7
I’M FEELING BETTER as I get ready for the rehearsal dinner. Joel and Bianca can do whatever they like, I’m immune to all emotions. Completely numb. Invincible. Let them have a damn baby. Who cares? Not me.
I wear the black lacy bra my mother gave me, not because I think Patrick is going to see it, but maybe he’ll sense it’s there, maybe I’ll give off the vibe of a woman wearing sexy lingerie.
The pants look great, I think, turning side on in front of the mirror. Well, they look great until I turn side on. They just need a belt. Maybe a higher pair of heels. A different top tucked in. One that shows more boob. Not that I have much boob to show. More jewellery. Do the pants look great? I’m not sure. I’m thirty, I’m a published author, I have successfully kept several houseplants alive, I shouldn’t be losing my mind over a pair of pants.
They look bad. But I have to wear them now. My immunity to emotion is slipping.
The minute I walk into the restaurant I see everyone milling around: Luke’s family, Hayley’s father, Gary, who she hardly sees, Joel standing next to Bianca and rubbing gentle circles on her back, my parents sneaking looks at Joel rubbing circles on Bianca’s back. The invincible feeling is well and truly gone. My stomach drops.
Deep breaths. I can do this. I have an important role tonight, as the keeper of the intricate web of who can and cannot talk to whom (Bobbi isn’t allowed to talk to Gary for more than five minutes of pleasantries; my mother has been banned from saying anything beyond hello to Joel; my dad shouldn’t talk to Luke’s father because of their opposing political views; Jean needs encouragement to smile in photos; Luke’s mother needs to be reminded of the names of at least fifty per cent of the people here) as well as having to shine and charm as a bridesmaid.
I can have exactly two glasses of wine, I decide. And one of them needs to be now.
I walk over to the bar, and as I’m ordering, Mac appears beside me. I can tell he’s there before I even turn to him. He has an energy. He’s shaved, and put on a slightly rumpled shirt, and he looks good. The rumpled shirt works, especially with the sleeves rolled up. He smells fresh, clean and slightly woody.
‘Excited to meet your soulmate?’ he says, leaning his elbows on the bar.
‘Very,’ I say. I look around. I don’t see any alluring redheads with a camera yet.
‘I’m looking forward to watching your love story unfold,’ he says.
I can’t tell if he’s being sarcastic in a nice way or a mean way, or maybe he is genuinely looking forward to watching me meet the love of my life.
‘I’m sure it will be a tale for the ages,’ I say, rolling my eyes. I want him to think I don’t actually believe in the psychic’s vision, even though I kind of do.
The bartender hands me my drink.
‘I’ll have the same,’ Mac says to the bartender.
‘You don’t know what this is,’ I say.
‘I trust your taste,’ he says, with a lazy half-smile that is so appealing I feel like it must be fake. Do they teach how to smile like that in acting school? Or do people become actors because someone sees them smile like that and they say, ‘You’ve got it kid’?
I turn to the room, resting my back against the bar and taking a sip of my wine.
‘Your mum seems nice,’ Mac says.
Again, I don’t know if he’s being sarcastic or serious. Why is this man so hard to read?
‘She can be a lot,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry about the Tom Hanks questions.’
‘She’s funny,’ he says, and then he adds, ‘You can see how much she loves you.’
It’s a slightly odd thing to say and it’s in this moment, as I scrutinise his face, I remember. His mother died. A few years after we finished uni. I remember Luke telling us. I am mortified this information slid out of my memory so easily. I remember talking with Hayley, asking her if Luke was okay after the funeral, because we were young and funerals were strange, foreign things, especially funerals for parents, especially funerals for parents who died unexpectedly. (It was a brain aneurysm; the details are rushing back to me.) It hit Luke hard, this woman he’d known for all of his childhood dying suddenly. I remember wondering if Mac was okay, although I didn’t know him at all, so it was more of an imagined thought, this poor guy, a friend of a friend, losing his mother.
How self-absorbed has the Joel situation made me that I forgot that about Mac entirely? That a pair of pants has taken up more mental space for me than someone’s dead mother. I feel the urge to say something, but I have no idea what. Yes, my mother loves me, I’m so sorry about yours? I don’t know what kind of relationship he had with his mother.
‘She does love me,’ I reply, after letting his words sit there for too long. I scramble to find something else to say, to move the conversation on. Or maybe that’s wrong, and he wants to talk about mothers. Maybe I should bring up the fact I know about his. I hesitate. He looks over my shoulder.
‘There’s Patrick,’ he says.
‘Where?’ I say, swinging around.
I spot him walking through the glass doors. Very tall, quite thin, pale, a head of curly red hair, which I like—there is something immediately endearing to me about red-headed men. He’s wearing a shirt that looks a touch too big on his skinny frame, camera bags in hand. He’s cute. He’s objectively cute. Hayley makes an excited face at me and hurries over to us.
‘Tall,’ Mac notes, still standing beside me.
‘He’s tall,’ Hayley says breathlessly, grabbing my arm.
Bobbi and Mum are on her heels.
‘That’s Patrick,’ Bobbi says, in a stage whisper. ‘See how tall he is!’
‘Almost six-four, he told me,’ Mum adds.
‘I have noted his height,’ I say. You would think I had some kind of height fetish.
We’re now all crowded together, a focal point in the room, drawing attention.
‘Please let this be the last thing anyone says about him tonight. At least until we are out of the restaurant,’ I whisper. ‘And no looking at him. Or me. I can’t attempt to flirt under these conditions, with you all commenting and watching.’
They all nod solemnly, even Mac, who looks amused. I can’t flirt under any conditions, really, as I have discovered in my brief single time. I’m a writer, I should be excelling at the dating apps with my funny banter, but men never seem to understand my tone, or my jokes. Or we’ll text on and off for days and then they’ll suddenly ghost me. Once I thought the conversation was going fairly well, we were getting into territory that was almost interesting, and he wrote, ‘Sorry gotta bounce, this conversation is dry as fuck.’ The breathtaking rudeness, the casual cruelty, the lack of care, the time I wasted imagining a future with someone because they wrote one message that could be interpreted as charming if you were being very, very generous and then the next day they say something so appalling you want to give up on all of humanity.
Online dating chips away at your confidence, slowly, slowly, and then all at once, until you are a shell of who you were. This is my assessment after spending twenty-one days on one app and going on two in-person dates before deleting them all late one night in a fit of despair. I will throw myself into flirting with Patrick for no other reason than this is an opportunity to do it in real life.
Also, imagine the speeches at our wedding, imagine our origin story, if we did get together. I can’t give up the chance to have a story that great. A psychic foretold us! Or maybe it’s not great. Maybe he—and more importantly, whoever is listening to me tell the story—would always be left wondering if I only dated him because of his name. No, it’s a good story. I can change it, make it work. I will say I didn’t know his name was Patrick until after I met him and thought he was cute.
Hayley has gone to greet Patrick, and I move towards where Luke is standing, realising too late that Joel and Bianca are joining him at the same time, and now we are stuck in a circle together. Bianca is sipping a Coke and looking pale.
‘How’s work?’ Joel asks me.
‘Fine,’ I say. ‘Good.’ Work is not fine or good. I work in digital marketing for an insurance company—a reasonably well-paid, stable and incredibly boring job that involves every piece of copy I write being cleared by a team of lawyers before it sees the light of day—and I detest my new boss, Marco. Joel used to enjoy hearing the minutiae of my work woes, but the days of us sharing those details are clearly over.
‘And the book release? I saw you in the paper,’ Joel says. To an unknowing bystander, this would sound like it might be a nice gesture, to mention my media coverage, but the piece in the paper that Joel is referring to was in fact more humiliating than anything else. It was an interview, and I am aware how rare it is to get an interview in the mainstream media, where book coverage is limited and fleeting, so I can’t complain, especially as a debut author. All publicity is good publicity, as my sweet publicist Claire has said multiple times. But the paper sent a photographer as well as the journalist for the interview, and the photographer encouraged me into a series of increasingly ‘zany’ shots, with an array of props, that I went along with because I’d had three coffees and a night of insomnia beforehand. The end result is a close-up of me holding a kitchen knife near my face and smiling in a maniacal way (never mind that there are no knives or stabbings whatsoever in my book), with the headline ‘This writer’s secret to success? Murder!’.
Bobbi had it laminated and she stuck it on the window of her bookshop next to a display of several copies of my book. Mum carried it everywhere with her for a month. I wouldn’t be surprised if she pulled it out tonight. Maybe she already showed Patrick. I can only imagine what Joel thought when he saw that picture.
‘The book is going great,’ I say, smiling in a way that I hope gives off the vibe that I am a bestselling author who doesn’t trifle herself to read her own media coverage or reviews. Oh, there was an article in the paper? Again? Pffft. Goodreads? Never heard of it. Definitely don’t have it bookmarked on my browser. When Joel leans over to say something to Bianca, I drop my smile and turn to make my escape.
And I bump straight into Patrick.
‘The famous Anna,’ he says, reaching out a hand to steady me.
‘Oh no, you’ve met my mother,’ I say and he laughs.
‘Taking some good shots?’ I ask.
‘I haven’t started yet,’ he says. ‘Just getting a feel for the room.’
‘Oh, what does that entail?’ I smile and toss my hair a little. If I can’t get this pleasant, age-appropriate Patrick who has been served up to me by the universe on a silver platter to like me, then I have no hope for my future.
‘Just checking the lighting, mostly, but also getting a sense of the energy and personality of everyone.’
‘What have you sensed so far?’
‘A very nice group of people,’ he says, smiling.
Is he flirting? I don’t think he’s flirting. I don’t think I’m doing a great job at flirting either. I can see Joel just a couple of metres away, and it’s very off-putting. I can’t flirt when Joel is in my eyeline. I turn and angle myself in a different direction, and now I can see Mac. He glances over at me and lifts an eyebrow slightly. I look away quickly.
I chat with Patrick—he’s been photographing events for five years, he co-owns the business with Drew, he moved here from Brisbane. I’m determinedly collecting facts as if the mums will be quizzing me later—and then he excuses himself to get the cameras ready, and Bobbi walks over to me. She’s wearing chunky black-rimmed glasses, big gold earrings and her signature red lipstick. Her dark curly hair is springing in every direction. I wish I could channel her glamorous energy.
‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you about Patrick,’ she says.
‘Thank you,’ I say.
‘I’m here to ask about the next book,’ she says, and now I wish she wanted to talk about Patrick. ‘How’s it going?’
Bobbi and I have always bonded over books. Hayley was a big reader when she was young, but she stopped as a teenager and never really went back, which broke Bobbi’s heart. My mum is a reader, but in a casual way. Bobbi guided my reading from a young age, and she knew exactly when to give me certain books. Now is the time for Melina Marchetta, then you’re ready for an Austen, and now for du Maurier, now for Octavia Butler. She put The Artist’s Way into my hands when I was twenty-two, starting my first full-time job and panicking that my life was not going to have any room for creativity. When I was struggling with my writing in my mid-twenties, she gave me Big Magic and Bird by Bird . After the Joel breakup, she said poetry was the only thing I should read for the first few weeks, and then I needed to move from that to dark crime and then memoir, and she was right.
Bobbi’s bookshop is my happy place. It has been ever since she bought it when Hayley and I were teenagers. I have done my homework sitting in her tiny stockroom, read whole books curled up on the velvet chair she has in the corner for customers, met my favourite author who came to sign copies, discovered whole new worlds browsing her shelves. Mum might be my ultimate cheerleader and obsessive seller of my books, but Bobbi is the one who is most invested in my writing career in the artistic sense.
‘It’s coming along really well,’ I say to her.
It is not coming along well at all, but I am keeping that mostly to myself. Everyone says to try to write your second book before the first one comes out, so you can write free of pressure and expectations. I had planned to follow this advice and have a finished first draft by now. And I also thought, with a touch of writerly delusion, it might even be a good first draft, that I might figure things out more quickly with my second book.
This has not happened.
I do not have a first draft. Or a draft zero. I have an ‘ideas’ document, that contains random sentences and bits of dialogue and half-written scenes and notes to myself like ‘Research bank fraud!!’ and ‘Is there magic in this book??’ and ‘Look up how long cats are pregnant for’, waiting for my mind to piece it all together like a puzzle. Waiting for the lightbulb moment when I will finally think, ohhhh this is what it’s been about all along, how obvious . What a hook, what a twist, what a high-concept and yet nuanced idea, how wonderful that it can be perfectly pitched in one simple sentence and will practically write itself from here on in.
I have spent a lot of time googling ‘second book syndrome’ and nodding along when I read essays and think pieces and listen to authors on podcasts talking about how hard it was to write their second book. And then I have spent a lot of time imagining myself saying this while doing press for my bestselling, award-winning second book, and people being amazed I found it difficult because the book is so seamless. I am visualising myself at the end. I am manifesting . That’s an important step, according to lots of podcasts.
‘What’s it about?’ Bobbi asks. She hasn’t asked me this before. Normally, she’s very aware of not putting that pressure on authors. She must sense I am lying.
‘I’m not really in a place where I can say exactly yet. There’s a lot of directions it could still go in.’ This, at least, is true. I have a whole Word document of different directions.
‘Mmmm. Okay. Have you read Lily King’s Writers and Lovers ?’
‘Yes. Last year. I loved it.’
‘Read it again. And Helen Garner’s diaries. Oh and George Saunder’s A Swim in the Pond in the Rain .’ She’s worried. This is how Bobbi fusses over me. She starts rapid-fire book recommendations.
Hayley dings her glass at that moment and tells everyone to take a seat at the table, and we move to sit down, the parents naturally congregating at one end and the rest of us at the other. I sit down quickly, so that Joel and Bianca are left with the decision of how far away from or close to me to sit. Bianca still looks very pale, and she’s taking tiny sips of that glass of Coke. I’m not sure I’ve heard her say a single word yet.
Mac sits down next to me. Joel, who was hesitating, looks relieved and takes a seat on the side of Mac. Hayley and Luke sit across from us, with Luke’s sisters and their husbands near them, and further down, my parents placed strategically between Bobbi and Hayley’s father, Gary, and his wife. I can see Hayley scanning the table, making sure everyone that needs to be separated is separated.
Patrick was taking photos as everyone milled around having drinks, and now we’re seated, he is getting pictures of people sitting together.
‘How are things going with Patrick?’ Mac asks, as we start our entrees.
‘I wouldn’t say they are going at all. Yet.’
‘I saw the two of you talking.’
‘For about five seconds.’
‘No spark?’
‘Too early to say.’
I am watching Patrick move around the room as we talk. He accidentally bumps Gary, who slightly spills his water, and then turns around and huffs about it.
‘I think he’s interested,’ Mac says.
‘How could you possibly know?’
‘I’m pretty good at reading body language,’ Mac says.
‘What did his body language say?’
‘It said, he thought you were cute.’
‘Cute.’ I make a face.
‘Cute is good.’
‘Cute is fine. But he’s supposed to be the love of my life. He needs to think I’m more than cute.’
‘Beautiful. I meant to say, he thought you were unbelievably, breathtakingly beautiful.’
‘No, I know what the body language of a guy who thinks I’m unbelievably, breathtakingly beautiful is.’
‘Oh yeah?’ Mac says, tipping his head a little towards me and smiling. ‘What is it?’
‘See the way you’re leaning in to me right now? Like that.’
Mac laughs.
This is flirting, I realise. Flirting with Mac is easy. Because there are no stakes. He’s like a flirting blank canvas. A scene partner. You lob a ball to him, he’ll hit it back, but it’s just a warm up, not a real game.
‘Are you giving a speech tomorrow?’ he asks me.
‘Yes, are you?’
‘No, Joel is doing the honours.’
‘How do you feel about that?’
‘Fine.’
‘Surely the professional actor should be the one giving the speech.’
‘Well Joel is the best man. And apparently he gives a lot of presentations in his work.’
‘Let’s put it this way, he’s not as good a public speaker as he thinks he is.’
‘Is this an objective assessment or an ex’s assessment?’
‘Both. He gets nervous. He’ll have no idea what to do with his hands if he can’t grip a PowerPoint clicker.’
‘Hands are tricky. You have to not think about them. If the thought “What do I do with my hands?” enters your mind in front of a crowd, it’s all over, you’re ruined.’
‘Now I am going to be thinking about my hands nonstop.’
‘You’ll do great.’
‘No, I’ll get nervous and all those nerves are going to come out through my hands.’
I imagine myself standing there, holding a glass of champagne for a toast but then gesturing violently and wildly and spilling it everywhere.
‘Nerves are extra energy, and you need that energy to give a good performance. Not being nervous is actually a bad sign.’
‘Is that true?’
He grins. ‘Actors say bullshit like that all the time. We have no idea what we’re talking about. That goes double for me. But yes, it’s true.’
I laugh.
Later, as we’re eating our mains, Joel turns to me, leaning over Mac a little.
‘How’s the next book coming along?’ He is carefully twirling spaghetti on his fork. He was always an expert at twirling spaghetti on his fork. He is the kind of man who can eat spaghetti bolognese and not get a drop of sauce anywhere. He’s such a careful eater, he doesn’t even need a napkin to pat his mouth at the end. I used to find that appealing.
‘It’s coming along,’ I say carefully.
‘What’s it about?’
‘It’s not in a place where I can answer that question yet,’ I say.
‘But very broadly, what’s it about?’ Joel pushes.
‘I’d rather not say,’ I say.
‘Should I be worried?’ Joel says, smiling at me and then smiling at Mac, so that everyone knows he’s being lighthearted, but I know he’s not. It’s a very loaded question.
‘Maybe,’ I say, because he’s pissing me off now.
‘It can’t be worse than the first one, surely.’
‘Excuse me, worse ?’ I put down my knife and fork, and turn to him more fully. Mac leans back a little.
‘I mean, worse for me.’
‘There’s nothing about you in my first book.’
We are still speaking in neutral, pleasant tones, but the energy is souring. Mac turns from one of us to the other, like we’re an entertaining play. I don’t think Bianca is listening, she seems to be concentrating on avoiding looking at any food and sipping on her Coke and alternately closing her eyes or looking at her phone.
‘Come on, Anna.’ Joel gives me a look.
‘Come on, what?’
‘Your book was about two couples on a hike.’
‘So?’
‘So you write a novel about two couples on a hike, after you and I went on a hike with another couple—is that just a coincidence?’
‘You told me it was a great setting when I told you about it.’
‘The idea you originally pitched was a woman getting lost in the wilderness and finding a dead body.’
‘Well, I realised I like dialogue and I needed someone for her to talk to.’
‘And she has a lot of familiar conversations. Is all I’m saying.’
‘You realise how insulting it is, what you’re saying? That I have no imagination, that I’m incapable of creating characters?’
‘I’m not saying that.’
‘It sounds like you are.’
Mac slides his chair back a little as Joel leans further over him. Joel will never drop an argument, especially if he thinks I’m not grasping the point he’s making.
‘I think you are perfectly capable of creating characters, in fact I know it, which is why I was confused that you didn’t.’
‘Which character are you referring to, specifically?’
‘The character of Julian.’
‘I know it’s hard for your ego to hear this, but you’re not in my book.’
Joel is a neuroscientist who works for the University of Melbourne; the character of Julian works in construction. Joel has Chinese and Greek heritage, resulting in the most luscious dark hair you could imagine; Julian has blond hair with a receding hairline. They have no characteristics in common.
‘Okay, my ego. Sure. But this Julian and the main character, I’ve forgotten her name—’
‘Rose.’
‘Julian and Rose have an argument that we once had.’
This is true. Sort of. Joel and I were dredging up a few of our longstanding arguments at the time I was writing the book, and some of those themes might have found their way in there.
I’ll never get over the raw vulnerability of having published a book. It’s like giving people a tiny little window into your soul, except they look in and see things that aren’t really there. And with Hayley and Luke and Joel it’s a little bit worse, because there are things, bits and pieces like that, they might find. Just because I’m a magpie who grabbed a few shiny memories doesn’t mean it’s about them in any real sense, but it’s hard to explain that.
‘No, they don’t, but even if they did, so what?’
‘That part wasn’t in the draft I read—’
‘You read a bit of the first draft, no not even the first, you read some of draft zero, and there were nine drafts—’
‘Look. I’m not saying it was bad. I’m just saying, I was a bit shocked. And offended.’
‘Why?’
‘You obviously wanted the reader to side with Rose.’
‘Oh, so it’s the fact you think your side of the argument wasn’t represented accurately.’
‘No. Well. Partially, yeah.’
‘They are having this argument while dragging a dead body into a cave.’
‘The details don’t matter.’
‘I think they do. And I’m the author.’
‘Well, I’m excited to read this book now,’ Mac says, clearly trying to lighten the mood.
Joel and I both ignore him.
‘A reader can’t form their own interpretation?’ Joel says.
‘Did you read the whole book or just skim it for bits to use to make accusations?’
‘No one is making accusations.’
Mac pushes his chair back a bit further, and puts his knife and fork together on his plate. I see over Joel’s shoulder that Bianca has left the table altogether.
‘I’m finished now, if you want to switch seats,’ Mac says to Joel. ‘Go through it all page by page. Line by line.’ There’s an edge to Mac’s voice that Joel notices, frowning slightly at him.
‘No need, we’re done talking about this,’ I say.
Joel hates someone else having the final say.
‘Are we done?’ he says. ‘Because if you get a whole book to work through our stuff, surely I can have a conversation.’
Now I’m really mad. But I won’t have this fight at the table. I won’t make a scene at Hayley’s rehearsal dinner.
‘Fine, let’s have a conversation.’ I stand up. ‘Excuse us Mac, we’ll be back in a moment.’
Mac looks like he wants to say something, but he doesn’t.
I am walking out of the room with Joel on my heels, when Patrick stops us.
‘Can I get a picture of the best man and the maid of honour?’ he says cheerfully.
I have never liked the term maid of honour, so Patrick loses a point for even saying it, and he loses another one for not picking up on the flames of rage currently roaring between Joel and me.
‘Sure,’ Joel says tightly.
We stand with about half a metre of space between us, Joel with his hands in his pockets, and me folding my arms across my chest.
Patrick looks at us like we are joking. ‘A little bit closer?’ he suggests.
We shuffle until we’re shoulder to shoulder. We stand like two people facing a firing line.
‘A little bit more, um, relaxed?’ Patrick says. ‘Maybe we could even try for happy?’
I lower my shoulders and give my best attempt at a smile. I can feel both my hands still curled into fists.
Patrick takes a bunch of pictures, looks at them, looks at us, and nods. ‘Those are. Well. That’s great. I’ll let you go,’ he says, and I know the pictures are terrible and will never see the light of day. Good.
In the hallway leading to the bathrooms, I turn to Joel.
‘Go for it,’ I say. ‘Get it all off your chest, everything you have to say about my book.’
‘There was some stuff about us in there,’ he says. ‘And you know it.’
‘I wrote it when we were still together.’
‘That makes it a lot worse.’
‘I can’t believe you’re saying this to me, considering.’
‘Considering what?’
‘Considering the fact that you told me you didn’t want kids, and now—’ I break off mid-sentence. ‘You owe me,’ I finish.
‘Owe you what?’ he says, quietly now.
I feel wobbly, unhinged. I have drunk one glass of wine, so it can’t be that. He owes me so much. An apology. Compensation for wasted time. He owes me his firstborn child! I bite down on my tongue. These thoughts can’t be verbalised.
‘An explanation,’ I say, finally.
‘What do you want me to say?’ he says, looking at me a little bit helplessly.
‘Why did you tell me you didn’t want kids?’ I ask.
I can see it, the path I am going down, big flashing neon sign that says don’t enter, don’t come this way, but I am going anyway.
‘The baby wasn’t planned,’ he says.
‘But you want it.’ I am trying to sound flat and emotionless, but my voice cracks.
‘Yes.’
‘You’re happy, you’re excited, you’re ready to be a father?’ I sound like I’m about to cry, but I’m not. I can still hold it all in.
‘Yes,’ Joel said. And I can hear it. He is.
‘So what changed?’
‘I don’t know,’ Joel says, and he looks at me almost with tenderness.
‘Something must have changed,’ I say.
‘Honestly?’ Joel looks at me.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Tell me, honestly.’
‘I didn’t want that life when we were together. I couldn’t imagine it with us, I don’t think parenthood would have worked with us,’ he said finally.
‘You didn’t want it with me .’
‘I said, with us . Our relationship.’
‘But you mean me. You just didn’t want to have a baby with me.’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Yes you did.’
‘Fine. Yes then. I didn’t want it with you. Is that what you want me to say?’
‘Yes.’ And it is. It’s satisfying in a sick way. I wanted the dagger in my heart and I could almost get it there myself but I needed him to push it all the way in and twist it, and he has. Now I can really feel sorry for myself, now I have made it more painful than it needed to be. I am not someone worthy of having a child with, I am not worthy of building a future with. I’m not worthy of any of it. That’s what I needed to hear.
‘Look. I’m sorry. I didn’t plan this,’ he says. ‘All being together at the wedding like this.’
‘I know.’
‘Anna—’
‘I’m going to the bathroom,’ I say.
‘Are you okay?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are we okay?’
He thinks it’s a fair trade. That I wrote a few paragraphs in a book that he feels weird about, and he’s having a baby with someone else.
‘We’re great,’ I say, pushing into the bathroom before he can read the lie on my face.