Emma patted my hand, her silver rings catching the light and sending up sparkles from the moonstones and amethysts there. In her warm little kitchen, it was so much easier to believe that Cooper might want to talk to me. I felt as if, in there, I was safe from the pressures of Richard and my mum. Emma gave me the confidence to believe in my own thoughts and wants. Whereas Richard made me doubt myself at every turn.
‘Last time he’d just been jump-scared by a car,’ Emma pointed out. ‘Maybe he overreacted and, if you talk to him again, he’ll handle it better. He came back after all. There must be a reason.’
‘And if he doesn’t react better?’ I asked.
‘Then he’s missing out. And just because he doesn’t want your friendship, that doesn’t mean you have to be with Richard. Because it’s obvious he’s making you miserable – and he was even before you broke up. You were always making excuses for him and pretending it didn’t bother you that he was never there when you needed him. I mean, he ditched you on the opening day of your business and now he wants you to work for him?’ Emma scoffed and gestured at me with a chunk of melon on a fork – like a magic wand. ‘That’s… pants.’
I laughed, and she let go of my hand with a smile. It was good, sitting there and eating brunch with my best friend. As if the cracks that our argument had left were closing. I should have just been honest with her from the beginning – about Richard, about Cooper, all of it. But that would have been almost the same as being honest with myself. Emma and I were so close, it would have been impossible to manage my catastrophic levels of denial if I admitted how I felt to her.
She must have seen my expression shift. ‘I should have said something sooner, about Richard. I didn’t ever really think he was good enough for you.’
‘I should have been willing to see it,’ I said.
‘I promise to never let something like that slide again.’ Emma held up her tea as if in a toast. I clinked my smoothie against it.
‘And I promise to listen to your excellent advice, even when I’ve got my head firmly shoved up my bum.’
We dissolved into giggles. This was what I wanted my life to be like. Warm and filled with laughter, understanding and love. It wasn’t about hitting milestones and making other people happy and it certainly didn’t have to come from a man. I just had to hang on to that when it became harder to believe.
Still, as we finished eating and Emma made another round of tea, I thought of Cooper and wondered if he’d be happy to see me. If he’d missed me like I’d missed him. Only there was somewhere else I needed to go first.
‘I think you’re right,’ I said to Emma, hands cupped around my mug. ‘I need to talk to Dad.’
Chapter 28
It was Sunday afternoonand that meant one thing – Mum was in the kitchen making a roast and Dad was in the shed ‘pottering’. That’s a word that usually conjures up images of compost and gardening gloves, fixing things or hand-carving toy soldiers. In reality, Dad’s ‘shed’ was quite a large construction with its own electricity, a TV and a wall-mounted bottle opener over a table topped with hundreds of resin-covered bottle caps. A man cave in all but name.
Mum let me in and took me through to the kitchen. Sunday-dinner preparations were in full swing; the Paxo was rehydrating, Aunt Bessie’s frozen roasties were cooking in the oven along with a slightly alien-autopsy-looking roasting bag full of chicken, bulging onions and carrots. Mum picked up the jar of Bisto and started measuring it into a Pyrex jug.
‘Dad in the shed?’ I asked, despite already knowing the answer. It was mostly a precursor to me escaping out there to talk to him. But first I had to appease the gatekeeper – would I be allowed to pass or would I have to sacrifice half an hour, or make an offering of laying the table?
‘As per,’ she sighed. ‘You can take him out a cup of tea, if you like.’
Permission granted.
It was weirdly nostalgic, nudging the frozen jam roly-poly out of the way to get at the kettle, making Dad a tea in his favourite mug. All at once I could have been fourteen again with maths homework to do before tomorrow, and a heap of ‘heatless curler’ technology crammed on top of my head, an acne face mask smeared over my skin.
‘That was nice of Richard taking us out for lunch yesterday,’ Mum said, while I stirred sugar into Dad’s tea. ‘How are things going with you two now?’
‘Oh, you know… the same as they were before,’ I said truthfully, hoping she’d hear what she wanted to without me having to lie. The thing was, even before the cheating, things hadn’t been perfect, or even good. I just hadn’t let myself see it and, by extension, hadn’t let my family see it either. But now my eyes were wide open.
I still had no idea what to do about Richard. By taking him back, I’d really muddied the waters and made things even more complicated. But I still couldn’t find it in myself to fully let go of the years we’d spent together and the future I’d imagined with him. I just wasn’t sure if I wanted him in that future, which was all kinds of messed up. I needed some extra perspective and, hopefully, Dad would deliver. As long as I could keep him in the shed and not allow him to nip out to the pub to escape. I contemplated hiding his car keys.
‘Tell him there’s no pigs in blankets,’ Mum called after me as I let myself out of the back door. ‘They didn’t defrost in time and I don’t want him to get his hopes up and sulk!’
Outside I picked my way down the garden, past the extravagant barbecue and the bar, both now covered over for autumn with matching hedge-pattern tarpaulins. Dad’s shed was right at the bottom, screened from the rest of the barren garden by a fake-ivy-covered trellis, which stood out against the grey stone and gravel. I went up to the metal door and knocked on it.
‘Enter!’
Inside, Dad was sitting in his recliner, space heater plugged in beside him and the TV showing a live football match. He looked surprised to see me, then clocked the tea and perked up.
‘All right, Tabby? You staying for lunch?’
‘No, I’m very full of brunch actually,’ I said, and settled into the second recliner, usually reserved for Dad’s friend Terry. ‘I just popped by for a chat.’
At the word ‘chat’ Dad started to look uneasy. I watched his eyes dart to the door and decided to press on before he could come up with an excuse to leave.
‘I talked to Mum the other day and she told me something about when the two of you first got together… that you were also sort of seeing somebody else?’
