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I shoot her a glance, but she shrugs like usual.
“What? I’m just saying!” She sighs at Ant like he’s a confidant. “Cass still sees Jack as a good guy who fell for someone else, but we all know he’s a cheat who screwed her over.”
Harry is dancing off a little way ahead, so I can’t shh her as much as I usually could if he was in earshot.
“Sarah,” Mum warns, but Sarah doesn’t care. Champagne has only made her tongue looser.
“Just telling him!” my drunk sister says. “He’ll think Jack is a prick as much as I do.”
Ant smiles at me. “I’m glad he’s a prick. Like you said, Sarah. I wouldn’t have met Cass if he wasn’t.”
“Cheers to that,” she says, raising an imaginary glass of champagne, and Ant raises an imaginary one right back, joining in with her drunken haze, even though he’s stone cold sober.
We all hang out together back at Mum and Dad’s until Harry is so tired he’s beginning to doze on the sofa, cuddling up to his huge giraffe with the hotel brochure still open on his lap.
“Time to go,” Sarah says, and she and Dave get ready to leave with birthday boy, giving Ant another grateful goodbye before they do.
Harry still has his huge giraffe in his arms along with the brochure when he reaches the front door.
“I’ve got a name for my giraffe now,” he tells us.
I wait for some zany, cool name that he’s conjured in his cute little brain, but his choice takes me by surprise.
“His name is Tony. Like Anthony.” He looks up at Ant. “That’s what a boy at school is called. Tony, not Anthony, but that’s what Ant is short for too, right? So the giraffe can be Tony.”
He grins up at Ant, and Ant gives him a beaming smile back.
“Wow, thank you, little chap. That’s quite an honour.”
We won’t see Sarah, Dave or Harry in the morning, since Harry has another birthday weekend play date and we are setting off back to Malvern after lunch, so I get a hug from everyone and wave them off with a see you soon.
It will actually be a see you soon this time though, unlike when I was hiding away from Jack and Susie in Malvern and not being brave enough to admit it to myself.
Dad and Ant are chatting happily in the living room when I join Mum in the kitchen to make bedtime teas.
“I wish Sarah hadn’t said that crap about Jack,” I say to her, but she shrugs.
“You know Sarah. She always says her piece.”
“Yeah, I do, but it still wasn’t cool. She talks about Jack like he’s the devil.”
“We all think he’s an idiot, Cass. Not just Sarah. Michelle would too if he wasn’t her brother.”
I ponder it as I take a sip of my tea, because maybe everyone else is right and I’ve been too kind and too undervaluing of myself, assuring myself that Jack made the right move for him and Susie. But if Jack loved somebody else more than me, then why wouldn’t he have gone to be with her? He was decent enough to be honest about it. He broke down in tears when he told me.
At least I’m over it now. There’s no pang of pain in my guts when I picture his face, and I’m not impulsively touching my wrist tattoo whenever I think about him. Not anymore.
We take our bedtime tea and mineral water upstairs and call it a night. Ant has a separate shower to me, since the bathroom is so small, and I’m already in bed in PJs, hair freshly blow dried when he gets in to join me. I‘m ready to snuggle with him and gush about how grateful I am that he is treating my family so insanely well, but I don’t get the chance to.
Ant’s smile fades in an instant as soon as he is next to me.
“You didn’t tell me Jack was a cheating cunt,” he whispers, and he sounds so angry it gives me shivers.
I suck in a breath, shocked by his rage.
“Because he wasn’t,” I whisper back. “I know him pretty well, Ant. He left me for Susie, sure, but he told me he was doing it. Sarah can say what she likes because she’s still pissed off, but he didn’t cheat on me. I think I’m the best judge of that.”
“It’s very unlikely you’re the best judge of that,” he says. “You’re the one who was blinkered by love for him.”
“Was,” I whisper. “I was blinkered by love for him, but I’m not now, and I still don’t think he cheated on me.”
“He did,” Ant says, as though he’s certain.
I shrug. “How can you know that? You’ve never even met him.”
My God, the venom in Ant’s eyes. It takes me aback.
