Chapter 1
CARLY
PRESENT DAY
‘Carly?’
I look up from where I’m reading in the garden of the crescent. In the brightness of the Edinburgh sunshine, it takes a moment to see who’s there, and when I do, my heart sinks.
‘Paul!’ I say brightly, getting up, my mind in overdrive: When did I last see you? Why now when I haven’t showered or done my hair? Who is the beautiful woman and kid in the buggy beside you?
‘How are you?’ he asks, coming in for what I think is a hug, but which turns out to be an air kiss, leaving me to style out an awkward embrace. The scent of his familiar Hugo Boss fragrance takes me straight back to three years ago.
‘Good, you know,’ I nod over-eagerly, realising that very little has changed since he left. ‘Living my best life!’
Internally I cringe. The woman in the pretty dress beside him actually does cringe though she’s quick to hide it.
‘Carly, this is Liv,’ says Paul, filling the embarrassing pause.
Liv reaches out an elegant, soft hand.
‘Nice to see you again,’ she smiles, her flawless teeth almost as perfect as her butter-blond hair.
I fixate on the word ‘again’.
Paul shifts where he stands, his brown brogues as polished as his wife’s teeth. Even on a Saturday he looks as if he’s about to head into the law firm.
And then it hits me where we’ve seen each other before.
That night, three years ago, when I’d been late to arrive to one of Paul’s Saturday post-rugby drinking sessions.
I’d entered the busy bar unable to find him, and I remember, as if in slow motion, one of his mates pointing to where he was.
Before I’d taken another step, I saw him, and Liv, making out in the corner.
I stood there for a moment, just staring, until Paul looked up. Then I ran.
What I remember most about that night is that he didn’t run after me, call or message.
Just radio silence. After two years together, not even a half-hearted ‘Come back’.
And even though I know he did us both a favour (rugby-playing lawyers weren’t my usual type then and definitely aren’t now – a classic example of opposites attract), there’s still the scar of rejection.
‘And who is this?’ I coo at the baby in the buggy, not wanting them to know that my mind is racing through the past.
‘This is Blair, he’s nine months old,’ says Paul, tickling the kid under his chin, who smiles, displaying four brilliant white teeth. Paul reaches out to squeeze Liv’s hand and it’s only then that it hits me.
‘He’s yours?’ I say, unable to hide the astonishment in my voice, the last three years having felt like three months.
‘Yes!’ laughs Paul, looking at me with his ice-blue eyes as if I’m from a distant planet. ‘Liv and I married a couple of years ago, and Liv fell pregnant not long after.’
‘Right,’ I nod, trying to keep up, trying not to show that I’m reeling from the punch of another person’s life effortlessly shaping up the way society wants it to, the way Paul always wanted his to, but which never felt right for me.
‘Good to see your life’s on track,’ I add, recalling how his plan was always a wife, three kids, and to be a partner by thirty-two.
I assume from the size of the ring on Liv’s finger that he’s made that happen also.
‘How about you, Carly?’ asks Liv. ‘Have you found your happy ever after?’
I shake my head and scrunch my eyes, as if to imply it’s the furthest thing from my mind, when in reality it isn’t. Because even when you don’t quite fit the mould, who doesn’t want to be happy?
‘More of a career girl?’ she encourages.
Before I can answer, Paul guffaws. ‘Yeah, right! Carly, a career?’
Liv, to her credit, slaps his forearm with the back of her hand.
‘What?’ he protests, gesturing to my loose yoga gear and hair scraped up under a bamboo headband, the book on the bench. ‘Come on. Carly, am I right? Books and yoga hardly scream career-oriented. You were always one of life’s coasters. What was it you were doing? Something with books . . .’
‘Children’s literacy events,’ I remind him, recalling how ‘cute’ he used to think that was, something he thought I could easily drop should he ever convince me that marriage, kids and living for the weekend were a good idea.
‘That’s right,’ he nods, his eyes blank, evidently having no recollection of what ‘Carefree Carly’ used to do.
‘How that’s going?’ Liv asks.
I grimace.
‘Not for you?’ asks Paul.
‘The funding was pulled,’ I explain. ‘The charity folded and with it my job.’
Both of them look as if I’ve just told them I have less than a month to live. I don’t tell them that while I enjoyed the job it never really felt like the dream job, and that still, with my thirtieth birthday on the horizon, I’ve yet to find my passion in life.
‘But you’ve something to fall back on? Something new lined up?’ asks Liv.
‘Just a bit of temp work.’
‘Lovely,’ she says, though her eyes are pooled with pity. ‘And you’ve a partner to shore you up for a bit?’
I shake my head.
‘But you’ve still got a place to live,’ Paul says rather than asks, as if he couldn’t possibly imagine a world where an ex would be homeless – far too much reality for their cosy Saturday morning in Stockbridge.
I want to give them the full whammy: that my best friend and flatmate Jude, the person who introduced us, is about to move to America, and I can’t afford to take on the rent alone.
That I’m surviving, not living. But I spare them the further awkwardness, allow them to keep their middle-class bubble intact.
‘I’ve got my flat in my parents’ house,’ I say, pointing to the top of Mum and Dad’s five-storey Georgian townhouse across the garden, where I’ve only recently moved back in.
‘Wow,’ says Liv, who clearly fantasises about Paul’s salary stretching to something similar.
‘Lucky me,’ I smile tersely, not mentioning that Mum and Dad have had to get rid of their lodger for me to return home just months shy of my thirtieth birthday.
‘Lucky you,’ says Liv, and she reaches out to rub my arm in a way that I’m sure is meant to be supportive but that comes across more as condolence. Her unspoken words being: who are you without a good job, a home of your own and a husband?
‘Well, we’d better get along. Good to see you,’ says Paul briskly when Blair begins to fuss, glad no doubt to have an excuse to get out of here.
‘Good to see you too,’ I call after them.
As they disappear out of sight, I muse on the fact that I don’t want Paul or what he has: his cookie-cutter relationship, his conventional career, his first child of the three he always wanted.
It’s more that I’d like to have something other than nothing – just one small passion, or someone – to call my own.
After they’ve gone, I sit for a while, drinking in the warmth of the morning, the April daffodils, and the townhouses of the crescent that surround the garden.
Almost nothing has changed since I was born here – neighbours have come and gone, law and finance firms having replaced the printers and publishers of days gone by, but the rhythm of the neighbourhood remains: during the week schoolchildren weave through office workers; at the weekend shoppers pass through on their way to the city centre or out to Stockbridge for the market, and always, regardless of the day, tourists stand on street corners, their eyes on maps or phones, trying to figure out how to find the Dean Village.
Inevitably they’ve lost their way from Princes Street or from Edinburgh Castle perched high on the hill overlooking the city I love most in the world.
And then there’s my home, where I grew up, a townhouse that’s been part of our family for ever.
As I leave the garden and cross the street, I see Elsa and Bill, both like grandparents to me, at their table in the basement window.
In the upstairs living room, Mum is folding sheets, and on the ground floor, books are piled high against the arched windows of the family bookshop, which my family has owned in various incarnations for almost two hundred years, and where I’ve worked on and off for as long as I can remember.
‘Morning,’ I say, opening the door to the shop from the black-and-white tiled vestibule.
‘Dad?’ I call, when I fail to find him in the front section of the bookshop, piled with donations for the second-hand section.
He isn’t in the back section either with its huge, partly obscured French windows overlooking the long, untidy garden below and the tall trees of the Dean Village beyond.
Since returning home, I’ve been more aware than ever that Dad is struggling to keep on top of the place.
‘Office,’ he mumbles.
I find him at his desk in the narrow back room, almost hidden behind books and paperwork and old coffee mugs.
‘What’s up?’ I place my book on top of the filing cabinet, its drawers bulging open, and start clearing the cups.
‘Accounts,’ he mutters wearily.
From the look of his scruffy black hair, dark eye bags and five o’clock shadow, I wonder if he’s been up all night.
‘Any improvement on last month?’
He shakes his head, rubs a hand over his brow.
‘What’s this?’ I ask, picking up a sheet of paper that’s fallen to the floor.
‘It’s nothing!’ he snaps uncharacteristically.
The two of us are usually as thick as thieves, me having spent more time in the shop with Dad over the years than with Mum tucked away in her study and her head.
He reaches out to take it from me, but I hold it just out of reach, reading the red-letter demand.
‘I had no other choice,’ he confesses, when it becomes clear he’s taken out a significant loan.
‘Does Mum know?’ I ask, shocked.