“Thank you for that.” She was being scrupulously polite, which somehow was even worse than her fury. “Let’s go ahead and do the extra payment now.”
Grabbing my phone, I pinged her the invoice for the electrical work, and she transferred the money to me.
She glanced at her phone. “I’d better get the train back to work.” Her face was more angular and world-weary than when we were twenty-five, but somehow even more beautiful. A strand of her silken hair fell from her ponytail, and I had to stop myself from reaching out and pushing it back behind her ear.
“Do you need a ride to the station?” I asked, feeling bad that she’d had to travel four hours for this meeting. Whatever my frustrations with Tabitha, she was an incredibly hard worker.
“No thanks. I need the walk.”
Now I felt even worse. Why couldn’t we just work together and be friendly? Except I knew why, and it was all my fault. “Okay, if you’re sure. See you tomorrow, I guess.”
3
Tabitha
“What’s wrong, Tabs?”My friend Isla handed me a glass of champers, and I marveled at how her red curls glowed in London’s golden dusk.
“Everything’s fine.” I forced a smile. The last thing I wanted to do was cast a pall over her baby shower by explaining about seeing Perry having sex with another woman this morning, followed by the fight with Tim.
Isla narrowed her eyes at me, skeptical. “I know you too well, Ms. Responsible—she who clears the empties at the work booze-up while everyone else gets hammered. For one second, take a break from being the person who looks after everyone else. Letmehelpyou.”
I glanced around the leafy garden of The Bell pub, where friends gathered. Isla wasn’t showing much, even thoughshe was in her second trimester, but her thirteen-year-old stepdaughter, Sephy, had insisted on getting a head start on the celebrations and had put herself in charge of tonight’s baby shower.
We sat around a table laden with animal-shaped snacks and bouncing with elephant balloons. Our closest friends had arrived first. Her old flatmate—with a beautiful baby boy grinning gleefully in her front pack—was laughing with Ishani, dressed in white linen shorts, and Sunny, in purple trousers. Due to appear soon were Isla’s new mum friends from Sephy’s school.
“This is your special day,” I insisted. “Let’s not talk about me.”
“It’s the first in a series of baby showers, apparently. Sephy wanted to have this one at the zoo, and we talked her down. She’s keen to try out a number of themes—quite the party planner, as it turns out.”
Isla smiled at Sephy, who was dressed in wide jeans and a crochet top. I felt a pang of envy at their special relationship. And Isla and her partner Declan were besotted with each other. Would I ever have that? Since this morning, I felt very far from even a hint of romance, let alone having a family.
“Seriously, Tabitha, I want to know,” Isla insisted.
I’d seen Isla’s tenacity as an investigative journalist firsthand. She wasn’t going to give up. I took a deep breath. “Perry and I split up,” I said.
She scrunched her nose, her smattering of freckles pressing together, and sighed, as if to say,Finally. Perry was a stickler for etiquette and a bit of a snob, which was cringeworthy at times, but I thought he was a reliable, decent bloke underneath his starched shirt and endless scolding about pronunciation.Hadthought.Past tense.
“So how did you come to that decision?” she asked tactfully. What she meant was, What made you finally see the light?
“It wasn’t my decision.” My stomach went tight admitting that. “Hedumpedme, in a manner of speaking.”
She did a double take. “You. Are. Freaking. Kidding.” Then a quiet scream. “This defies the laws of the universe.”
A warmth burst through my chest that she thought so highly of me, followed by a knotted twist that she thought so little of Perry. “I’m not kidding.”
“How? What? When?”
I wasn’t ready to lay out the whole story right now. I needed to stay numb to get through the evening, but I knew Isla the journalist wouldn’t let it go until she’d heard the whole sordid tale. “As you know, he’d been doing yoga, which I thought was very odd…”
“Yes, you did mention that. I wanted to ask what he’d wear, but I never got the courage. Go on.”
“Turns out, he and his female instructor were bending like pretzels in a new partner-yoga class. And evidently, they couldn’t stop twisting into each other after class and then took it into the bedroom.” Even though I was trying to make it funny, tears pushed at the backs of my eyes, and my voice cracked. “Not their fault, just ‘an inevitable part of the normal exigencies of one’s practice,’ apparently.”
His words. SoPerry.
Isla’s face screwed up, appalled. “Oh God. I’m so sorry, Tabs. That’s awful and…bizarre. When did you find out?”
“This morning. I had my suspicions and turned up to his flat at seven a.m. They were full-onin flagrante. She is nothing if not flexible.” The scene of them on Perry’s bed, where I’d slept with him for four years, their arms and legs akimbo, explodedinto my mind. I still had no idea how long this had been going on.
