Emmy looked at him curiously. “Did you guys have a fight? Don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll sort it out soon.” She smiled at him.
He shook his head. “No. She’s gone.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s probably in Joburg. They’re bringing back her character, and she’s going to shoot the rest of the show in Joburg.”
“What?” Emmy’s face lit up. “That’s great news, she must be so stoked. That’s awesome.”
“Awesome?’ he asked. “She’s moving to Joburg to shoot it.”
“Not permanently,” Emmy said quickly. “Poppy would never just leave us like that, not permanently. Did she say permanently?”
“No,” he shook his head. “She didn’t.”
“So, she’s coming back then,” Emmy said.
“Well, she didn’t say that either.”
“But did she actually say shewasn’tcoming back?” Emmy folded her arms and looked at him.
“No, she didn’t say that either,” he found himself repeating.
Emmy looked at him and raised her eyebrows. “So, what exactly did you fight about?”
He shook his head. “It’s an adult thing. You wouldn’t understand.”
“An adult thing?” she asked. “Well, from where I’m standing, and from what you’ve told me, it doesn’t sound very adult.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you’re standing here telling me all these things, making these assumptions about what she was thinking. And if you guys had had an adult discussion with each other, you would be telling me things very differently right now.”
“What would I be telling you?” he asked.
“You’d be saying how excited you were for her. How it’s only a two-hour flight away. How she can come back on weekends, or we can fly out there to see her sometimes. That it’s only for a while, but it’s cool because you love each other and she’s pursuing her dream and you would hate to take that away from her because you love her.”
He stared at her blankly. He hadn’t even thought about this. He’d just seen her going, and that had been it. He’d reacted from a place of total fear about losing her. She was the best thing that had happened to him in a while, and he’d just freaked out.
“Please tell me you guys talked about that,” she said.
He shook his head. “We didn’t. I didn’t really get to that, I just—”
“Lost it?”
“Yes, I kind of did.”
“So, you let the one really good thing in your life just go, without trying to figure out how to make it work?”
He nodded. “I guess I did.”
She shook her head. “Ryan, it’s the twenty-first century. We have Skype, we have Facetime calls, we have these amazing things called airplanes that magically make you appear at another place within hours. I mean, Shelly’s dad works in Joburg, he flies there on Monday morning and comes home on Friday afternoon. Shelly reckons it keeps the romance alive. She says it’s pretty gross but she often hears them on Friday nights—”
“Okay, enough information.”
“And it’s not forever. It’s not a soap opera; it doesn’t go on for a hundred years likeDays of Our Lives, it’s going to end soon. And it’s her dream. And she is so good at it—if she didn’t do it, she would literally be depriving the world of her brilliance.”
He sat there and clasped his hands together. “Okay, I might have overreacted a bit.”
