Page 5 of The Work Husband

It was. It definitely, one hundred per cent, certainly was.

‘Maybe it is, just a bit. But it’s a restaurant reservation! It’s not like he stole food aid meant for famine-stricken villages in Yemen and sold it on the black market.’

‘It’s not. But just because it’s less wrong doesn’t mean it’s not wrong.’

The problem with dating a really good guy, I realised, was that he was exactly what it said on the tin. The unease I’d felt when Jamie had triumphantly revealed his solution to my Cormac Kennedy problem intensified a notch. If Sam thought something was wrong, then it probably was.

‘Okay, you’re right,’ I said. ‘It’s not great. But it’s done now. Cormac’ll be getting stuck into his spider crab omelette as we speak, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Unless he didn’t turn up, in which case the people who originally booked the spot will have got it, and then there’s no harm done.’

‘I’m not saying there’s anything you can do about it now.’ Sam’s face had the set, stubborn look it got when he thought he was winning an argument. ‘I’m thinking, what if this happens again? What if Jamie needs you to do something for him that’s equally unethical? What will you do then?’

I forced a laugh. ‘Sam, you’re overthinking this, like, massively. What’s he going to do? Ask me to smuggle cocaine in my vagina? Of course he’s not. And even if he did, of course I’d say no.’

Sam’s face relaxed, and he reached out to take my hand. ‘Just as well. Because I’m rather fond of your vagina, as it happens.’

Our eyes met, and I felt the tingle of electricity I’d felt the first time he’d touched me, long before I’d met Jamie, had sleepless nights over bookings at fancy restaurants, or had any reason to worry about whatever had or hadn’t happened between Sam and Ava.

‘Shall we get another drink, then go for tacos?’ I asked.

‘Or we could just go home and order pizza… later,’ Sam suggested.

‘Milton will be hungry.’

Milton was our rescue cat, who we’d adopted the previous year. He was polydactyl, with a congenital limb difference that gave him an extra toe on his front feet so he looked like he was wearing mittens on his black paws. When we brought him home, I’d felt a surge of complete, unconditional love that had blown me away. I didn’t love him more than I loved Sam, but loving him had made me love Sam more, which I hadn’t thought would be possible.

‘We wouldn’t want to keep him waiting, would we?’ Sam agreed.

‘You know what, you’re right.’ I turned his hand over, caressing the palm with a fingertip. ‘Let’s go home.’

THREE

‘Georgia, don’t you think we need to leave?’ Sam asked.

It was a Saturday afternoon, almost two weeks after Cormac’s dinner at Ash and Brine. Sam had been pacing up and down the flat for the past ten minutes, crossing the industrial-style wooden floor from the leather chesterfield I’d found in a skip and come sprinting home to tell him about before someone else took it, to the kitchen counter where I was standing.

‘Hold on.’ I glanced up at him. He didn’t look impatient or annoyed, just excited – like a little kid on Christmas morning. When he saw me looking at him, he grinned and I grinned back, realising I felt the same. ‘I’ll be five minutes, max. I promise.’

‘We were meant to be there by three,’ he pointed out, ‘and it’s twenty to now.’

‘I know! But I can’t rush this – I’ll fuck it up.’ My lips pressed together in concentration, I piped a swirl of pale blue frosting onto first one cupcake and then another. ‘They’ve got a brand-new baby. Their lives will be utter chaos for months. They won’t care if we’re five minutes late or twenty-five.’

‘And they won’t be able to cook a decent meal for months either,’ Sam pointed out, ‘so they’re not going to care if your icing’s wonky or not.’

He paced again, ending up looking over my shoulder.

‘Don’t distract me.’ I finished the eighth swirl, exhaled, put down the piping bag and picked up a canister of blue sprinkles. ‘Too much?’

‘I mean, they look great as they are. But too much is kind of the point of cupcakes, right? And it is a special occasion.’

‘Exactly. I’m going in with the sprinkles, and I’m going hard. You get the champagne and the flowers, and we’ll be out of here in five.’

Almost an hour later (how did that happen? Was there some rift in the space–time continuum between our kitchen and the front door?), we were approaching the door of Molly and Ben’s flat, which formed the ground floor of a dilapidated Victorian terrace a short bus ride from our warehouse-style apartment in East London. As the door to the street swung closed behind us, shutting out the roar of traffic from the road, I became conscious of another sound: a thin, high-pitched wail like an alarm going off on a long-forgotten device buried in a drawer somewhere, insistently informing you that its battery was about to die once and for all, but only when it had given you about three days’ warning and wrecked your sleep in the meantime.

Sam and I looked at each other, wide-eyed with apprehension and something else – something almost like wonder.

‘Do you think that’s—’ I began.

‘The baby?’ His voice had dropped to a whisper. ‘I guess. They’ve been known to cry a bit, or so I’m told.’