‘Bye, then.’ And off she walked and oh fuck now he was going to see her bottom in these hideous leggings. Oh well, she was going to walk tall and pretend she was cool about it, andow, she’d tripped.
Walking tall obviously did not work for her.
She looked round and Raf was standing there looking gorgeous and not at all accident prone, andreallysniggering.
She screwed her face up at him and walked off again.
‘Buon giorno,’ Georgie repeated in response to the Duolingo prompt, as she and Max drove along the Fosse Way on their way home to Bristol that afternoon. Max was pressing the buttons on the app for her. (Obviously she’d screenshotted the app and added the photo to the ‘Resolutions’ chat.)
‘Mum, can we stop with the Italian for a bit?’ Max asked. ‘Por favor?’
‘That’s Spanish.Per favore.’
‘Please?’
‘Okay, let’s just get to the end of this bit.’ It felt like it was going to be a lot harder than she’d drunk-thought to reach GCSE standard in Italian by the end of the year, but she couldn’ttorment Max too much. It wasn’t his fault that she was a complete idiot.
‘Ti amo,’ the Duolingo woman told her to say.I love you.
Hmm.
How was she going to keep in touch with Raf? And how was she going to work out whether her suspicions were correct? If they were, maybe it would be okay to have the secret read out. No, it wouldn’t. Or, actually, yes, it would. Or would it? Gaaah, it was making her head hurt trying to figure it out. She needed to forget about it for now and just focus on sticking to her resolutions and getting the secret back until she’d found out the truth.
Her phone suddenly pinged about thirteen times in quick succession.
‘Can you check to see who that was?’ she asked Max.
‘It’s your “Girls”chat,’ he told her, the girls obviously being Poppy, Beth and Ankita.
‘Thank you,’ she said. Then she automatically added, ‘Don’t read them.’ While she was driving she often got Max to read certain messages out loud for her but never ones from the ‘Girls’chat because you never knew when Ankita would write something really inappropriate for eleven-year-old eyes.
She shivered. She loved her friends so much. They really were her and Max’s family. She had to do whatever she could to protect that. She could not lose them. So she had to get the secret back.
So she was staying in touch with Raf. End of.
The obvious thing to do was send him some friendly messages to check how he was recovering from his op. Plus there might be some banter on the ‘Resolutions’ chat.
Could she persuade a friend to go on a trip to New York with her and engineer a visit to his apartment? Not really, and it would probably cost a fortune.
Maybe she should just tell him the (partial) truth and ask him to send the letter back. But then – dreadful thought – what if Max opened it for some reason? It was unlikely, but like most kids of his age he didn’t have thebestprivacy instincts and it was possible that he would.
Okay. First things first: she had to work out whether the secret was even true.
Maybe she should justask? She’d need to be careful, though, that no one overheard.
God. If she wasright, the repercussions would be just… well, mind-blowing.
8
POPPY
Poppy – standing in their little garden just outside the kitchen while Daniel sat in his chair just inside the open door – gave one final hip jerk and laughed at Daniel’s giggling and clapping. He waslovinghis mother’s completely failed attempts at hula-ing. She stepped out of the hoop, picked it up and leaned it against the back wall of the house before going back through the open kitchen door to join Daniel.
‘I amnotgood at that.’ She made a face at him and he clapped again. ‘Okay.’
She unstrapped him and lifted him out of the chair and put him down on the floor where he immediately started rolling. Helovedrolling at the moment, and as long as she kept doors closed it was perfect for both of them: he rolled and she could get some chores done.
‘We’re cooking a new meal,’ she said. ‘That’sright, a new meal.’
