Chapter 8 #2
While he waited for the coffee to steep, Ed leaned back against the worktop and looked at her. ‘Thing is, I’m not the only one guilty of violating the code, am I?’ His expression was gentle, despite the air quotes he made with his pointer fingers.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Hannah said, irritated, head still banging.
Ed folded his arms across his ridiculously broad chest and shook his head. ‘When were you going to tell me about Friday? About seeing Jude in Sheffield?’
‘I . . . Well . . .’ Hannah scrambled for a response that sounded less incriminating than ‘never, probably’. After a beat, she blurted: ‘How do you even know about that?’
‘Joe told me, of course. And Jude told him. For what it’s worth, it sounds like he’s in hell over the way he handled seeing you.’
‘What. Ever,’ Hannah spat, suddenly sounding fifteen years younger than she was. ‘He was a dick – too clever and important to acknowledge little old me, the hired help for the day.’
‘Is that honestly what you think?’ Ed said, frowning.
Hannah ground her teeth, but said nothing, so Ed went on: ‘Acting like he didn’t know you was shoddy, but you of all people know he was always prone to foot-in-mouth disease.
I don’t think you can take one screw-up as a sign he’s developed some sort of superiority complex – more like proof he’s still better at dealing with numbers than people.
Even Mum said he looked guilt-stricken at lunch yesterday.
Like a death row convict awaiting his lethal injection, was the phrase. ’
Hannah felt stung and annoyed by this assessment, which – if she removed her own hurt feelings from the equation – was both fair and reasonable.
She hated the fact that she knew Jude well enough to concede he might have panicked, then stumbled into the sort of social faux pas that, in a different life, she might have helped him out of.
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Maybe he hasn’t turned into Lord La-Di-Dah of Sydney.’
‘Glad we agree,’ Ed said, ‘because it means we can return to the point: you keeping a lid on how you felt. And I don’t just mean last week.
I mean since Joe and I started seeing each other.
I mean since Christmas Eve karaoke. It was only when I saw your face yesterday that I realised how cut up you still are. ’
Hannah felt the reflexive urge to deny she was in any way ‘cut up’, only to discover she lacked the necessary energy.
Instead, she hung her head. This was what she’d been afraid of – what she’d been desperately trying to avoid.
Ed sounded gutted. It had finally hit him that pursuing his own happy future necessarily involved Hannah facing the most painful episode in her past.
‘It’s not for you to worry about,’ she said firmly.
‘Of course it is – we’re twins. I love you. I should have pushed you harder to talk about it, and long before now. D’you realise I still don’t even know what happened at the airport? Why you and Jude broke up? It’s like the fucking fishing trip.’
‘Fishing trip?’ Hannah was lost.
‘In Gavin and Stacey,’ Ed explained. ‘The running gag: everyone knows something bad went down on the fishing trip, but hardly anyone knows what.’
Hannah just looked at him. She could see his point, but she wasn’t about to offer chapter and verse on what had happened right now.
‘I’ll admit it bothered me a bit when Joe and I first reconnected,’ Ed continued.
‘I didn’t like that you’d been so hurt, or that I didn’t fully understand why.
But you were seeing someone. You’ve had a fair few boyfriends since Jude left, even if none have lasted.
As the kids at school might say, I had no idea it was still this deep. ’
‘I’m not sure I fully knew it myself until recently,’ Hannah admitted.
Belatedly, Ed depressed the cafetière’s plunger, then gingerly poured the coffee. He put a lump of brown sugar into Hannah’s favourite mug, stirred it and passed it to her.
‘Thanks,’ she said, massaging her left temple with her free hand. ‘I need this.’
‘You need at least two of these, and a bacon sandwich,’ her brother countered.
‘Actually, I bet there’s some in the—’
Before she could complete the sentence, Ed had opened the fridge and extracted a packet of bacon. He pulled a frying pan from the cupboard next to the oven and, once their breakfast was sizzling in it, turned and fixed her with a serious gaze.
Above the sound of bacon fat crackling and popping, he said: ‘You should know, I read Joe the riot act last night. Worst argument we’ve ever had – and probably the only one he’d admit he’s lost in about twenty years.’
‘What?’ Hannah said, alarmed.
‘He crumbled under questioning about you “agreeing” to plan the wedding. Turns out he feels surprisingly bad about securing your services under false pretences.’
‘Oh. I . . .’
‘Let me guess. You weren’t planning to tell me that part.’
Hannah briefly scrunched her eyes shut, wincing hard. ‘No . . .? It seemed like a done deal. I was just going to get on with it.’
‘Of course you were.’ Ed said this like it was a bad thing.
After letting the bacon sizzle for another few minutes, he pulled the tail-end of a granary loaf from Hannah’s bread bin and started their sandwich assembly.
He’d cooked the bacon exactly how she liked it: not burned, but crispy enough that each rasher could be snapped in two.
He pushed her breakfast towards her and poured her a second coffee.
‘Do you want out?’ he asked, adding a drizzle of HP sauce to his sandwich. ‘I wouldn’t blame you if you did – and Joe wouldn’t dare complain either, after having his arse handed to him yesterday.’
Hannah thought for a moment. She knew Ed was putting on a brave face – that it would devastate him if she backed out.
And, however she sliced this, she was going to be in the wedding party, as was Jude.
From a bloody-minded, business point of view, she wasn’t sure she trusted any of her competitors to do this job as well as she could, either.
She might as well organise the thing and make the most of whatever cachet it brought her, as well as the profits she earned.