Jenny Sparrow Knows the Future by Melissa Pimentel (14)

13

I was asleep by the time Christopher came in, and in the morning he still had the red-eyed, rumpled look of a man who’d had a dinner of six pints and two packets of cheese and onion crisps. ‘Plus some peanuts,’ he added when I handed him a glass of water.

‘Good,’ I said, dropping two ibuprofen capsules in his upturned palm. ‘I was worried about your protein levels.’

He smiled. ‘That’s funny,’ he said, but he didn’t laugh. For once, I wished he’d laugh at something I said. Him telling me he thought it was funny didn’t have quite the same effect.

‘How was everyone?’ I asked, pushing my irritation aside.

‘You know,’ he said, swallowing down the tablets. ‘The usual. Jonno’s panicking about the baby, Crispin’s boss is riding him like a Shetland pony—’

‘I thought Shetlands were more decorative than functional.’

He waved me away. ‘Figuratively speaking, then. Steve’s got a new girl on the go – blonde, apparently, and quite young.’

‘Obviously.’

‘Says he’s found the one, but I think we both know how that’s going to go.’

‘I won’t buy a fascinator just yet.’ I plucked the damp towel off the bedroom floor and hung it across the bedframe to dry.

‘And then Spanner brought out his bloody deck of cards and started doing his whole “pick a card, any card” shtick at the poor group of lasses next to us, and he ended up chucking the whole deck at the window.’

I looked up, aghast. ‘Why the hell did he do that?’

He shrugged. ‘Said he’d seen David Blaine do it once, and thought he knew the trick.’

‘But he didn’t know the trick?’

‘Does Spanner ever know the trick? Three years of magic classes, at vast expense, plus God knows how many hours watching instructional videos on YouTube, and the man still wouldn’t be able to pull off a trick if it was Halloween and he had a roll of toilet paper and a carton of eggs.’

I laughed. It was true, Spanner was hopeless at magic, despite his enduring belief that he was Houdini incarnate. He’d once tried to pull a pound coin out of my ear, and instead got tangled up with my earring. He nearly severed the lobe.

Christopher set his glass of water on the bedside table and pulled me towards him. ‘C’mere,’ he said, kissing me lightly. The sweetly stale smell of old booze still clung to him. ‘I missed you last night.’

‘Me too.’ It was nice being together like this, the old shorthand flowing between us, the sheets warm from the heat of his body. Even in his hungover state, he still looked adorable – like the dissolute-but-ultimately-charming-Englishman-who-turns-out-to-secretly-be-a-prince in a Lifetime Christmas movie.

‘What did you get up to? Just stayed in?’

I shook my head. ‘I went out to dinner,’ I said.

He raised his eyebrows. ‘Not with bloody Ben again, I hope.’

I felt a swell of anger rise inside of me. What did it matter if I had gone out to dinner with Ben? I’d explained a hundred times that Ben was just a friend. I didn’t nag Christopher when he went out with his friends, even that girl Becky he’d gone to uni with who I knew still harbored a crush on him. She called him ‘Toph’ in a tittering voice and shot me murderous looks when his back was turned. I opened my mouth to say something when I remembered that I’d lied about seeing Ben, anyway, and that maybe right now wasn’t the time to go around righteously defending my right to interact with the opposite sex, seeing as the last time I’d done that I’d ended up married to one of them.

Instead, I smiled and said, ‘No, on my own, actually.’

He scrunched up his face. ‘You went out to dinner alone?’

‘And to the movies.’

‘Oh God,’ he groaned, pulling me in closer. ‘I’m sorry. I had no idea you were so keen to go out last night. You should have told me!’

‘Why? Would you have canceled your plans?’

He pulled back, surprised. ‘We were wetting Jonno’s baby’s head – a bit of a tradition – so probably not, but I would have invited you to tag along. It was a bit of a lads’ night, so not sure how much you would have enjoyed it, but at least you wouldn’t have had to go sitting in a restaurant on your own like a saddo.’

‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I actually had fun.’

‘You don’t need to say that just so I won’t feel guilty.’

‘I’m not.’ I saw the look of horror on his face and laughed. ‘Seriously, it was nice! I sat at the bar and had a drink and then I went and saw a movie that you would never in a hundred years have wanted to go to. It was actually kind of great. I might do it again soon.’

He still looked dubious, but managed to shrug his shoulders. ‘As long as you’re all right. Still, we should arrange something with the other couples soon. Once Jonno’s wife’s recovered from the birth, maybe. It would be good to give you an airing.’ I wondered briefly at the idea that I was a cupboard, or a wound. ‘Speaking of couple things, Crispin said he went to a cracking wedding the other week and thought the venue might be good for us. I thought we could go down this weekend, take a look?’

‘Where is it?’

‘I don’t know – Somerset somewhere. Durleigh? Thurloxton?’

The words meant nothing to me, but I thought of uncrossed items on my to-do list and nodded enthusiastically. ‘Sounds great!’

‘Perfect. Maybe we could stay in a little B&B nearby, make a night of it.’

I nodded. ‘Sure!’

‘Great. Actually, I’m swamped today – would you mind having a look at places? I’ll send you a link to the venue when I get into work. Speaking of which …’ He hauled himself to his feet with a grunt. ‘I should get going. Do me a favor and put the kettle on? There’s no chance I’m getting through this morning without a brew in me. I’ve got Ken the Shredder at 9.30 wanting to go over the McMannon case.’

‘Of course!’

He bent down and kissed me on the lips, and I watched his slim, muscular back retreat into the bathroom.

I padded into the kitchen and flicked on the kettle. A weekend away might be nice. Get some fresh air, some space from London, check out this wedding venue … Yes, it would be good. Christopher and I could have some time together, just the two of us, and start getting our heads around the idea of the wedding. I plonked a teabag into the mug I’d got Christopher last Christmas – a chipped blue affair with GOTTA RUN! emblazoned across the front (get it? Because he likes to … oh, never mind) – and poured in the boiling water. Maybe I could find a place with one of those big roaring fires.

My mind flashed back to the men on the Tube talking about weekends away in the Cotswolds. I couldn’t shake the image of a room full of bloated jackasses pouring schnapps down the throats of their giggling mistresses. I shook my head, hoping to dislodge the thought. No. The weekend away would be nice. A little getaway.

Maybe it was just what I needed.

The journey to work was blissfully without incident – no noses buried in armpits, no accidental-or-otherwise gropings, and no braying pack of idiots pontificating about shagging or cricket or both. I arrived just after nine, made myself a cup of coffee, and settled in to do some groundwork before I set off for Columbia Road that afternoon.

Jeremy seemed convinced that Bryant had been up to something, but so far I couldn’t find any concrete evidence of wrongdoing. His accounts were in order. He paid his taxes on time. Sure, he wasn’t answering his phone, and no one knew where exactly he was living now, but his house had just burned down. Who really felt like chatting over a cup of tea and a slice of Victoria sponge after a thing like that? Maybe he’d just had a really bad string of luck.

I pulled out the formal police report on the fire, along with the sheaf of photographs documenting the damage. The forensics all seemed to check out – the electrics were old, and the conclusion was that one of the fuses had blown and a spark had caught on the curtains in the back of the shop. I glanced at the photograph – a tattered, blackened piece of canvas hung limply from the metal rings. I held it up to the light. There, through a tear in the fabric, was what looked like a small silver dial ringed with black numbers. My heart lurched. It looked like the lock on a safe.

Maybe Bryant had left something in there. A will, or bank documents that might point to his wife’s life insurance money. There was no guarantee that it would lead anywhere, but there was the possibility, and that was enough to spur me on.

I was congratulating myself for being so eagle-eyed when Ben bowled into the cubicle, shouting good morning at me.

I started in my seat and stared at him. He was wearing a pair of dark denim turn-ups so tight I worried for the future of his unborn children, an artfully distressed T-shirt, and a pair of box-fresh Jack Purcells. His hair was styled within an inch of its life, and the cubicle immediately filled up with the scent – sorry, ‘oud’ – of Dior Homme. ‘He’s alive,’ I cheered. ‘ALIVE!’

He rolled his eyes, but couldn’t quite manage to wipe the cat-that-got-the-cream-and-the-salmon-and-hell-why-not-even-the-caviar look off his face.

‘Soooo,’ I said, grinning at him moonily. ‘I take it you heard back from Lucy?’

He shrugged. ‘She rang me last night.’

I couldn’t believe he was going to try to style this out all nonchalantly. ‘Annnnnnd?’ I prompted.

Another shrug. He’d somehow become French overnight. ‘We’re going out tonight.’

‘Tonight?!’ I crowed. ‘I thought you’d asked her out for Saturday?’

He blushed, a proper, deep crimson. ‘She said she couldn’t wait.’

‘Holy Mary Mother of God! This is great!’

He broke now, finally, like a flood against a dam of twigs. ‘I know! It’s so weird, because when she called I was all like, maybe she’s calling to tell me to leave her alone, you know? But then she was all like, hey, sorry I didn’t get in touch with you sooner, I was in Luxembourg.’

‘She was in Luxembourg?’

Another shrug. As if a jaunt to Luxembourg was a normal, everyday occurrence. As if it was almost surprising that we ourselves were not currently in Luxembourg. ‘She works in finance, so …’

‘Wow. She must be a high-flyer if they’re sending her to Luxembourg.’ I heard my father’s voice come out of my body, and yet I was powerless to stop it.

He smiled shyly. ‘Yeah, I think she’s quite senior. Anyway, she was all, sorry I’ve been MIA, let’s go for drinks tomorrow, and then I’ll stay at yours, and we can go out for brunch or whatever on Saturday.’

‘And you said yes?’ I gripped the arms of my chair. This woman was not pulling any punches. I scanned Ben’s face for signs of The Fear. The old Ben would have changed his phone number and deleted his Snapchat if a woman had proposed they share a cab, never mind a weekend. But the new Ben was just smiling idly at two interlinked paperclips on his desk, as though they were representative of the powerful cosmic nature of true love.

‘’Course I did,’ he said, clasping his hands behind his head and leaning back in his swivel chair. ‘Why wouldn’t I?’

And that, my friends, was the moment that hell froze over. ‘Well,’ I said, reaching over and catching him on the shoulder. ‘I’m really happy for you.’

He shrugged again. Seriously, he’d gone so Gallic that at any moment he was going to throw a string of onions around his neck and declare that he was going on strike. ‘It’s cool,’ he said casually. ‘I figured it would work out.’

‘Sure you did.’ Poor little Satan and his minions, so very, very cold down there.

‘How’s it going on the Bryant case?’ he asked, tipping back in his chair.

I opened my mouth to tell him about the safe in the photograph, but decided against it. Best to wait until I had concrete evidence. ‘Nothing new,’ I shrugged. ‘Hopefully one of his neighbors will have seen something.’ Or, I thought, I’d see something for myself.

The rest of the morning sped by, and before I knew it, I was finishing up my Pret sandwich, brushing the crumbs from my chair, and gathering up my belongings.

Ben glanced up as I slung my bag over my shoulder. ‘You off to do your sleuthing?’ he asked through a mouthful of All Day Breakfast.

I nodded. ‘I’ll probably be back before the end of the day,’ I said. ‘I have to file a few things for that hit-and-run claim.’

He rolled his eyes. ‘Christ, you’re such a spod.’

I shot him a saccharine smile. This was only half-true. I was definitely a goody-two-shoes when it came to work, but I’d also failed to look into a single B&B for the weekend, and I knew Christopher would ask when I got home. I figured I could come back to the office and do a quick Internet search so I’d at least have something to offer over dinner tonight.

I waved goodbye to Ben and shot out of the office. I checked the time on the way out: ten past two. My mind whirred with mental calculations. Fifteen minutes on the Victoria Line. Change at King’s Cross or Highbury and Islington? Getting the Overground might take a little longer, but it would save me the walk from—

I heard a low whistle, and a deep voice call out to me from across the street. ‘You look like you mean business.’

I looked up to find Jackson leaning against the wall opposite, jacket slung over one arm, booted foot cocked against the bricks. He gave me a sly grin, and made his way across the street towards me, neglecting – as ever – to look out for traffic. A car beeped as it swerved to avoid him. He didn’t so much as blink.

‘What are you doing here?’ I asked as he arrived safely on my side of the street.

‘We had a deal, didn’t we?’

‘I know,’ I spluttered, ‘but I left you a message –’

He waved me away. ‘I never listen to my messages.’

‘That’s very irresponsible,’ I asked. ‘What if it’s important?’

‘My theory is that if someone has something important to say to me, they’ll call back.’ He reached up and plucked a bit of fluff from my hair. My mind flashed to the feeling of his palm cupping my chin in the bar the other night. It had seemed so clear-cut the night before, but now that he was standing here in front of me, holding a biscuit crumb he’d fished out of my hair between his thumb and forefinger, I was wavering. ‘Anyway,’ he said, blowing the bit of fluff from his fingertip, ‘I know how much you hate talking on the phone, so I figured I’d show up in person and save you the agony.’ He smirked at me. ‘So what was your message about?’

‘Nothing,’ I muttered. ‘It wasn’t important. And what makes you think I hate talking on the phone?’ Not that it wasn’t true. Phone conversations, even with people I knew – even with Isla! – made me break out into a sweat. I always ended up pacing around the room like a panther, talking in a too-loud voice usually reserved for football matches, or trying to communicate with people who didn’t speak your language. If I was forced to call the gas company or book a doctor’s appointment, I would mentally rehearse what I was going to say before I dialed. I don’t know what I thought was going to come out of my mouth if I didn’t – a confession about a sexual deviance? Some sort of strange verbal tick? – but attempting to apply logic to the situation was pointless. Still, I didn’t remember telling Jackson as much.

‘You told me about it in Vegas.’ He shook his head. ‘I still can’t believe how much you don’t remember from that night.’

‘Don’t remind me,’ I groaned.

‘It seems like I don’t have much of a choice. Anyway, you told me how much you hated the phone, so I figured it was futile to try to talk any sense into you that way.’

I bridled at this. ‘What do you mean, talk sense? I’m the one who’s being rational here, not you.’

‘Hey there, no need to get all defensive.’

It was enough to spin me off into another dimension of irrational rage. ‘And what exactly do you think you’re doing, just showing up at my office like this? I get that you don’t have a normal job – that you like to “live free” or whatever, like a poor man’s bongo-playing-era Matthew McConaughey, but some of us actually take our jobs seriously, and it is totally inappropriate of you to keep turning up like this.’

He gave me a long, even look. ‘You done?’

I huffed. ‘Yes.’

‘Glad to hear it. Now where are we off to?’

My stomach clenched. ‘We?’

‘Sure. We missed our dinner last night, which means we’ve got time to make up.’

‘I’m not having dinner with you tonight,’ I blurted out.

‘Even more reason for us to spend the afternoon together. Come on, where to? Anywhere you’re going, I’m going.’

‘What if I said I was going to get a bikini wax?’

He raised his eyebrows. ‘I’d say I’ll buy you a whiskey now and one when you’re done. But that’s not where you’re going, is it?’

‘It’s a work thing,’ I said. ‘I have to go to Columbia Road and try to get this guy’s neighbors to tell me he’s a crook.’

‘Sounds like fun. Besides, I’m great at getting people to tell me stuff.’

I looked at him sceptically. ‘You are?’

He crossed his arms. ‘You want me to tell you what your nickname was in high school?’

Oh God. I couldn’t have! There was no way I would have told him. Only Isla knew the story about Brad Tompkins stumbling over my soccer cleats in the middle of a make-out session. Even today, the humiliation of it was enough to make my gorge rise. Whatever a gorge was.

He winked at me then, the bastard. ‘Let’s go, Garbage Feet. We’ve got neighbors to grill.’

I groaned. ‘What the hell else did I tell you that night?’

He tapped the side of his nose with his finger. ‘That’s for me to know and you to find out. You thinking of changing at King’s Cross or Highbury and Islington? The Overground will take longer but—’

‘It will save the walk,’ I said, ‘I know, I know.’ We set off towards the Tube. ‘So you didn’t have to work again today?’

He shrugged. ‘They don’t need me much.’

‘Pretty sweet gig. What did you say the movie you were working on was?’

‘I didn’t,’ he said. ‘It’s some big budget dystopian thing. They’re still scouting locations and they wanted me to come along to check out possible camera angles. Anyway, let’s not waste our time talking about boring stuff like work. Why don’t you tell me about the time you tried out for the cheerleading squad?’

I stopped short. ‘Oh my God! I didn’t.’

‘Relax. I’m sure they thought you had tissues stuffed in your bra because of your hay fever.’

‘Shut up,’ I hissed.

‘Just a shame you didn’t think of it before you did that cartwheel …’

‘Arghhhh! You know, some people might class this as harassment.’

‘Some have,’ he reached over and tucked my hand in the crook of his elbow, ‘but the charges have never stuck.’

We ended up taking the Northern Line. We emerged at Old Street, the traffic of the roundabout drowning out our conversation even in the middle of the day, and gazed up at the enormous cranes lifting steel beams into place on flashy new blocks of flats called things like The Apothecary and The Old Printing Press.

Jackson shook his head as he took it all in. ‘Things sure change fast. When I lived here, it was all council flats and artists’ squats.’

I shot him a sceptical glance. ‘Didn’t you say you lived here ten years ago?’

‘That’s right.’

‘I’m pretty sure Old Street wasn’t exactly a shanty town back then.’

He laughed. ‘Okay, you got me. Maybe I’m looking back with rose-colored glasses.’

‘More like a rose-colored telescope,’ I said.

‘Still,’ he said, gesturing towards a skyscraper built like a jackknife, ‘all this glass and steel wasn’t here, and I’m damn sure there wasn’t a fancy coffee place in the middle of the roundabout.’

I tugged on his arm. ‘C’mon, gramps. Let’s go before you start telling me about how you used to walk three miles to school every day.’

‘In the snow,’ he added.

‘Uphill both ways.’

We grinned at each other before setting off down Old Street. We passed glass-fronted cafés stacked with people pecking away on MacBooks, pubs with late lunchers sneaking in a pint before returning to their flexible work space, and boutiques displaying collections of what looked like extortionately priced sticks.

He stopped short when we got to the intersection with Curtain Road. ‘Do you mind if we take a little detour?’

I checked the time. It was ten to three. ‘Sure,’ I said, and we hooked a right.

He shook his head and tsked as we passed former dive bars that were now fancy tapas places, skate shops that were now salons, and a pub that was now a Foxton’s. ‘At least the tattoo place is still there,’ he said as we looped around on ourselves, ‘but I don’t think I’m ever going to get over that American Apparel.’ He stopped outside of Rivington Street and pointed up at the top floor of a nondescript brick building. ‘There,’ he said. ‘That’s where we used to live.’

I followed his gaze. ‘We?’

‘Me and my girl,’ he said quietly. We both stood there for a minute, staring up at the building, before a man with a handlebar moustache pushed past and stirred Jackson out of his reverie. ‘Come on,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘No use standing around here looking for things that are long gone.’

I wanted to ask him about this girl – his girl – but the look on his face told me not to push him on it. At least not right now. We walked the rest of our journey in silence, crossing the melee of Kingsland Road and into the relative quiet of Hackney Road. I stopped him just before we got to Columbia Road.

‘Okay,’ I said, brushing the hair back from my face. ‘So here’s the deal. I’m going to go knock on some doors and hope that one of this guy’s neighbors wants to invite me in for a cup of tea and a chat.’

‘The lonely old woman ploy,’ Jackson said. ‘I like it.’

‘What I need you to do is to not talk.’

‘Hey now!’

‘I mean it! This case is a big deal at work, and I can’t have you going around ruining it.’

He folded his arms across his chest. ‘Are you calling me a ruiner?’

‘Based on evidence to date, yes, I am calling you a ruiner. Why don’t you go have a cup of coffee or something?’ I spotted a café done out to look like a 1950s tea parlor and pointed to it. ‘There! Go sit in there and have a piece of Victoria sponge, and just don’t – don’t—’

‘Do anything?’

I nodded gratefully. ‘Exactly.’

He rolled his eyes. ‘Fine. But if you get into any trouble, just let me know. I’m telling you, I can charm the birds out of the trees if necessary.’

‘Leave the birds in the trees and the snakes in the grass and all other animals exactly where they are. Got it?’

‘Got it.’ I watched as he walked, whistling, across the street and pushed open the door to the café. A bell chimed his arrival and I heard him calling out a greeting to the waitress. God help her.

I decided to take a walk down the street to get the lay of the land before approaching anyone – or, as Jeremy would say, to case the joint. Victorian terraces lined the street, most of them with shopfronts painted in pretty shades of blue and green and pale yellow. There was an old dairy on one side, its ground floor now a posh bakery, and a school set back from the road and guarded by a wrought-iron fence. Most of the windows on the houses were lined with flowerboxes overflowing with blooms in bright reds and pinks.

In short, it looked like a postcard of a place rather than a real one, and I was certain I’d never been in the vicinity of so many artisanal throw pillows in my life.

It was gorgeous, of course, but there was something about it that didn’t feel real, and it was smack dab in the middle of it that I found Mr Bryant’s shop, its boarded-up remains sandwiched between a shop selling upscale baby knitwear and a gluten-free crêperie. Even before the fire, his shop would have stuck out like a pair of Clarks at a Louboutin sample sale.

I doubled back on myself and headed towards the Hackney Road end. Here, the façade of pleasant gentility wore away to reveal its original, slightly grittier incarnation. The park was beautifully kept, but thankfully full of people who didn’t look like they’d fallen out of a Boden catalog. A bunch of schoolkids chased each other, squealing, as their mothers looked on impassively. A teenaged girl with Coke-can headphones on walked past clutching a cardboard box full of chips, the tinny thud of bass surrounding her like a cloud. And there, on a park bench, sat a pair of old men, hands resting on top of canes, heads angled in towards each other, just taking it all in.

They would be as good a place to start as any.

‘Excuse me,’ I said, striding over to them. ‘Do either of you know Edward Bryant?’

The two men exchanged glances. ‘Sorry, darling, never heard of him,’ the man in the flat cap said.

‘He owns the cobblers,’ I said, pointing down the street. ‘There was a fire there a few weeks ago?’

The man with the white moustache scratched his chin. ‘Doesn’t ring a bell …’

I sighed. ‘Do you live around here?’

The man in the flat cap gave me a long appraising gaze. ‘That’s a very personal question, young lady.’

‘Yes,’ the man with the moustache piped up. ‘Why should I tell you where I live? I don’t know you from Adam.’

‘You might follow us home,’ the flat cap man said.

‘Knock us on the head and rob us blind,’ the moustache man added.

‘I’m not – I’m just—’ I spluttered.

The two men looked at each other and broke into laughter. ‘We’re only joking, love,’ said the man in the cap. ‘Of course I know the cobblers. I’ve lived here nearly twenty years.’

‘He’s still settling in,’ said the moustache man, jerking his thumb towards flat cap. ‘I’ve been here since I was just a nipper.’

‘Great!’ I said brightly. ‘So can you tell me—’

‘Now where’s your accent from?’ The man in the flat cap rested his chin in the cup of his hand and smiled up at me.

‘America.’

‘Ah, America! Lovely place. Always wanted to go. Where in America are you from?’

‘New Jersey,’ I said reluctantly. I was always reluctant to admit to Brits I was from New Jersey. First of all, because they were always hoping for somewhere more glamorous – New York, Los Angeles, even Florida had a strange allure. And second –

The man in the flat cap lit up like a casino at Atlantic City. ‘Baddabing! New Jersey! Sopranos, right?’

I nodded wearily. ‘Right.’ The only things most British people knew about New Jersey came from The Sopranos, which meant that as soon as they heard I was from there, they assumed that I owned a fur coat and understood that pointing-at-the-nose gesture, neither of which was true.

‘Brilliant program, that,’ said the man with the moustache. ‘My son got me the DVD for Christmas one year and I watched the whole series in a month.’

‘Lazy git!’ hooted the man in the cap.

‘Yes, it’s a great show,’ I said, ‘James Gandolfini was an amazing actor. Now, about the cobbler shop—’

‘Such a shame he popped his clogs, isn’t it?’ The man in the cap looked positively mournful. ‘So young, too.’

‘True, but you can’t live like he did and not suffer the consequences,’ the man with the moustache said, gently caressing his own sizable stomach.

‘The fella did look like he loved a bit of steak, God bless him.’

‘Nothing wrong with that!’ The two men dissolved into laughter again. It was becoming increasingly clear that I wasn’t getting anywhere with them.

‘Look,’ I said, a little too impatiently, ‘I don’t have much time, so I’d really appreciate it if you could tell me a little bit about the cobbler shop.’ I saw the eyebrows shoot up on the two men, but ploughed on regardless. ‘Were you there the day of the fire? Did you see anything? Did you speak with Mr Bryant at all?’

The man with the flat cap rose to leave, leaning heavily on his cane for support. ‘Sorry, love,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid I can’t help you there.’

The man with the moustache joined him. ‘His mind’s not so good these days,’ he said, placing a steadying hand on the back of the bench. ‘And neither is mine. Good luck.’

They nodded at me curtly and shuffled towards the exit of the park. I suppressed the urge to scream.

‘Not going too well, huh?’ I turned to find Jackson smirking at me. He held out a paper takeaway cup. ‘Thought you could use a coffee.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, snatching the cup from him. I took a sip. The coffee was hot – I felt the tip of my tongue sizzle on contact – but delicious. ‘I thought I told you to stay in the café.’

‘It’s exactly that sort of charming attitude that got you so far with those two gentlemen,’ he said, nodding towards the now-empty bench. ‘You sure you don’t need a hand? I’m telling you, I’m good with people.’

I sighed. ‘Fine. But only because I know you’re not going to leave me alone anyway.’

He fell in step as I walked back towards the street. ‘Great! Where to next?’ He rubbed his hands together. ‘This is like being a private eye. I always wanted to be a private eye, didn’t you? All those Chandler novels …’

I glanced over at him. ‘You read Chandler?’ Somehow Jackson didn’t strike me as the Chandler type. He was too … glib. Although, frankly, he didn’t really even strike me as the reading type.

His eyes lit up. ‘Oh, man, I love Chandler! The Big Sleep. The Long Goodbye.’

‘Farewell My Lovely,’ I added.

‘That’s my favorite.’

‘It is?’ It was mine, too.

‘Absolutely! It has the best character name in fiction.’

‘Moose Malloy!’ we chorused.

He grinned at me. ‘I’ve never met a woman who was a Chandler fan.’

‘Really?’

He shrugged sheepishly. ‘I don’t tend to go for brainy types, if you know what I mean.’

I pictured a long line of pert blondes fanned out in front of him like a deck of mildly erotic playing cards. ‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ I said ruefully.

‘Hey, you can’t have it all. Have you watched the films?’

I nodded. ‘Most of them.’

‘Who’s your favorite Philip Marlowe?’

I considered this as we turned left and towards a row of neatly kept houses. ‘Everyone always says The Big Sleep, and of course you can’t argue with Bogart and Bacall—’

He shook his head and took a sip of his coffee. ‘Can’t argue with that at all.’

‘But I think the best Marlow is Elliott Gould—’

‘In The Long Goodbye!’ he chimed. ‘He’s amazing, isn’t he?’

I found myself beaming. No one ever knew about Elliott Gould. ‘Totally!’

‘That movie is so weird and 70s-trippy, right?’

‘Those girls living across the hall from him …’

‘And that scene in the house in Malibu!’

We nodded at each other like a couple of those bobble-headed dolls you could get in cheap souvenir shops around Leicester Square. Just then, a scraggy-looking dog bounded up to us, tongue out, tail wagging. I took a step back – when I was little, my mother had warned me not to pet strange dogs because they could ‘bite my face off’ – but Jackson was on his knees in an instant, scratching the dog behind its ears while it thumped its tail happily on the ground. I watched as the dog rolled over and showed him its belly. ‘Good dog,’ he cooed, getting right down on the ground beside it.

‘Jackson,’ I cautioned, ‘be careful. That might be an attack dog or something.’

He took the dog’s face in his hands and held it up for me to see. ‘This dog?’ The dog looked dazed with happiness, a thin thread of drool hanging from the corner of its mouth.

I took a cautious step forward. ‘I’m just saying, you don’t know what kind of dog it is.’

Jackson took the dog’s cradled head and stared into its eyes. ‘What kind of dog are you, huh? Are you a bad dog, like the mean lady says?’

‘Jackson!’

‘Or are you a good dog? I think you’re a good dog, yes I do.’ A brief bout of play wrestling commenced, and it was difficult to tell who was having more fun – Jackson or the dog.

It was amazing, really. I spent my whole life calculating risk, weighing up the options, and following the rules, and here he was, just ploughing through like a bull on a bender. And I still couldn’t decide if he was a genius or an idiot because of it.

Just as I mentally debated the point, a frazzled-looking middle-aged woman with a bouffant of light blonde hair tore across the park towards us. ‘Max!’ she shouted, ‘Max!’ The dog momentarily stopped licking Jackson’s face and gazed quizzically at the woman, who arrived by our side huffing and puffing like she’d just won the 400-meter hurdles. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, grabbing for the dog’s collar. ‘She was there one minute and when I turned around – whoosh! – she was off like a bloody rocket! Pardon my language.’

‘No need to apologize,’ Jackson said, getting to his feet and dusting down his knees. ‘Max and I were having a good old time, weren’t we, girl?’

‘She’s such a tart,’ the woman said, shaking her head. ‘I’m Marjorie, by the way.’ Jackson and I introduced ourselves, as Max rolled around in a patch of grass. ‘Fox poo,’ Marjorie said, pointing at the dog, wriggling merrily on her back. ‘She can’t get enough of it. Disgusting, really.’

‘My dog was just the same,’ Jackson said. ‘He’d find a foxhole and go nuts for it.’

‘Dogs are strange creatures, aren’t they? Really, I don’t know why I put up with her.’ The indulgent smile on her face told a different story.

‘They’re crazy all right,’ Jackson agreed. ‘That’s what I love about ’em.’

‘Well, I don’t want to take up any more of your time,’ Marjorie said, producing a leash from her jacket pocket and bending down to secure it to Max’s collar. ‘Lovely meeting you.’

‘You too,’ I said, reaching down to give Max a tentative pat on the back. Her fur was thick and coarse, like horsehair, and the smell of her lingered on my hand.

‘Say,’ Jackson said, getting back down on the ground and gathering Max in his arms for a hug. I was starting to wonder if we should leave them alone for a while. ‘I don’t suppose you could do us a favor? My friend and I here were looking to talk to someone who saw that fire at the cobbler’s place up the road. I don’t suppose you know anyone who might be willing to have a chat with us?’

I shot him a look. He was being way too upfront. There was no way this woman was going to—

‘Of course!’ Marjorie trilled. ‘Now, I saw the smoke from my house – I live on Wellington Row, just over there – but I didn’t see much else. Betty Cranfield, though – she’ll have seen it. That woman sees everything around here. I swear, she must have been a member of the SOE during the war.’

‘She sounds like our gal,’ Jackson said, beaming up at her. ‘Could you tell us where we could find her?’

‘Let’s see,’ she said, consulting her wristwatch. ‘It’s ten to four on a Friday, so she’ll be having her hair set in Daisy’s just up the road.’ This was impressive knowledge of Betty Cranfield’s schedule. Marjorie must have clocked my surprise because she laughed and said, ‘I know that makes me sound mad, but I always take Max for a walk at the same time every day, so you get used to seeing the same people in the same places. And every Friday, Betty’s under the blower at Daisy’s. You’ll find her there, I’m sure.’

‘Thank you so much,’ I gushed.

‘No bother! It’s always a pleasure to meet a fellow dog lover.’ She addressed this to the top of Jackson’s head, and by the look on her face, I was pretty sure it wasn’t just his appreciation for canines she was admiring. ‘Just tell her Marjorie sent you, and tell her I’ll be round in the morning with the papers once I’m finished with them. Saves her a trip to the shops,’ she explained.

‘That’s very sweet of you,’ I said.

She straightened her shoulders. ‘It’s a small community around here. It may be all posh bloody cafés and fancy boutiques on the street, but most of us have been here for ages. We look after each other.’ I picked up a slight defensive tone in her voice, and wondered if she wasn’t just talking about bringing Betty the paper. Maybe she knew more about the fire than she was letting on. ‘Right then,’ she said, tugging on Max’s lead. ‘Come on, you, let’s get you back to the house. She’ll be dead on her feet after all this excitement.’

Jackson gave Max a final scratch and reluctantly climbed to his feet. ‘A pleasure to meet you, Marjorie,’ he said, taking her hand in both of his. Marjorie swayed slightly under the weight of his charm offensive, and I had to physically restrain myself from rolling my eyes.

‘Lovely to meet you, too, Jackson. Maybe I’ll see you again around the park …? I know Max would love that.’ Yeah right, I thought. Max is the one who’ll be pining away.

‘I hope so, too,’ Jackson said, dipping his head and giving her a little wink. Jesus, the guy was really laying it on thick.

‘Nice to meet you, too, Janice,’ Marjorie said, giving me a cursory wave before turning to leave.

We watched her and Max make their way across the park, Max stopping at every bush, rock, bench, and fellow dog to have a sniff, while Marjorie tutted and tugged on her leash. It took me a few seconds to realize Jackson’s shoulders were shaking with laughter.

‘What’s so funny?’

‘Oh, nothing,’ he said, a grin spreading across his face. ‘You ready to go, Janice?’

‘Shut up,’ I hissed, but soon I was laughing, too. ‘What about you, Casanova? You were practically clutching a rose between your teeth while doing the tango back there. I don’t know who was more taken by it – Max or Marjorie.’

‘Marjorie, I reckon.’ I reached out and smacked him on the arm. ‘What? It worked, didn’t it?’

I rolled my eyes. ‘We’ll see about that. Come on, let’s see if you can work your magic on Betty, too. Something tells me she’s going to be a harder sell than poor Marjorie.’

Jackson interlaced his fingers and cracked his knuckles. ‘Sweetheart,’ he said, ‘I’m just getting started.’

In the end, we were both right. Betty was indeed a tricky customer, all sidelong looks and tuts and sighs, and Jackson was indeed up for the challenge, all winks and grins and ma’ams. In fact, he basically ma’amed her into submission. No one could have withstood the tidal wave of ma’ams he unleashed, regardless of their suspicion of outsiders or the state of their bunions or their overall abiding sense that these two Americans were trying to pull a fast one.

We found her just where Marjorie said we would, her white hair neatly sectioned and pulled tight around a set of bright pink curlers, the tang of ammonia and the floral scent of her perfume heightened by the heat of the hood dryer that hummed above her head. Daisy’s itself was set in time as tightly as Betty’s perm, with its black bucket seats, checkerboard floor, and photos of elegant women displaying the latest hairstyles from 1963 tacked up on the wall. I wondered how this place had survived the transition into hipsterville, but the steady stream of nicely turned-out ladies of a certain age clutching rolled-up umbrellas and pulling check-printed shopping carts into the salon quickly answered my question.

So, after much cajoling and charming and downright flirting, Betty told us about the fire.

Well, she told Jackson about the fire, while I tried to make myself as inconspicuous as possible. Betty had taken one look at me in my Zara trousers and my court shoes and my trench coat and had decided that I was not trustworthy in the least. Worse – that I should be ignored at all costs, like a lunatic singing Abba tunes on the 134 night bus.

‘I’ll tell you what I saw,’ Betty said, peering at Jackson above her bifocals, ‘though I don’t know what good it will do you. I was sat at the café across the street – you know, that trendy one that does the croissants with chocolate in them – and I was having a cup of tea – they do do a nice cup of tea, mind – when I smelled a funny sort of smell.’

‘What kind of smell?’ I asked. She ignored me.

‘So I said to Sophie – she’s the girl who runs the café, lovely girl even if she has ruined her face with that piercing – I said, can you smell that? And she said, yes, I can, it’s a sort of acrid smell. I think it’s coming from outside. So the two of us went outside and there was smoke coming from the front of Ed’s shop. Great thick black clouds of it.’

My mind whirred. Electrical fires usually produced white smoke. It was flammable liquids – like gasoline – that produced black smoke.

‘I said to Sophie, quick, call the fire brigade! She went off to phone them and I stood outside and shouted up to Ed, in case he was home. “Ed!” I shouted. “Ed, your shop is on fire!” But there was no response. So I started worrying that maybe he couldn’t hear – he’s a lovely man, Ed, but deaf as a post – but then there he was, scuttling up the street fast as anything. The look on his face – well, I’d never seen anything like it.’ She shook her head at the memory. ‘Just horrible. He’d spent his whole life in that shop, and he’d only recently lost his Vicki …’

Jackson glanced at me. ‘Vicki was his wife?’

She nodded. ‘An absolute gem, she was. They were childhood sweethearts, you know.’

My heart softened at this. ‘Have you seen Mr Bryant since the fire?’

‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘As soon as the flames were out, he up and left. We haven’t heard from him since.’ She gave Jackson a beseeching look. ‘You’re not here to tell me he’s dead, are you? I don’t think my poor heart could take another shock.’

Jackson looked at me, and I shook my head. ‘No, ma’am,’ he said, reaching out and covering her hand with his. She visibly softened at his touch. ‘We’re not here to tell you anything bad has happened to Ed. My friend here is just trying to get to the bottom of how the fire got started, that’s all.’

‘Does Mr Bryant have any debts that you know of?’ I asked. ‘Any trouble with the shop?’

Betty bristled. ‘He’s an honest, hardworking man, if that’s what you’re asking.’

‘I’m sure he is,’ I said, ‘but if he was struggling, or having trouble …’

‘There’s no trouble,’ she said, ‘the man is a saint.’ The firm set of her mouth indicated that our nice little chat was now finished.

Jackson must have sensed it, too, because he pushed back his chair and got to his feet. ‘Can we get you anything before we go? I could run across the street and get you a cup of tea?’

‘That’s fine, dear,’ she said, patting the back of his hand. ‘I’m all right for the moment, but thank you.’

‘Thanks for speaking with us,’ I said, offering her my card. ‘If you think of anything else, please give me a call.’

She batted the card away and fixed me with a gimlet eye. ‘I don’t know what you think you’re up to, but I can tell you this: you won’t find any snitches around here, so it’s no good you coming around here asking questions. I can promise you that no one around here has a bad word to say about Ed Bryant – you can be sure of that. Now if you’ll excuse me, my curls are starting to singe.’

And with that, we were dismissed.

We walked out of the salon and headed down the street towards the cobbler shop, dejected. ‘Did you have to go in so hard back there?’ Jackson asked.

‘I was just trying to get to the point!’ He was right, though – I’d blown it. Subtlety had never been my strong suit conversationally, and I lacked Jackson’s charm to finesse my way through it. The thought of his superior skill in the situation made me unnaturally angry.

‘Man, you would have made a terrible salesman,’ Jackson laughed. ‘Did you see the look on her face?’ He let out a low whistle. ‘If looks could kill, I’d be ordering a cold cut platter for your funeral right now.’

‘Thanks for the sympathy,’ I spat. ‘Shit. What am I going to do now? That woman was like the Columbia Road Mafioso, right? She’s going to spread the word that a nosy American is poking around where her nose doesn’t belong and – bam! – the doors will slam shut.’ In my panic, I’d reverted to talking like Jeremy. ‘I’m going to be left high and dry,’ I sighed.

‘Aw, it can’t be all that bad, can it? I mean, how important is this whole thing, anyway? The man’s shop burned down. He had insurance, you’re the insurance company, so you pay out the money. Right?’

I tried to hold my temper. ‘It’s not that simple,’ I said tightly. ‘I have to prove that the fire was an accident, and so far there are a few things that suggest that it wasn’t. Like Mr Bryant skipping town, for one.’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘You really took those Chandler novels to heart, huh? Next thing I know, you’ll be smoking a cigar and complaining about a dame that done you wrong.’

‘Just be quiet and let me think, will you?’

He tipped an imaginary hat. ‘Take your time, gumshoe.’

My mind whirred. What did I know so far? I knew that Edward Bryant had lived in the shop for years. I knew that we’d paid out life insurance following his wife’s death, but that money hadn’t materialized in his bank account. I knew that the shop was meant to have burned down in an electrical fire, but the smoke was black rather than white. And I knew that there was a safe hidden somewhere inside the boarded-up shop. An idea began to form.

‘Come on,’ I said, tugging on Jackson’s arm.

‘Where to now, PI?’

I glanced up at him as we hurtled down the road, past a shop selling bespoke Moroccan tiles and another selling expensive kitchenware. My heart thudded in my chest, knowing what I was about to do. ‘How opposed are you to a little bit of trespassing?’ I asked. It was madness, really, but I didn’t care. My whole life seemed mad at this point. I might as well take a page out of Jackson’s book and throw caution to the wind … particularly if there was the potential to be productive in the process.

He grinned and threw me one of his patented winks. ‘Why, Jenny Sparrow, you are full of surprises.’

Breaking and entering was surprisingly easy. The front of the shop was boarded up, but if you went through the alley adjacent to it, you found yourself in a trim little garden that backed onto the building. And if you pushed the back door a little harder than one usually would, you were inside the burned-out shop quicker than you could say ‘intent to commit a felony’.

‘Right,’ Jackson said, clapping his hands together. A pile of desiccated leather tipped to the floor. ‘What are we supposed to be looking for again?’

‘I’m not sure,’ I admitted as I peered around at the charred walls. ‘Proof that the electrics really did cause the fire, I guess.’

‘I thought that was what the fire department was for.’ He picked up a tool and brandished it in the air. ‘What the hell is this thing?’

‘An awl,’ I said, ‘and yes, the fire department did a full report and concluded it was an electrical fault, but I just need to double-check.’

‘Because our good friend Eddy has disappeared?’

I nodded. ‘That’s part of it, but really it’s just about being thorough. I like to be thorough.’

‘I’m guessing that’s how you knew this thing was an awl?’ he said, waving the tool at me.

‘I researched cobbler tools before I came, in case anything stuck out as strange.’

‘Yeah, the thing that would be strange about this situation would be finding a tool that didn’t fit.’ He was about to put the awl back on the table when he stopped in his tracks and turned to me, eyes lit up like a pair of disco balls. ‘Hang on a minute. Does that mean you were planning on breaking in here all along?’

I gave him a sly smile. ‘I wouldn’t say I wasn’t planning on it …’

‘You little devil! And here I was thinking you were a rule-follower.’

‘I am a rule-follower!’ I said, indignant. ‘I love rules. It’s just … sometimes to catch a rule-breaker, you have to be willing to slightly bend them yourself.’

‘You call this,’ he said, gesturing towards the pried-open back door, ‘rule-bending?’

I nodded decisively. ‘Yes.’

‘Whatever you say, boss. Now, where do you want to start?’

‘Over here, I think.’ I stepped past a low stool and ducked behind what had once been a workbench. The smell of sulfur and damp paper and the oaky smell of charred wood filled my lungs. I stopped and stared.

In the far corner, just below the grime-smeared windows, a tangle of wires peeked out from a hole above the trim. I crouched down for a closer look. Sure enough, the protective coating had worn away on parts of the wires and the ends were all frayed. A fire hazard if I’d ever seen one. All it would have taken was one little spark to catch the curtains, and – whoosh! – the whole place would have lit up like a Christmas tree.

‘Found something?’ I looked up to see Jackson looming over me. I pointed at the wires and he let out a low whistle. ‘Those are some dicey electricals right there. You think that’s what caused the fire?’

I nodded. ‘That’s what it said in the report, and this looks like it matches up …’

‘Huh. Well, at least you know the guy was telling the truth now, right?’

‘Maybe …’ I stood up and dusted down my knees, my eyes scanning the room until they snagged on the scrap of curtain I’d seen in the photograph. I hurried over and pushed it aside, revealing a stretch of soot-blackened wall, and – the hairs on the back of my neck stood up – a safe. I tried the door, assuming it would be locked, but it opened easily. I peered inside and my heart sank. The safe was empty. If there had been any evidence inside, Ed Bryant had made sure it was long gone by the time we turned up.

Jackson, on the other hand, had a different interpretation of events. ‘Well,’ he said, slapping the wall with the flat of his hand, ‘looks like you hit the jackpot.’

I scratched the back of my neck and stared inside the empty safe. ‘It doesn’t prove anything,’ I said finally.

He shot me a look of incredulity. ‘What do you mean, it doesn’t prove anything? The guy has a safe in his shop, the place burns down under suspicious circumstances and – poof! – the safe is empty and someone’s covered it up! Feels like an open and shut case to me.’

I shook my head. ‘All we’ve done is find an empty safe. That doesn’t prove anything other than that Mr Bryant was cautious about where he kept the store’s cash.’

Jackson scrunched his face up. ‘Then what the hell are we doing here?’

‘Barking up the wrong tree, I guess. Sorry I’ve led you on this insane wild goose chase.’

‘Don’t worry about me,’ he said, nudging me with his shoulder. ‘Believe it or not, this isn’t my first wild goose chase, nor is it the first crime I’ve committed.’ He clocked the look on my face and laughed. ‘No need to look so shocked, my dear – it wasn’t anything serious, I promise. I’m not about to tell you that you’re married to an axe-wielding murderer.’

‘Thank God for small favors,’ I grumbled. I looked around the room, suddenly despondent. ‘God, what am I going to tell my boss?’

‘Tell him the truth. You tried your best, but you couldn’t find anything that incriminated the guy. Who knows – maybe the fire really was an accident.’

I shook my head. ‘My boss definitely doesn’t think so.’

He looked at me. ‘What do you think?’

I considered this. ‘Honestly, I don’t know what to think. All of this stuff – the safe, him disappearing – it all seems to point to something bad. But for some reason, I can’t bring myself to believe he did it. It was his home for forty years. His wife’s, too, before she died. Why would he just burn it down?’

He let out a long sigh. ‘Grief makes people do crazy things. Makes them strangers even to themselves sometimes.’

I looked up at Jackson, willing him to say more, but his mouth was drawn tight.

I thought of my mother. If my father hadn’t left her and broken her heart, would she be a different person now? Or was it always inside of her, and the grief had just unlocked it?

‘I don’t know about you,’ Jackson said, breaking the dark silence that had descended on the room, ‘but I sure could use a drink. I saw one of those fancy-looking gastropubs on the corner – why don’t you let me buy you an overpriced beer?’

I hesitated. It was only five o’clock – I should really go back to the office and type up my notes, see if there was a piece of the puzzle I was missing. And I still hadn’t sorted out a B&B for the weekend … But the Tube would already be packed with early rush-hour commuters, and the look on Jackson’s face was practically beseeching. Maybe a pint wouldn’t be such a bad idea.

‘Okay,’ I said, picking my way through the detritus to the back door. ‘But only one.’

‘Sure,’ Jackson grinned at me. ‘Just the one.’

‘Another round?’ Jackson lifted his empty pint glass and waggled it at me. One had already turned into two after the first round disappeared in a matter of gulps – our adrenal systems still on high alert after all the criminal activity – but three felt … incendiary. I checked the time on my phone: 6:45. Christopher would be home by eight at the latest, and I still hadn’t booked anywhere for our weekend away.

Jackson saw the hesitation on my face and rolled his eyes. ‘I’m asking if you want another pint, not a bunch of ketamine.’

‘I’m just a little worried about the time,’ I said. ‘Christopher—’

‘Christopher will cope if you’re out past seven. C’mon, just one more. Particularly as you’re leaving me high and dry this weekend.’

News that I was going away for the weekend had not been well received. There was cajoling. There was hectoring. There were even thinly veiled threats about husband’s rights and the difficulty of procuring a divorce in the state of Texas. (Not true: I’d looked it up when he’d gone to the bathroom. For the low price of $139.99, you could get a divorce in Texas in less than twenty-four hours.) But finally, there’d been a nod of his head and a raising of his hands. ‘I know when I’m beat,’ he’d said, though he hadn’t shown any evidence of that to date.

‘Fine,’ I said eventually, ‘but just a half.’

He reappeared with a half-pint glass filled mainly with gin, only the faintest splash of tonic floating on top. I took a sip and winced. ‘This wasn’t really what I had in mind.’

He winked at me. ‘I know it wasn’t.’ He clinked his glass – filled with a tawny brownish liquid – to mine. ‘Bottom’s up, sweetheart.’

The gin hit my stomach just as I realized I hadn’t eaten anything other than a meagre Pret sandwich that day. ‘I think I need some nuts or something,’ I muttered as the heat from the liquor warmed my esophagus. The adrenaline from the break-in – I still couldn’t believe I’d instigated something that could be described as a break-in – had deserted me, and I felt jittery and slightly giddy. I took another sip and felt my nerves begin to steady.

‘Salted or dry roasted?’

The nuts didn’t do much to mitigate the booze, and by the end of the glass, my head was fizzing pleasantly and I was lolling slightly to the left.

‘Right,’ Jackson said, pushing the little triangle of folded up paper across the table at me. ‘Your turn.’

‘Get ready,’ I said, balancing the triangle on the table. He pointed his index fingers at the sky. ‘Hang on, your goalposts are closer together than mine were!’

‘They are not. Now are you going to shoot or what?’

‘Not until you move the goalposts further out.’ I reached across the table and pulled his hands further apart. ‘There.’

‘Are you kidding me?’ He regarded the distance between his two fingers, which admittedly was now quite considerable. ‘You’re such a cheat.’

‘I’m not a cheat!’ I cried, indignant. ‘You’re the cheat!’

‘That’s real adult of you.’

‘Cheat, cheat, never beat,’ I chanted.

‘For Chrissakes, will you just shoot already?’

I lined up the triangle and flicked. The bit of paper sailed across the table, through his upstretched fingers, and landed squarely in the middle of his chest. ‘Goooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaal!’ I shouted. A few of the other patrons turned and looked at me crossly, but for once I didn’t care. Let them stare, I thought. I’d just won a game of flick football.

‘Best out of three,’ he said, pushing the triangle back towards me.

I shook my head. ‘I’m officially retired,’ I declared. ‘I will never again play flick football.’

‘For God’s sake – you know, you’re a real piece of work.’

‘Takes one to know one,’ I said, sticking out my tongue.

He shook his head. ‘Man, I should have turned up with a flask that first day outside your office. You’re a fun drunk, you know that?’

‘I’m not drunk!’ But I was. That much was obvious. More drunk than I had been since … I felt myself blush. Oh yeah. Since I married him.

‘You were a fun drunk in Vegas, too. Do you remember the first thing you said to me in that bar that night?’

‘I think we’ve established that I don’t remember much from that night,’ I said, but something at the back of my mind was pushing its way to the front, like a little kid who really, really has to pee. ‘Wait, was it something about being an heiress?’

He nodded. ‘You told me you were the great-great granddaughter of the man who invented the toilet-roll holder.’

Of course I had. As Isla would tell you, it was classic early 20s’-era Sparrow. She and I had spent pretty much the entirety of our twenty-second year cavorting around New York making up stories about ourselves while chatting up strange attractive men (strange in that we didn’t know them, not in that they were weird. Though some definitely were weird). The toilet-roll holder one was a favorite.

‘Did I also tell you that Isla was a princess whose family owned half of Peru?’

His eyebrows disappeared into his hairline. ‘So you do remember! Yes, you tried that one, too, but I quickly sussed out that a Peruvian princess was unlikely to be named Isla. Call me crazy.’

A snort of laughter escaped from somewhere deep inside of me. ‘Oh God,’ I moaned, hiding my face in my hands, ‘I can’t believe I said those things to you.’

‘Don’t be,’ he said, waving it away, ‘it was hilarious. Like I said, you’re a fun drunk.’

I thought back to my time with Isla in New York. We hadn’t just been fun drunks, we’d been fun sober people, too. We’d crashed gallery openings, taken paper-wrapped subs from Peppino’s to Prospect Park to watch the sun set, splashed through open fire hydrants on muggy August afternoons. We’d lived fast and loose with our time. I had work, sure, and Isla had school, but still the days and nights seemed to stretch before us as huge, endless expanses.

And then it had changed. I’d changed.

‘Hey, you okay?’

I looked up to find Jackson studying me, his mouth pulled down. I forced myself to smile. ‘Fine,’ I said brightly.

‘You were on a different planet there for a minute. What had you so lost in thought?’

‘Nothing,’ I said, shaking my head quickly. ‘It’s not important. So how long did it take you to figure out I wasn’t a toilet-roll holder heiress?’

He leaned forward in his chair. ‘Are you telling me you’re not a toilet-roll holder heiress?’ He whistled. ‘Well then, what the hell am I doing here? I had big plans for that money, I’ll tell you.’

I laughed. ‘What makes you think I’d share any of my toilet fortune with you?’

‘Alimony, sweetheart,’ he said with a wink. ‘I intend to be ruthless.’

‘Well, I’m sorry to say the most I can offer you is a half a toaster and a couple of bonds I still haven’t cashed from my graduation.’

‘I thought the insurance racket was a good one,’ he said.

‘It’s not bad.’ I felt suddenly defensive of the payslip that arrived in my inbox each month. ‘But London isn’t particularly conducive to saving money.’

‘I hear that. I pretty much only ate baked beans when I lived here, and I walked everywhere because I couldn’t afford the bus, never mind the Tube. Best way to see the city, though, so I don’t regret that.’

I paused before saying what I said next. ‘You mean when you lived here with your ex?’

He nodded but didn’t say anything more. And really, that should have been the end of it. He clearly didn’t want to talk about it, and it wasn’t any of my business, but I couldn’t help myself. It was like trying to ignore a mosquito bite – eventually you were going to tear into the skin like a rabid dog with a chicken.

‘What happened between you two?’ He caught his breath as if I’d punched him in the gut, and I felt instantly, horribly embarrassed. ‘Sorry!’ I said hastily. ‘Honestly, just ignore me.’

‘No, it’s fine.’ He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. ‘She died.’

I felt my face fall. ‘Oh my God,’ I gasped. ‘I’m so sorry.’

He shrugged. ‘It’s okay.’ He shook his head and corrected himself. ‘I mean, it’s not okay’ – he let out a little half-laugh – ‘of course it’s not okay, that she died. But it’s okay that you asked.’

‘We don’t have to talk about it.’

He took a sip from his pint, placed the glass back down on the table, and stared into it, as though an answer might be conjured from it. ‘It’s okay. Really. Her name was Anna. She was English – a real East London girl, all blonde hair and long legs and attitude.’ I felt a twinge of jealousy and shooed it away. I had no right to be jealous of any girlfriend of Jackson’s, and I sure as hell didn’t have the right to be jealous of a woman who was dead. ‘We met when I was backpacking through Europe,’ he continued, rolling his eyes at the cliché. ‘In Greece. I was off my face on ouzo and was walking back to the hostel when I ran into her. Literally. I physically ran into her. Almost knocked her over. I actually did fall over, right at her feet.’ He shook his head at the memory. ‘I remember looking up at this – this goddess towering above me, and thinking someone must have slipped something into that last glass because there was no way someone that beautiful could be anything other than a figment of my imagination. And then she opened her mouth and said, in the most incomprehensible cockney accent, “Fucking hell, watch where you’re bloody going, you fucking idiot!”’ He looked up at me and smiled. ‘And that was it. Love at first sight.’

‘I met Christopher the same way,’ I said.

‘You did?’

I nodded. ‘I tripped running for his cab. He had to scrape me off the pavement. Though there was less cursing, and I’m pretty sure the word “goddess” didn’t enter his mind when he was doing it.’

He shot me a weak smile. ‘You never know. There must have been something to make him fall for you.’

‘Maybe it was the way the light hit the asphalt,’ I said. ‘So you guys met in Greece, fell in love, and then you moved to London to be with her?’

‘Pretty much.’

‘How long were you together before …’ I couldn’t bring myself to finish the sentence.

He didn’t hesitate. ‘Two years, three months, and eighteen days.’

‘That’s a long time,’ I said. ‘Especially when you’re that young.’

He shrugged. ‘Yeah, well. Not long enough.’

Silence fell at the table. I picked up a beer bottle and started peeling strips off the label.

‘You’re wondering what happened to her,’ he said finally. It wasn’t a question. I nodded. ‘A car accident.’

‘Jesus.’

‘She was on her way to some reclamation yard in Dorset. She loved going to those things – the more junk, the better. I used to call her Oscar the Grouch – obsessed with garbage.’ His eyes creased fondly at the memory. ‘She was good at it, though. Our flat was filled with stuff she’d found. “My gems”, she called them. Anyway, she’d been wanting to go to this one place in Dorset for a while, so she convinced her father to lend her his van – he was in construction – and off she went.’ He shook his head, just once. ‘I was supposed to go with her. She’d been on at me about it for weeks, but the day before we were supposed to go, I got a call about a job. We needed the money, so I took it. And she went on her own.’ He picked up his pint, swirled the liquid around. ‘It should have been me that was driving. I’m a bad passenger, I would never have let her drive. She must have got distracted or something, taken her eye off the road. She went too fast around a sharp corner and—’ He took a long drink from his pint and set his glass back down on the table.

‘After she died, I couldn’t handle it. I just cut and ran – packed a suitcase and caught the first flight back to Texas. I didn’t even stay for the funeral.’

‘You were in shock,’ I said.

He shook his head angrily. ‘I was a coward. I knew I couldn’t stay in London – everywhere I looked, I saw her.’ He smiled sadly. ‘I still do. But I should have stayed and faced it with her family like a man, rather than running off like that. I’ll never forgive myself.’ He looked desolate. ‘I’ve been running ever since, I guess.’

My heart thudded in my chest and I realized I’d been holding my breath. ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ I said, in one long, rushed exhalation.

He looked up at me, the corners of his eyes crinkling at the edges. ‘You said that the first time,’ he said sadly.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I told you about Anna that night in Las Vegas. I thought you might remember but … it doesn’t matter.’

I clapped a hand over my mouth. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, ‘I can’t believe I don’t remember. I’m such an asshole.’

He put up a hand. ‘It’s fine.’

‘It’s not fine!’ Shame shot through me like a hot flush. ‘God, I can only imagine what sort of wisdom I was spouting in that state. I can’t believe you ever wanted to see me again.’

He stared down at the table and rubbed at a water ring with his thumb. ‘Actually, you were great.’

I studied his face for a minute. ‘I was?’

He nodded, but wouldn’t meet my eye. ‘You were the first person I could talk to about it. It was strange – I mean, I never talk about it, about … her, but something about you … It was like I couldn’t not tell you or something.’

I struggled to make sense of this. ‘Sometimes it’s easier to talk to a stranger,’ I said, floundering.

He opened his mouth and I saw the hesitation on his face. ‘You told me about your mother, too,’ he said quietly.

I froze. ‘What did I tell you about her?’

‘About her breakdown. Her condition. About how you had to look after her after your father left.’

‘Oh.’ I wasn’t sure what to say. I never, ever talked about my mother, but apparently I’d told a total stranger on a night out in Las Vegas. The realization brought the familiar terror with it. Maybe this was how it would start. Maybe I was finally losing control.

‘Hey,’ Jackson said, giving me a nudge. ‘It’s okay. We all need someone to talk to sometimes.’

I shook my head. ‘I’m sorry I offloaded on you like that,’ I said. ‘You must have thought I was …’ I swallowed, hard. ‘Crazy.’

He shook his head decisively. ‘No. I definitely didn’t think you were crazy.’ He lifted his eyes to meet mine, and an electric current ran through me. ‘I thought you were amazing.’

Jackson looked bemused as my gaze flicked around the room like a startled bird. I was definitely flustered. There was no chance of hiding that. What had he meant by ‘amazing’, exactly? That I was amazingly easy to talk to? Isla always said I had a ‘responsible mom’ vibe about me – that even when we did crazy and/or stupid things in our twenties, she knew she could count on me to have correct change for the bus, or tissues tucked away in my bag. Was this the same thing? Maybe, even in the depths of drunken oblivion, I’d tapped into those reserves. Maybe I’d offered him a shoulder to cry on, or sourced some soothing warm cocoa. Honestly, who knows?

I knew, deep down, that it was possible that he wasn’t referring to my aptitude for packing tissues or proffering comforting beverages. There was some kind of connective undercurrent running between us. I raised my eyes to his, just for a minute. He was watching me with an intensity that was downright unnerving.

‘Thanks,’ I said finally, the words just managing to edge their way past my lips.

He opened his mouth to speak just as his phone started to buzz on the table. He looked down at the screen and his face fell. ‘Shit,’ he said, ‘I have to get this.’ He stood up from the table, picked up his phone, and walked to the far end of the bar. But not before I saw the name that had flashed up on his phone: Colette.

Colette. That was a pretty name.

I watched him as he spoke into the phone, head bowed, fingers running through his hair. He caught me looking and turned his back to me.

I tried to work my way through what Jackson had told me. He’d had a girlfriend called Anna, who he’d loved, who’d died. She was beautiful. He blamed himself for her death. He’d told me about this that night in Vegas – how could I not remember? – and I’d said something that had helped him. What had I said? How could I have helped?

I looked back towards where Jackson was standing, still deep in conversation. He’d turned back to face me now, and when I looked up his eyes met mine. He forced a smile, but his eyes looked pained.

I felt suddenly, irrationally, angry. Who was this Colette person, and what was she saying to make him look that way? A girlfriend, probably. I’ve never even asked if he was single. It’s an odd question to ask your husband, admittedly, but it would have been useful to ask in this case, before … before what? I was engaged to Christopher. It was none of my business if he was seeing someone. Even if her name was Colette. God, she was probably French, which meant she was gorgeous and rake-thin and smoked roll-ups, and had one of those blunt fringes I’d always wanted but could never pull off. She probably wore leather trousers and looked good in them. Man, I hated Colette.

‘Sorry about that.’ Jackson had rematerialized and was settling back down at the table.

‘No problem!’ I said brightly. Do not ask who it was, I chanted to myself, do not ask who it was. ‘Who was that?’ I asked.

He shot the phone a treacherous glance. ‘No one important,’ he said. ‘Just a work thing.’ So beautiful French Colette was just a colleague. I did my best to ignore the relief that flooded through me. ‘So,’ Jackson continued, ‘where were we?’ My mind flashed back to the look on his face when he’d told me about that night in Vegas. What had he said again? ‘I thought you were amazing.’ No one had ever said anything like that to me before. And then the feeling that ran through me when I’d met his eyes, that fizzing electric heat.

‘I can’t remember,’ I mumbled.

He leaned forward in his chair and brushed the back of my hand with his fingertips. My skin felt hot beneath his touch. ‘I can,’ he said gently. ‘Jenny, I have to tell you something.’

‘Oh, I’m sure you don’t,’ I said nervously.

‘I lied when I said I’m in London for work this week.’

I looked at him. ‘What?’ What did this mean for French Colette?

‘I mean, I’m here for work, but that’s not the real reason.’

‘Oh.’ I could feel what was coming and gripped the arms of the chair as though preparing for take-off.

‘That night in Vegas … the way we talked … I haven’t been able to talk to anyone like that since Anna.’

‘Jackson …’

He held up his hand. ‘Let me finish. I’ve spent the past ten years thinking I would never feel that kind of closeness with anyone ever again. Hell, I didn’t want to feel it – I knew how much it hurt when it was taken away. But then I met you. Even that night in the casino, when you had that awful sunburn and you got so pissed off at the roulette table – do you remember? Even then, I felt like we had a connection.’

I raised my hands to my face. My cheeks felt hot to the touch. ‘I was a mess.’

He smiled. ‘Even when you’re a mess, you’re a good one.’

‘Please,’ I said softly. ‘Stop.’

‘After you left that morning, I realized I had to see you again. Obviously there was the whole matter of us being married by Elvis, but it was something more than that. You had this … hold on me. And then when this job came up and I knew I’d be in London …’ He shrugged. ‘It felt like fate.’ He looked across the table at me, his green eyes clouded with uncertainty. ‘Was it?’

‘I should go,’ I said, scraping back my chair.

He leaped to his feet. ‘Please, Jenny. Don’t run off like this.’

I shook my head. I needed to get out of there. I couldn’t sit across from him one more minute – it was too much. Part of me was desperate to hear what he had to say, but another part of me – the same part that had worked so hard to build this life for myself, to tick off item after item on my list, to form myself into the person I felt I should be – couldn’t stand to listen to another word. It was too dangerous. It felt … incendiary. As if my whole life would go up in a flash as soon as he opened his mouth again. ‘I’ve got to write up these notes when I get home,’ I gabbled, ‘and Christopher will be wondering where I am, and—’

‘Jesus, will you stop wondering about what Christopher wants for one second?’ he spat angrily.

The breath caught in my throat. I’d never heard him speak like that. ‘I do,’ I spluttered. I felt my cheeks grow hot. ‘I mean, I don’t. I don’t think about what he wants all the time.’

He folded his arms across his chest. ‘That’s bullshit.’

I was angry now, too. ‘You know what? You’re right, I do think about what Christopher wants. You know why? Because he’s my fiancé, that’s why. Because we have a life together. Because I love him.’

He shook his head. ‘You don’t have to waste your energy convincing me,’ he said. ‘You need enough of it to keep convincing yourself. How long have you been engaged now? A month? And you’re still not wearing a ring. When are you going to stop pretending that you want to marry him?’

I gripped the edge of the table to stop my hands from shaking. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘That’s the thing,’ he said, reaching for my hand. I batted it away. ‘I do know. I know you’re not happy with him. I know he’s not right for you. That night in Vegas, you told me—’

‘Will you stop talking about what happened that night? Don’t you get it – I don’t remember any of it! It didn’t mean anything to me! I was drunk, and stupid, and—’

‘You told me that you never made him laugh.’

My mouth clamped shut. The truth of it pierced through me. It was true, I never made him laugh. I saw him laugh with his friends – a big, booming laugh, all teeth and belly – but with me, he never did. Maybe it was the whole British sense of humor thing – maybe we didn’t match up. Maybe I just wasn’t funny.

And then, as though he could hear my thoughts, Jackson said, ‘You’re funny, Jenny.’ I looked up at him, and he nodded, just once. ‘You are. And if Christopher can’t see that, he’s a fool and he doesn’t deserve you.’

‘You don’t know him,’ I said quietly.

He smiled sadly. ‘But I know you.’

Silence settled around us. I could hear my heart thudding in my chest, the blood rushing through my ears. I thought of Christopher, the way he looked like a little boy when he came in from a run, bright-eyed and flushed. The solid warmth of his body beside mine when I slept. The years of long-distance phone calls and transatlantic flights. The look on his face when he picked me up from the airport when I finally moved to London, the way he’d held my hand and said to me, ‘This is where our lives begin.’ All the plans I had. The little house with the lilac bushes in the front yard (Number 34). The pink upturned faces of small children, a boy and a girl (Numbers 38 and 39). The vacations to Sardinia and Provence and Santorini (Number 43). The tiny white villa someplace hot where we’d retire (Number 51). It was all there for us, plotted out on a map that I held in my hands. And here was this stranger sitting opposite me, telling me I should scrap the whole thing and start again.

The air inside the pub suddenly felt muggy and cloying, and all I could smell was stale beer and the scent of roasting meat wafting through from the kitchen. My breath started to come in short, staccato bursts. I had to get out. I grabbed my bag and stood up. Jackson reached for my wrist, but I dodged him and ran out the door and onto the street.

The streetlamps had just switched on, casting a yellowish glow onto the pavement. Young couples walked arm in arm, peering in windows of boutiques that were now shut, heads tucked in towards each other as they murmured plans for the weekend. I pushed past them and set out at a run. I had to get away from all of them.

I heard footsteps behind me, and then a hand tug on my arm. ‘Jenny, for God’s sake, stop!’

I shook him off and spun around on my heel. Jackson was bent double, panting from the exertion. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said in between gasps, ‘I didn’t realize you were part cheetah.’

‘I did track as a kid.’ Number 14 on the list: Make the varsity cross-country team. Tick. I took in his broad shoulders and lean torso. ‘I didn’t realize you were so unfit.’

He put a hand to his chest and patted it fondly. ‘I did Marlboro Reds as a kid.’

I put my hands on my hips. ‘What do you want, Jackson?’

‘I want you to tell me why you ran out like that, to start with,’ he said.

I sighed. ‘Because I want to go home. Because I don’t want to talk about that night in Vegas ever again. Because you have no right to sit across from me and judge the way I live my life. And that’s just to start with.’

He shook his head, and, infuriatingly, smiled. ‘You really are a pain in the ass, you know that?’

‘Takes one to know one,’ I said.

‘Ah, there’s that refined wit of yours.’

I rolled my eyes. ‘Shut up, will you? Please, for once in your life, just shut up.’

He took a step closer, and then another. I could smell the faint trace of soap and aftershave lingering on his skin, along with something deeper, almost musky. Heat seemed to radiate from him. I took a step back onto the road, but he reached out and pulled me back onto the pavement.

What happened next seemed to unfold in slow motion. The Friday-night revelers streaming past, on their way to restaurants and pubs and house parties and evenings in with a takeaway and Netflix. The way Jackson raised his hands, tentatively at first, and then quickly, as though he was about to catch a firefly in his cupped palms rather than my face. The feel of his fingers on my cheeks, the softness of them, the surprising lightness of his touch, and then his face coming towards me, his hazel-green eyes open and staring straight into mine, and then the warm pressure of his mouth on mine.

It only lasted a second before I came to my senses. But not before I found myself kissing him back.

I pushed him away. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I hissed.

He took a step back and ran his hands through his hair. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘I just thought—’ He gave me a searching look. ‘You can’t tell me you don’t feel something between us.’

‘I don’t feel anything!’ I shouted. An elderly man who was passing us stopped and asked gently if I was all right. The pity in his eyes made me want to weep. ‘I’m fine,’ I said hurriedly, waving him away. ‘I was just going.’

‘Don’t go,’ Jackson said, putting a hand out to stop me.

‘Don’t touch me,’ I seethed. I saw the hurt look on his face and softened. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just – this is my life,’ I said, gesturing around me. ‘And here you come swooping into it and telling me to blow it all up.’ I shook my head. ‘And I can’t.’

He bowed his head. ‘I don’t want you to blow your life up,’ he said quietly.

‘I have to go.’ I moved to leave, but he blocked my way. ‘I’m going away with Christopher this weekend. I have to pack.’

‘Meet me on Monday morning.’

I looked at him. ‘What?’

‘Meet me on Monday morning halfway across Westminster Bridge. My flight isn’t until the afternoon, I could take you for a coffee, or breakfast if you want, and we could …’

‘What, Jackson? What could we do?’

‘Talk,’ he said gently.

‘I can’t,’ I said curtly. ‘I have work. I have a fiancé.’ I threw my hands in the air, exasperated. ‘I have a life!’

‘I want to have a life with you.’ His gaze remained steady, and I felt myself wilt under its intensity.

I looked away. ‘This isn’t real life, Jackson. You know that, right? You and me, we never should have even met. I shouldn’t have got drunk, I shouldn’t have said whatever it was I said to you, and I sure as hell shouldn’t have married you. Now please, I have to go home. Will you let me go?’

‘Monday morning, nine a.m., Westminster Bridge,’ he repeated. ‘If you don’t come, I’ll go back to America and I’ll give you your divorce.’

‘You will?’

He nodded. ‘I promise. If you don’t show up, I’ll send you the papers and you’ll never have to see me again. But please, just promise me you’ll think about it.’

‘There’s nothing to think about.’

‘Maybe not,’ he said. ‘But think about it anyway.’

I nodded and pushed past him. I could feel his eyes on my back as I headed towards Hackney Road, but I didn’t turn back to see.

‘Something happened.’ I was pressed against the side of a pub a few blocks away from the flat, phone clutched to my ear, breathing ragged and irregular. On the other end of the phone, I could hear Isla’s footsteps as she rushed down the corridor, and the faint bleep of a far-off heart monitor.

‘Okaaaaaay. You’re going to have to be more specific.’

I’d managed to get most of the way home in a dull, shocked haze. I sat on the Northern Line, staring at my yellowed reflection in the train window, and willed myself not to think. A man next to me ate McDonald’s French fries out of a grease-stained bag, and the woman opposite me made an O-shape with her mouth as she applied mascara. I wondered, briefly, why everyone made that face – it genuinely did nothing to aid the mascara application process – before the rising sense of doom chased the thought away. My life was literally disintegrating before my eyes. Who cared why people made that face when applying mascara?

At Camden Town, a hoard of teenagers wearing backpacks covered in badges and too much black eyeliner pushed on, clutching plastic bags filled with cheap T-shirts they’d bought at the market. They jostled and swore and cajoled and flirted with each other, while the rest of us seethed at their youthful exuberance, before finally, mercifully, the train reached Tufnell Park and I was deposited unceremoniously on the platform.

That’s when the breakdown started in earnest.

Thankfully, Londoners are used to people having breakdowns on Tube platforms – and on buses, and in taxis, and on those death-trap rental bicycles, and probably on those gondolas to Greenwich no one uses – so everyone politely averted their eyes as I blubbed indecorously next to a pile of discarded Metros.

I had kissed another man. Technically, he had kissed me – I pictured myself on the witness stand, jabbing an accusatory finger at Jackson’s stupid, handsome face – but technicalities weren’t particularly pertinent when I knew in the blackest depths of my heart that I’d kissed him back. Even for a second. I’d kissed him back and, worse, I’d enjoyed it. Even now, I could still feel the pressure of his lips on mine. A current ran through me.

The judge banged his gavel on the desk. Guilty!

And now, I was huddled against a brick wall down an alleyway, hoping that Isla would have some words of wisdom that would get me out of this.

She had words, but I wasn’t sure how wise they were. ‘Don’t tell Christopher.’ That was the first thing she said. And then, ‘What was it like? He struck me as a tongue-thruster. Was he a tongue-thruster?’ And then, most insanely, ‘Maybe this is a good thing.’

‘A good thing? How can kissing a man who is not my fiancé be a good thing?’ I cried.

‘For starters, the man you kissed is your husband, so technically it’s more kosher for you to be kissing him than for you to be kissing Christopher.’

‘Not helpful.’

‘Second, and I’m going out on a limb here, but I’m guessing maybe you enjoyed it?’

I screwed up my face in disgust even as the current zinged through me again. ‘I did not!’

‘Come on,’ she coaxed. ‘Maybe just a little?’

Jackson’s warm lips on mine, the smell of his skin, the pressure of his hand on the back of my neck … No! I shoved the thought down into the vault, where I kept other forbidden memories, like the time I let one fly during a particularly vigorous dodge ball session in seventh grade.

Isla took my silence for consent. ‘I knew it!’ she crowed.

‘I’m telling you,’ I said, balling my fingers into a fist, ‘I did not enjoy it!’

‘Ah, the lady protests too much,’ Isla laughed delightedly.

There are times when I have to dig deep into the rich history of our shared friendship to prevent myself from absolutely clobbering her. ‘Isla,’ I said in my calmest kindergarten teacher voice, ‘will you please listen to me? This isn’t a joke. I seriously fucked up here, and I don’t know what to do about it.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Her voice dropped an octave as she went into crisis-management mode. That’s why I loved her – just when she was about to drive you around the bend, she put on her hero-doctor hat and sorted out a solution. ‘Okay, let’s assess the situation. What happened after the kiss?’

‘I pushed him.’

‘You pushed him?!’

‘Yes, I pushed him. And then I yelled at him.’

‘A push, then a yell.’

I nodded at the collection of cigarette butts scattered by my feet. ‘That’s right. What else was I supposed to do?’

‘I don’t know … talk about it?’

‘Well, he did come out with this whole crazy speech about how we had a connection and how I shouldn’t marry Christopher.’

I heard Isla take a long drag on her cigarette. ‘Wait. Are you saying there was a declaration?’

‘I wouldn’t call it a declaration …’

‘The man said you shouldn’t marry another man because the two of you had a connection, correct?’

‘Correct,’ I said weakly.

‘And this came directly after him kissing you?’

‘Yes …’

‘I would definitely call that a goddamn declaration.’

‘Well, I don’t care what it was.’

‘So how did it end?’

I filled her in on his Westminster Bridge proposal. (The irony of receiving a proposal involving one of London’s iconic bridges, but from the wrong man, and not of the sort I’d been after in the first place, was not lost on me.)

‘Is this guy being played by Ryan Gosling or what?’ Isla cried. ‘The next thing you’re going to tell me is he carries a pug under his arm and is really into capoeira.’

An image of Jackson petting the dog in the park earlier flashed into my head. ‘I don’t think he’s into martial arts,’ I said uncertainly.

‘So what are you going to do?’ she asked breathlessly (though I wasn’t sure if the breathlessness was due to excitement or the third cigarette I heard her lighting).

‘What do you mean, what am I going to do?’

‘I mean, who are you going to choose? Ryan Gosling or … hmm, who would play Christopher in this? Oh! Who was that guy in Love Actually?’

‘Hugh Grant?’ I suggested.

‘No, not him. The one who ends up with the Portuguese waitress … you know, the boring one.’

‘Hey!’

‘Colin Firth! God, he’s so fucking boring I forgot his name.’

‘Christopher is not boring,’ I insisted.

‘When was the last time you guys had sex in a non-missionary position?’

‘Isla!’

‘I rest my case! Soooooo … who’s it going to be? Ryan “Hey Girl” Gosling, or Colin “Lockjaw” Firth?’

‘I really think you’re being unfair to Colin Firth,’ I said. ‘And to Christopher!’ I added hurriedly. ‘Anyway, this is crazy. Of course it’s Christopher! He’s the person I’m meant to spend the rest of my life with!’

For once, Isla had been reduced, at least momentarily, to silence. ‘Are you sure?’ she asked finally, gently.

‘About what?’

‘About you and Christopher. When I saw you in Las Vegas …’

‘Jesus Christ!’ I shouted. A passing dog walker stopped and peered at me down the alleyway and I conjured up a manic smile and a thumbs-up to keep him moving. ‘I do not want to hear another thing about Las Vegas,’ I hissed. ‘Taking that trip was the biggest mistake of my life. If I hadn’t gone, none of this mess would have happened.’

‘Thanks a lot,’ she said. ‘I could have spent those Air Miles going to Ibiza, you know. That fact that I’ve never been to Pacha is practically criminal.’

‘You know that’s not what I meant. It’s just, ever since that trip, my whole life has been completely turned upside down.’

‘Is that such a bad thing? I mean, it worked for the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.’

‘Of course it is!’ I cried. ‘And can you please be serious for once?’

She sighed. ‘I am being serious. All I’m saying is that maybe you should look at the situation not as a mess that needs to be cleared up, but as an opportunity to broaden your horizons.’

‘Oh,’ I snapped, ‘my horizons have been broadened all right. They’re so broad they couldn’t fit sideways into an airplane hangar. That’s the whole point – I don’t want my horizons broadened. I want them narrowed down to a very finite number of things that are currently printed on a laminated list in my bag.’

‘Oh God,’ Isla groaned. ‘Will you stop with the list already?’

‘No, I won’t stop! The list has got me where I am today.’

‘Crying down the phone to me?’

‘You know what I mean. I’m on a path, Isla,’ I said firmly. ‘Christopher and I have been together for six years. We love each other.’

‘I spent all of 2001 wearing Juicy Couture tracksuits,’ Isla said. ‘Just because you do something for a long time doesn’t make it right.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I fumed.

‘What if Christopher isn’t the man you want to marry?’ She heard my sharp intake of breath and hurried to explain. ‘I’m not saying you didn’t want to marry him at some point. Of course you did! He’s a nice guy, he has a sexy accent, and he has very good hair. I get the appeal.’

‘Exactly,’ I said, triumphant.

‘No, you’re not listening. Maybe that was right for you when you first met him and decided to tick that box on your list, but that doesn’t mean he’s right for you now.’

‘Of course it does.’

‘Are you telling me that you’re exactly the same person now as you were when you were twenty-five?’

I thought about this. ‘I get better haircuts now,’ I admitted.

‘It’s not just your hair!’

‘… and I’m more responsible about dental hygiene.’

‘Yes, I’m sure those things are true, and I’m glad to hear you’re taking your dental hygiene more seriously, because gingivitis can lead to major health problems, but do you think you might have changed on a deeper level?’ I didn’t respond. ‘Because I can tell you’re a different person, even if you can’t. A smarter, more interesting, more nuanced person. Do you know why?’

‘Because I finally learned how to pronounce the word Sauvignon?’

‘No! It’s because literally everyone is a smarter, more interesting, more nuanced person at thirty-one than they were at twenty-five. Do you know why? Because twenty-five-year-olds aren’t adults. They’re people who wear adult clothes and pretend to go to adult jobs, but really they’re just fifteen-year-olds who’ve been given access to credit!’

I thought back to my twenty-five-year-old self. True, I had been consistently surprised when a paycheck arrived in my bank account every two weeks. And sure, despite this, I hadn’t managed to return a single library book without having to fork out a whopping late fine. And of course, there was the time I fell asleep on the subway and ended up in Yonkers. She may have a slight point.

‘Jenny, you have to stop boxing yourself in like this. I know that after the day of the flying ants—’

My stomach dropped. ‘I don’t want to talk about that.’

‘I know you don’t, but I don’t care. I was there. I know what you went through.’

‘It was fine,’ I said quietly.

‘No, it wasn’t. No kid should have to take on what you did.’

There it was. The phrase I’d heard so many times over the course of my life. It didn’t change anything, though. I did what I did because I had to. My mother had needed help, and no one else would give it to her.

Sure, at first there were loads of people offering to help out. My aunt came by every week to check on us before a new job meant she had to relocate to a different state. Friends would stop by with casseroles and looks of concern, and most of the time my mother would conjure up a grateful smile and invite them in for coffee. But then there were too many flares of anger, too many curses shouted and doors slammed in faces, and they eventually stopped coming. There were social services, of course, but they were the people I feared the most. I was scared they’d try to take her away from me, or me away from her. Every time they turned up, I made sure she took her meds in the morning and I’d give her my little pep talk. ‘You have to try to be good, okay?’ I would coax. ‘Just stay calm and it’ll be over before you know it.’ We would invite them in and show them around – look at our well-stocked fridge! Our freshly scrubbed bathroom! – give them a cup of tea and shove them out the door as quickly as possible. And then, after a year of successful visits, they stopped coming, too. And then it was just the two of us.

Most of the time it was fine. She took her medication, she went to therapy, she tried her best. I could see that in her – that constant fight against the tide of her condition. But sometimes she would lose, and I would come downstairs in the middle of the night to find her cleaning out her desk drawers or rearranging the canned goods alphabetically. Other times, she’d tell me she was going out to buy groceries and return three days later with a strange man in tow. And then, every once in a while, her anger would return, and I’d come home to find the kitchen destroyed, and I’d have to slope off to Walmart to buy a new set of dishes.

It never felt like a burden, though. No, it was different to that. It felt like my birthright. Like something I deserved. Deep down inside, in the cavernous recesses of my brain, a voice would tell me that, one day, the same thing would happen to me. It was only a matter of time. The dark thing that lived inside her lived inside me, too, and it was only a matter of time before it showed its face and began its work of systematically destroying me.

That’s why I made the list. To my thirteen-year-old mind, the only way to keep it at bay was to remain completely in control at all times. My mother had been fine until my father left, and the plans she’d made for herself had fallen apart. I wouldn’t let that happen to me. That’s why the list was so important. It was my lifeline.

‘All I’m saying,’ Isla continued, ‘is that you should just think about whether this is really what you want before you go through with it.’

That phrase again— ‘just think about it’. Why did everyone keep imploring me to think? As if I was some kind of mindless automaton wandering through her day making vague bleeping noises. Didn’t they know that I spent every single minute of every single hour thinking and planning and analysing my next move? ‘I don’t need to think about it,’ I spat. I could hear the harsh edge in my voice, but I couldn’t stop myself.

‘But—’

‘I don’t need to take some time out or think about things or do anything that would further screw up my life. I know what I want, and what I want is to spend this weekend with my fiancé, planning our wedding, safe in the knowledge that when I get back, Jackson will be on his way back to America, and I’ll never have to see him again.’

‘What about the divorce?’

‘He promised he’d send the papers regardless of my decision.’

‘And you believe him?’

I paused to consider this. She had a point – there was a chance that Jackson would refuse to file the papers. I could sue him for them, sure, but not without a long, protracted battle, one I might not be able to hide from Christopher. Still, something told me he’d be true to his word. ‘I do,’ I said softly. ‘I know he would do it.’

I heard Isla take a deep breath. ‘You know I’ll support you whatever you decide. If Christopher is the man you want to marry, I promise you I will be the happiest goddamn maid of honor you’ve ever seen. I’ll wear whatever disgusting lime-green monstrosity you want me to, I’ll wear one of those stupid monogrammed terrycloth robes while we’re getting ready – hell, I promise I won’t even sleep with the best man, at least not until the reception is finished. But I want you to be sure that this is what you want.’

‘It is,’ I said firmly. ‘I’m sure of it.’