed. He’d have driven to the pub. Mum would text him the all-clear later once things were resolved.
I sat back and wiped at my face with my sleeve. Mum tutted and whisked a tissue from the bedazzled box on the table. I dabbed at my eyes and blew my nose.
‘It’s so stupid,’ I muttered. ‘I just… I feel like I’ve been a complete idiot, trusting all the wrong people and getting let down…’
‘Oh, honey, it’s not your fault for trusting him. He just made a mistake, that’s all. It’s nothing to do with you.’ Mum rubbed my arm and looked at me ruefully. ‘You mustn’t blame yourself.’
I nearly let out a wet little laugh at that. Of course, now it wasn’t my fault – now that I was literally sobbing on her sofa. Why did it take me breaking down to earn a bit of genuine concern? It was as if she couldn’t tell I was upset without me bawling right in front of her. My own mother, who’d known me from birth, who’d raised me, couldn’t tell when I was hurting.
I sucked in a stuttering breath. ‘But there must have been red flags and I didn’t see them. Didn’t want to see them. Like an idiot,’ I sighed. ‘And then you asked me if I was sure I wanted to break up with him and now I’m… maybe I’m not sure and I’m just rethinking a lot of my choices lately and wondering if I should even be allowed to make my own decisions, because I keep making things worse.’
‘Like what?’ Mum asked, confused. ‘Other than Richard…’
‘Oh just…’ I didn’t want to talk about Cooper, it would take too much explaining. I’d feel like even more of an idiot telling Mum I’d been crushing on a stranger. ‘With the shop. Like maybe starting a business wasn’t the best idea. Like you said, I’m too idealistic. I went into it with a dream and now the reality is so much different. Just like with Richard.’
‘Is the shop really not doing so well?’ Mum asked softly. ‘Do you need some money?’
‘No! No, I don’t want… I don’t know, maybe I should stick it out. See it through, you know?’ I sniffed. ‘Giving up just because it’s hard… I’d only be making it one hundred per cent my fault that it folded. At least if I try, I’ll know it wasn’t down to me not making an effort.’
‘So…’ Mum said carefully. ‘Are you thinking about… giving him another chance? Putting the work in to forgive him?’
Just like that, the shop – my business – was waved aside. Mum had tunnel vision on my love life. The thing was, I hadn’t been thinking about forgiving Richard. But sitting with her, talking about it, I was starting to wonder if that was exactly what I needed to do. Everything was falling apart and it had all started when I broke up with Richard. Had I binned off three years of my life and potentially left myself homeless and the owner of a failing business because I was too rigid to see that he was sorry?
He’d brought me flowers after all and hadn’t snapped at Emma when she was (rightfully) mean to him. He’d been trying to win me back – talking to me, cleaning up after himself at the flat, trying to still give me money for shopping – and I’d been throwing it back at him out of anger. But was I really perfect? All right, so I hadn’t cheated but I also hadn’t really listened to any of his opinions about the inheritance money. Instead of setting up a joint business, I’d put it all into the shop and then basically ignored him for months while I worked on that.
I took a deep breath. ‘I keep thinking about how you always used to tell me I expect too much of people – like, remember when I stopped being friends with Chelsea Walker in middle school?’
‘Because she stole your pink gel pen,’ Mum nodded, looking amused. ‘I remember.’
‘It wasn’t that she stole it. It’s that she just refused to admit she had. I mean, it was clearly mine, it was the same brand as all my pens and she only had the one of that kind. It was the same level of gel…’ I cut myself off because this was well-worn ground. I’d been annoyed about it since I was ten. ‘It wasn’t that she took it. It’s that she was so obviously lying and she just expected me to let it go.’
‘I remember the fallout from that one. You two didn’t speak for three weeks,’ Mum sighed. ‘But you made up in the end, didn’t you? At the summer hog roast? I think because you realised it was just a silly little thing. It wasn’t worth your entire friendship.’
I sighed. ‘Yeah, we did make up. And then two years later she found out Jamie liked me, and she wanted to go out with him instead, so she told everyone I was a lesbian.’
‘Well, there’s nothing wrong with being a lesbian,’ Mum said. ‘So that says more about her than about you.’
‘I know there’s nothing wrong with…’ I sighed, frustrated. Especially given that my mother had never acknowledged the fact that her own sister was gay. ‘The point is, I forgave her for the first lie and then she told an even bigger one to get what she wanted. And then I got bullied by idiots over something that wasn’t even true, and she went out with Jamie and ghosted me.’ I screwed the tissue up into a ball and crushed it in one hand. ‘What if I forgive Richard for a “one-time mistake” and next time he lets me down even worse? What if we get married and have kids…’ I felt Mum twitch slightly like she was suppressing an excited fist-pump. ‘… and then he just walks out on me with someone else, leaving me looking like an even bigger fool than I do right now?’
I looked up and saw Mum nibbling her lip, gazing sideways at Dad’s empty armchair (also hideously bright cyan with a Mongolian sheepskin cushion on it). She looked, for the first time since I’d arrived, kind of perturbed.
‘Mum?’ I asked, sensing something was off with her. Normally she was full of soothing platitudes, so long as she wasn’t the cause of the upset. But right now, she was worryingly silent. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’
Mum’s eyes flew back to me and she looked a little wide-eyed and helpless. A fluffy bunny caught in the headlights. I’d never known her to be lost for words before.
