‘Let me guess. You want to discuss becoming permanent running partners.’
Georgie laughed. ‘Exactly.’
‘Yep, no problem. I’m sure Noah will be fine without me this evening. Everyone’ll be staying home nursing the remnants oftheir hangovers and feeling miserable about having to go to work tomorrow. Want to meet here?’
That was a good question. On balance, it would probably be better if they met in a very public place. No one would ever think they would do anything cloak and dagger here in the pub. Also – her mind was working overtime – Raf had said he was staying with Noah, so maybe she could somehow, while she was here, go into Noah’s living quarters and get the resolutions envelopeandcheck out Raf’s trainers so she knew what to buy as a replacement.
‘Perfect,’ she said. ‘Ninep.m.?’
‘Great.’
3
POPPY
Poppy’s phone pinged and she parked the buggy on the cobbled pavement outside the pub for a moment to check her messages. Maybe it was Declan.
She couldn’t decide whether she was pleased or disappointed when she saw that it was actually Ankita. She’d posted a picture of a coffee cup captioned with the wordDecafand a strong-arm emoji in their ‘Resolutions’ chat.
Poppy posted a heart in return. She followed it with a sweaty-brow-big-smile-phew emoji, which was really for herself, because thank goodnessshehadn’t chosen a no-caffeine resolution; without some serious coffee she’d never get through these no-sleep months (and it was definitely going to be months and not years; she wassureshe’d be able to get Daniel sleeping through the night soon. Fingers strongly crossed).
She frowned. How was she going to manage the next year – year! – without pudding, though? Hmm. She should really have thought that through better. She wondered what everyone else was giving up; some of the others’ lists seemed to have extended topages.
Daniel whimpered and then started to up his decibel level and she hastily put her phone back into her bag with one hand and began to jiggle the buggy with the other.
She was actually a bit of a buggy-jiggling superstar now, if she said it herself, because Daniel had a thing for motion.
He also had a deeply impressive sixth sense for those nanoseconds when Poppy might be feeling like an actual human rather than a nappy-changing milk machine. Like the second she sat on the loo, just hoping to wee for twenty seconds in peace, he’d start yelling. Or when she had a jam-no-butter (because that was the quickest to make) sandwich halfway to her mouth and truly believed she was going to chew in peace, maybe even sitting down, he’d start yelling.
The crying was building now. Understandably, because they’d had a long lunch and it was now way past his afternoon sleep time. It was kind of annoying that the only part of the day where he did have a routine was the afternoon, so she had no choice but to go back to the house and get him into his cot, but she’d have plenty of time to go out in the afternoon when he was older.
She bent down to smile at him and nearly fell over (she really did need to get fitter again).
‘Home soon and I’ll feed you and then you can sleep.’
He reached out for her and cooed and her heart squeezed at the sheer perfectionof him. She made the face that always made him laugh and he gurgled and then went for a full-on chortle as she continued pulling faces. She was pretty sure that if she could bottle his laugh she could make a lot of people happy; it was literally the best sound ever created and you couldn’t fail to feel cheerier while you were listening to it.
They carried on with the faces and the gorgeous laughter until her knees started hurting and she had to stand up. Daniel immediately resumed his yelling and she immediately startedre-jiggling the buggy until he quietened down. Her bending-down abilities might not be up to much right now but her arm muscles definitely had to be benefiting from all the buggy-pushing.
Ouch. Her head hurt and bumping the buggy over the cobbles was not helping. She actually had a bit of a perma-headache nowadays, which was almost certainly because she never got more than a couple of hours’ sleep in a row. It was usually low-level but every so often it flared up into a proper, full-on, desperate-for-darkness-and-a-cold-flannel-and-complete-silence monster one, bordering on a proper migraine, a word which, as a GP, she didn’t bandy about lightly.
She was heading into monster ache territory now. For a number of reasons. In no particular order:
Hangover. Her first big night out for over seven months, accompanied by too much Prosecco, was always going to make her feel bad the next day.
Even more sleep deprivation than usual. She normally slept like the dead between Daniel’s feeds but last night she’d had so much to think about that she’d lain awake for hours trying to sort through the thoughts jumbling against each other in her head. The idea that they all had secrets from each other. Even though it wasn’t really a surprise, it was kind of shocking to articulate it. They didn’t see each other as much as they used to, given that she’d been living in Australia for three years before Daniel was born, and she, Declan and Daniel had only arrived back in the UK a couple of weeks ago, and obviously Georgie, Beth and Ankita were busy with their own lives too, but they were still best friends. Who all had big enough secrets that they’d keep usually unkeepable resolutions for a whole yearto avoid divulging the secrets. It was sad to think that however much you loved your best friends you could get to a point where you were too busy or too miserable to confide in them any more. Which brought her on to Declan. Was he or was he not having an affair?
Stress. Because, again, was Declan having an affair? Writing down ‘I think Declan’s having an affair’ and sealing it in an envelope had felt huge, and once she’d written it she’d spent last night revisiting all the moments where he’d been behavingreallyweirdly around her. It had started a few days after they got back to the UK. Sometimes he was really distracted and sometimes he was his usual lovely self, in fact even lovelier than usual, like, for example, husbands reputedly were when they were feeling guilty about an affair.
