Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
Lisa won’t look at me.
She’s staring at her coffee, both hands wrapped around the mug, and there’s a flush creeping up her neck that I remember from school – the same blotchy pink she used to get before oral presentations, before parents’ evenings, before anything that required her to say something she couldn’t take back.
I watch it spread and I think: This is going to be about Ross.
And then I think: Of course it is. What else would it be?
The café noise fills the silence between us. Someone’s toddler is banging a spoon on a high-chair tray. The coffee machine shrieks and hisses. A woman two tables over laughs at something on her phone, a big, open laugh that feels obscene in the middle of whatever is happening here.
‘So,’ I say, because somebody has to.
Lisa takes a breath. ‘Right. Okay.’ She lifts her eyes to mine and then drops them again.
I can see her running through whatever she’s prepared, checking the order, making sure it comes out the way she practised it in the car or the shower or wherever people rehearse the conversations they’ve been putting off for years.
‘This is about Ross,’ she says.
I nod. My pulse is doing something unpleasant in my throat, but I keep my face still, my hands flat on the table, and I wait.
‘When we were at school,’ she says. ‘When you and Ross were together. There were a couple of times when—’ She stops. Swallows. Tries again. ‘There were a couple of moments. Between me and him. Behind your back.’
The words fill my chest, and for a second I can’t breathe properly. I’m sixteen again, Ross is everything, Lisa is my friend, and the world is small and intense and absolutely certain.
Then the second passes, and I’m thirty-seven, sitting in a café on the high street with a flat white going cold in front of me. My daughter is in the car outside, my husband is at work, and the girl I was at sixteen has nothing to do with the woman I am now.
Or she shouldn’t anyway.
‘What kind of moments?’ I ask, and thankfully it comes out calm, not angry or tearful.
Lisa winces. ‘Nothing – I mean, we didn’t sleep together.
It wasn’t like that. But there was a party, at Gavin Holt’s house, do you remember?
You’d gone home early because you felt ill, and Ross stayed, and we ended up talking in the garden and he kissed me.
I kissed him back.’ She says this last part quickly, like ripping off a plaster.
‘And then there was another time, after school, behind the sports hall. He found me on my own, and it just – happened. Twice. That’s it.
Twice, and then I told him it couldn’t happen again, and he said fine, and that was the end of it. ’
‘You knew?’ I say. ‘About me and Ross? We never told anyone.’
Lisa gives me a look that’s almost pitying.
‘Melanie worked it out. Ages before – the way he watched you, the way you both left rooms two minutes apart. She told me, and we never said anything because you so obviously didn’t want us to.
’ She turns her mug in a slow circle. ‘But that’s the point, isn’t it?
I knew he was yours. And I still did it. ’
I sit there and take it in. I watch Lisa’s face crumple with the guilt she’s been carrying around like a bag of bricks, and I wait to feel what I’m supposed to feel, which is betrayed, furious, devastated. The holy trinity of finding out your first love cheated on you with your friend.
But it doesn’t come. Not the way it would have five or ten years ago, or even six months ago.
It hurts, yes – there’s a dull ache inside me that I recognise as something old and bruised being pressed on – but it’s not the sharp, blinding pain I would have expected.
It’s more like pressing on a scar you forgot you had. Tender but healed. Mostly.
‘Kim, say something,’ Lisa says. ‘Please. I’ve been wanting to tell you for years, and I just never knew how. I know it was wrong, and I’m sorry. We were kids. I’m not making excuses, but we were kids, and he was—’
‘Persuasive,’ I say.
She blinks. ‘Yeah. He was.’
‘I know.’
Lisa stares at me. She’s braced for tears, or shouting, or the cold fury that women save for betrayals that are decades old and perfectly preserved. I can see it in the way she’s gripping her mug, white-knuckled, ready for the blast.
‘Why are you telling me this now?’ I ask, although I think I already know the answer.
Lisa stirs her spoon around her cup, her gaze on the table. ‘Someone from back in the day got in touch, and I guess it brought up memories I’d forgotten, or buried, maybe.’
I don’t need to ask who contacted her.
‘I forgive you,’ I say.
The words surprise me as much as they surprise her.
But they’re true. I can feel it – the forgiveness isn’t something I’m performing or choosing to give because I want to seem generous.
It’s just there, like it’s been waiting for this moment to announce itself.
Lisa and Ross behind the sports hall, Lisa and Ross in Gavin Holt’s garden – they feel like scenes from someone else’s life.
A play I once watched and cried over but can’t summon the same emotion for now.
‘You don’t have to say that,’ Lisa says. Her eyes are shining. ‘I mean, you can be angry. You’re allowed to be angry.’
‘I’m not angry. I mean it. We were sixteen. You said it yourself – we were kids.’
‘But you loved him.’
‘I did.’
‘And I knew that, and I still—’
‘Lisa.’ I reach across the table and put my hand on her wrist. She goes still, and I feel the tremor in her arm.
I squeeze gently and let go. ‘It was years ago. I’ve got a husband.
I’ve got Olivia. I’m not going to fall apart because you kissed a boy behind the sports hall when Blur were still in the charts. ’
She laughs. It’s wet and trembling, more relief than humour, and she wipes her eyes with the heel of her hand and shakes her head.
‘God, I thought you were going to throw your coffee in my face.’
‘That would be a waste of a flat white.’
She laughs again, the shake gone, and we’re just two women in a café sharing something that used to be enormous and has somehow, over the years, shrunk to a size that fits in the palm of one hand.
But underneath the forgiveness, underneath the calm I’m showing Lisa, something else is happening.
Something quieter. Because hearing her say it – hearing her describe Ross seeking her out, finding her alone, making it happen, and then shrugging when she told him to stop – I’m watching a picture I’ve carried for years develop a crack.
The Ross I kept in my head all this time.
The Ross who was mine, who shared with me something untouchable and pure that nobody else could understand.
That Ross didn’t exist. He kissed my friend at a party I’d left early because I was ill.
He found her behind the sports hall and tried his luck because she was there and I wasn’t and he could.
That’s not a great love story. That’s just a teenage boy doing what some teenage boys do when they think nobody’s watching.
And the worst part – the part that stings my eyes – is that I built my whole adult emotional life on the memory of him.
Every time Alex fell short, every time the marriage felt boring or stale or difficult, I measured it against Ross.
Against the intensity. Against the way he made me feel at sixteen, when I had no mortgage, no child, no job, no responsibilities, and loving someone was the only thing I had to do.
I held my husband up to a ghost and found him wanting, and the ghost was never even real.
I’ve been so stupid.
So unbelievably, breathtakingly stupid.
‘Kim?’ Lisa says. ‘You’ve gone quiet.’
‘Sorry. Just thinking.’
She watches me, and her face changes. The relief fades, and something else takes its place – concern, or maybe caution.
‘Can I say something else?’
I nod.
‘I don’t know if this is my place, and you can tell me to shut up, but—’ She pauses.
Lowers her voice, even though nobody in this café is paying the slightest bit of attention to us.
‘Ross wasn’t who you thought he was. I know that’s easy for me to say now, and I know you loved him, but the way he was with me – it wasn’t charming.
It was calculating. He knew exactly what he was doing.
He knew I wouldn’t tell you. He knew I’d feel too guilty to say anything, and he used that. ’
My skin prickles. The toddler has stopped banging. The coffee machine has gone quiet. It feels as though the room has drawn back half a step to give Lisa’s words space.
‘When I think about it now,’ she says, ‘with adult eyes, I can see it for what it was. He played people. He worked out what they needed to hear, made you feel like you were the only person in the world, and then he did exactly whatever he wanted when your back was turned. That’s not love, Kim. That’s control.’
I don’t say anything. I can’t, because my throat has closed, and everything Lisa is describing – the charm, the calculation, the way he made you feel like you were the centre of everything and then did precisely as he pleased – sounds so familiar that I want to be sick.
Because she’s not just talking about the past. She’s talking about now. She doesn’t know it, but she’s describing the exact pattern of the last few weeks – the messages, the warmth, the nostalgia, the slow, careful reeling in, and then the text that turned everything cold.
I don’t tell her about the texts, or the friend request, or the shopping centre meeting, or the threat. I don’t tell her that Ross has been circling me like something patient and hungry. I say none of it.
‘If I could go back,’ Lisa says quietly, ‘I would stay well away from him. Not because of what happened between us. Because of who he is.’
She holds my gaze, no trace of the nervous flutter she walked in with. And I can see that this isn’t a woman covering her own tracks or easing her conscience. This is a warning. A proper, thought-through, kept-it-in-for-twenty-years warning.
‘Thank you for telling me,’ I say. My voice comes out too even. The voice I use at Olivia’s school when I’m furious about something and don’t want to show it. ‘I mean that. Thank you.’
Lisa nods. She looks like she wants to say more, but she doesn’t push it.
She finishes her coffee, and we make brief small talk about her job, her kids, a holiday she’s booked for August, and the state of the high street.
It’s thin, polite, and full of holes, but it gets us from the table to the door without either of us having to say anything else that matters.
She hugs me outside on the pavement.
‘Look after yourself, Kim,’ she says.
‘I will.’
She walks away towards the car park. I watch her go, then I turn and go the other way, towards my car where Olivia is sitting in the passenger seat with her feet on the dashboard and her phone held up to her face.
I get in, put my seat belt on, and start the engine.
‘Who was that?’ Olivia asks, not looking up.
‘Just an old friend from school.’
‘What did she want?’
‘Nothing much. Just a catch-up.’
Olivia nods, satisfied, and goes back to her phone. I pull out of the parking space and drive us home with both hands on the wheel and a smile on my face, and the sick, cold knowledge that the version of Ross I loved never existed at all.
Which means I don’t know the man who’s been texting me.
And that’s so much worse.