CHAPTER4
The weather forecast for their reunion weekend couldn’t have been more perfect, but, for once, Erin begrudged the sunshine. Glaring at the living room window, she quietly cursed the great fiery ball in the sky which happily beamed in, highlighting every streak she’d just inadvertently made with her new window cleaning spray.
‘Everyone raved about this product on Instagram,’ she shouted towards her phone. ‘I’d have been better just spitting on the window and rubbing Jasper’s fluffy arse all over it.’
She heard her agent, Nicole, laugh before attempting to steer the conversation away from Erin’s cat’s backside and back to business. ‘Look, Idris really wants you to do this film. Will you at least go in and read with him?’
‘Three attempts and this window is still taunting me. Do you think everyone would mind just sitting with the curtains closed?’
‘Erin…’
Erin sighed, setting her cloth down on the coffee table. She sat on the couch and picked up her new Samsung flip phone.
‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘I mean, as tempting as the thought of working with Idris Elba again is, I just think it’s too soon.’
‘At least think about it,’ Nicole replied. ‘It might be a welcome distraction, you know. Get you back out there, back in the land of the liv… oh shit. Oh shit, shit, I didn’t mean—’
‘I'll think about it. I’d better go, I still have lots to do. Take care, Nic.’
She flipped her phone closed and placed it on the table.Breathe, Erin. Just breathe.
She knew Nicole hadn’t meant anything by it, just the wrong turn of phrase, but still it jolted her heart into her throat.The land of the living.The one place where Scott couldn’t exist and she wasn’t ready to go back there without him.
She wiped at a tear. She hadn’t noticed it escaping from her eye until it trickled to the corner of her mouth. Even after twelve months of crying, she could still hear Scott in her head, sarcastically telling her that sadness was vastly overrated and only led to uncontrolled clicking of Facebook shopping links at 3am.
Jasper’s meow near his food bowl was a welcome distraction. He wasn’t a particularly vocal cat so when he did decide to articulate his annoyance over an empty dish, it was adorable as she knew it was a sound reserved solely for her. The long-haired tabby had shown up at Loughview House three years ago and never left, choosing to spend his summers lounging outside and his winters curled up at the foot of Erin’s bed.
‘No mice this weekend,’ she warned him as she squeezed a foil pocket of cat food into his bowl. ‘Not everyone appreciates rodent corpses as much as you do.’ After three years, when it came to mice, Erin had gone from terrified to ambivalent to sympathetic, even to the point of humanely capturing the ones that Jasper let go and driving them to a field where they didn’t have to deal with a spoiled tabby who only ate a particular fish soup but liked to torture mice for pleasure.
She checked her watch. Another couple of hours and the girls would be arriving.
With the windows now officially a lost cause, Erin pottered around making sure the guest rooms had everything she thought they might need. She had considered leaving individual gifts in the rooms, but after ten years of minimal contact, how could she presume to know what they now liked? Would she even know them at all?
Did Becky still have a problem with Reese Witherspoon? She knew that Alex was still writing, but did she still read as voraciously as she once did? Was Beth still into Katy Perry? Did Tara ever dump Keith and his monotonous music?
She pondered these questions as she went room to room, leaving towels on the beds and making sure all the bathrooms had loo roll and fancy hand wash. She had thought about hiring a cleaner to blitz the place before her guests arrived, but she had not had anyone in the house since the funeral last year and the last thing she needed were stories appearing in theDaily Mailabout how grief had turned actress Erin Flynn into someone incapable of taking care of herself and her home. Besides, cleaning gave her something to do. Something to focus on.
The house had been renovated since the girls were last here. Nothing major structurally but now it was much more their home now than her grandpa’s.Theirhome. Her home.
She found it to be a tad more modern than she’d have liked, but Scott was very much into contemporary design and she wanted it to be as much his home as it was hers. He coveted helpful gadgets, minimalist rooms and shiny white surfaces whereas Erin preferred a home by the sea to be more shipwreck than shipshape. Erin preferred her memories and keepsakes to be dotted everywhere, despite Scott’s protests. To begin with, Erin was grateful that she had stuck to her guns and displayed their life together for all to see. It was proof that Scott had lived here and that he had been happy. They had been happy. But now… now it was just a reminder that the world had moved on and she was completely alone. A few months after Scott died, her agent had broached the subject of selling Loughview House, an idea that Erin initially dismissed. It was still too raw, too painful to even consider. She needed time to grieve. But now, eight months later, while time hadn’t exactly healed her wounds, it had given her an understanding of just how fleeting time itself was. Much to her dismay, life carried on and no matter how much Erin wanted the world to stop, it just kept spinning regardless.
Contacting the estate agent wasn’t as hard as Erin had anticipated. As much as she knew she knew it was the right thing to do, she wasn’t so sure she would ever convince her heart to leave it all behind. Of all the memories Erin held dear from Loughview, from her and Scott drinking beer by the firepit, to playing with her grandpa on the beach as a child, the one that hit the hardest was a memory from a decade ago. Graduation night with her best friends. Those women weren’t lost to her, not in the way Scott and her grandpa were.
Erin realised that while Scott might have been her greatest love, he certainly wasn’t her first and she was not ready to lose all of her soulmates entirely. Erin knew that in order to move on, she needed her past friends to help her see a future.
She just hoped it wasn’t too late.
