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‘Do you have my letter?’ she asked, pulling him into a corner where no one else would hear.
‘Ah yes.’ Brian reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out an envelope and handed it to her. Audrey tucked it safely into her clutch. ‘I don’t know why Vivien gave it to me—’
‘You’re seeing her again,’ Audrey said sharply, and watched his face freeze in horror. ‘Why?’
Brian let out a sigh, and then briefly closed his eyes. ‘I never stopped loving your mother, Audrey,’ he said slowly.
‘What about Lawrence?’
‘It’s a mess. I know.’
It was time to sit down for dinner. She could not think about this now. Audrey would file it away in a mental drawer, though she was running out of mental drawers to hide unpleasant thoughts in. She weaved her way through the crowd to get to the top table. Josh was to be on her right and Hillary on her left, but when she reached the round table, she saw the place card on her left had ‘Fred’, scrawled in lilac ink. No one had known Miranda was going to bring a plus one when the seating plan had been printed.
‘I thought you might not get a chance to speak to him otherwise,’ Miranda said, nodding to the place card. ‘Trust me, you guys are so similar, I think you’ll really get on.’
Audrey noticed that Miranda had moved herself next to Paul. What was it with people thinking they would mess with the seating plan? If she protested, it might only make things more awkward. Just as she’d started to feel reassured that everything was going to be fine, that the worst of the day was over, the seating plan from hell had been thrown into the mix.
She found her gaze flitting around the room, stopping on all the men she knew – friends of hers, friends of Josh’s, partners of their friends. Could she have found herself marrying any one of these men if just a few twists of fate’s wheel had been different? Was there some guiding force pulling her towards the right person, or was it just a giant game of chess with a billion different outcomes? If Clara hadn’t found the house share with Paul on Craigslist, if she hadn’t been taking photos in Covent Garden that day, or been sitting next to Josh at Dee’s wedding, would her life have been completely different?
If it was purely down to chance, if there were a million forks in the road, then of all the ways her life could have played out, was this the best outcome? Could the human heart handle the idea that it could have loved another just as well? So many ideas of romantic love are spun around the belief that there is just one perfect person, that the journey to find them is beyond our control, that it is destined – but what if it is merely a lottery? Her mental spiral stalled as Fred pulled out the chair next to her. She tried to set her face to a neutral expression but felt her eyelid twitch with the pressure of hiding what she was feeling.
An artfully presented salmon terrine was laid in front of her, but Audrey felt sick at the idea of eating.
