Chapter Two
Nina glanced blearily at her phone, registered that it was nine thirty and that on any normal Thursday she would have already been at work for an hour, having jumped out of bed at six to shower and blow-dry her hair, and to make a pot of the expensive Colombian coffee that she and Sam liked.
They would sit and drink it before setting off for their high-flying jobs, making plans for an evening together.
She squeezed her eyes shut to stop the tears that threatened to fall yet again, pulled the cover over her head and rolled over.
She’d lost everything – the job she loved, the man she loved, her friendship with Mags, the glamorous life in Manchester she’d built.
And now she was stuck at home in her suburban teenage bedroom with no boyfriend and no prospects. She couldn’t deal with the world today.
Even Theo’s attempts to rouse her failed; she ignored the smell of breakfast drifting up from the kitchen, the tempting scent of Greek omelette, then Theo himself as he opened the curtains and sat on the end of her bed, waving the plate and a mug of freshly brewed coffee at her.
‘I know you mean well, Baba, but I need to be alone,’ she said, her voice dry and cracked.
She licked her lips and peered out from under the covers, blinking in the unwelcome light.
The coffee did smell really good. ‘My life’s over and there’s nothing you can do.
’ Her voice wobbled like it used to when she was a little girl, and she felt bad as she saw him sigh, his face etched with melancholy.
‘Ah my little Antheia,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Smart and brave girl like you, the world’s at your feet, if only you can see it.’
She heaved herself to a sitting position, clutching the duvet to her like a baby with a comfort blanket. ‘Thanks, Baba. Maybe I’ll see it another day, but today it feels like everything’s gone wrong and I just can’t deal with it.’
He sighed and nodded, turning to leave as she flopped back down, rolling away from him and pulling the covers up over her shoulders. ‘You can leave the coffee and the omelette,’ she said, her voice muffled.
He smirked a little as he placed them on her bedside table, next to the framed picture of Nina and her mum that she’d brought with her.
‘Don’t look so pleased with yourself,’ she muttered. ‘No point in wasting good food, that’s all.’
As soon as she heard the door close she sat up, grabbing the mug and savouring the delicious, nutty flavour of the coffee.
He’d warmed the milk, just how she liked it.
Stabbing the omelette, she dolefully chewed a mouthful of egg, feta and onion, opening Instagram and browsing all the pictures of everyone’s beautiful, perfect lives with their beautiful, perfect partners and beautiful, perfect jobs.
For the hundredth time since they’d split, she scrolled Sam’s Insta, pressing into the wound of the loss of him.
Reels of him doing weights at the gym, pictures of him looking smart and chiselled as he drank expensive whisky at a work do, a girl leaning close to him for a selfie of the two of them as he beamed at the camera.
Not just any girl. Mags.
Nina almost threw up the omelette.
She stared at the picture, at Mags with her big green eyes and little pointed chin and happy, happy smile.
It was a thing, then. Not just a one-off, not just a fling, not just a stupid mistake that meant nothing.
He’d lied about that, he’d probably been seeing Mags for months behind Nina’s back, cheating on her, deceiving her, time and again.
He said it meant nothing, but Mags had become his new girlfriend, she’d probably eventually be his wife, maybe the mother of his three beautiful, green-eyed children.
She might be getting slightly carried away.
Either way, Sam wasn’t moping in his childhood bedroom, and Mags was hardly riddled with guilt, was she?
Neither of them cared at all about what they’d done.
Nina swallowed the double whammy of hurt.
Her boyfriend and the girl she’d trusted as a good friend, both had betrayed her.
Mags’s deceit was almost more painful, in fact.
She threw the phone onto the floor, pulled the covers right over her head and sobbed. She would close the stupid curtains, if only she could be bothered.
‘Oh, dear.’
Heather didn’t bother to knock, but barged into the bedroom and flicked on the light to reveal the sorry lump of her friend under the covers, where she’d been all day, listening to her record collection.
‘Ouch, switch the light off,’ Nina grumbled.
‘Wow, you are a hot mess,’ Heather said, ignoring her and plonking down on the bed. ‘Your dad was not exaggerating. Come on, you need some friend therapy from circa twenty-ten.’ She produced two plastic tumblers, a giant bag of cheese puffs and a bottle of pink wine from her rucksack.
Nina sat up and sniffed, wiping her nose and running her fingers through the tangled mop of her hair.
‘Thanks.’ All this crying had left her exhausted, and this blast from their shared past was just what she needed, reminding her of the evenings they’d sat as teenagers in this room, drinking wine and dreaming of Harry Styles and feeling oh-so-sophisticated.
That was before Heather confided that her preference was actually for Avril Lavigne.
‘My god,’ Heather said as she tutted and handed Nina a tumbler of wine.
‘See the state of you; I haven’t seen you without makeup since the great hangover of twenty-twenty-one.
No wonder Theo called for reinforcements.
And this isn’t helping, either.’ She carefully pulled up the arm on Nina’s record player, causing Stevie Nicks’s powerful rendition of ‘The Chain’ to come to an abrupt halt.
‘Hey!’ Nina protested. ‘What are you doing? That’s my favourite band. I love their music. It’s poetry.’
Heather pulled a face. ‘Miserable, that’s not going to do you any good.’
‘Better than all that Maroon 5 you listen to.’
‘Those boys are geniuses, I’ll not have a bad word said about them.’ Heather grinned, and Nina couldn’t help but smile in response. ‘Tough week, huh?’
Nina had already messaged her with a blow-by-blow account of her life falling apart, but she knew that Heather would sit and listen, nodding and rolling her eyes sympathetically as she went through it all again.
Nina showed her Sam’s Instagram, and once again went through every possible scenario of what was going to happen between him and Mags.
As she was running through the possibility that they were setting up home together, Heather stopped her.
‘You do know you’re well shot of him, right?
That arrogant bottom-burp.’ Heather, a preschool teacher, had got into such a habit of toning down her language that she now found it impossible to utter the mildest swear words, even when the situation clearly warranted it. ‘And I never liked her, either.’
Mags and Heather had only met a few times, and had instantly disliked each other. Mags, originally just a work friend of Nina’s, had been horrified by Heather’s tattoos and the shaved-side haircut she sported, and Heather’s verdict on Mags was, as she reiterated now, ‘Vacuous and stuck up.’
‘I thought she was my friend,’ Nina said, still reeling with disbelief at such a betrayal. ‘And I thought he was the one.’ Nina felt tears prick at her eyes once again.
Heather snorted. ‘What, Sam? Come on.’ She stuffed a handful of cheese puffs into her mouth and continued talking, the words slightly muffled by chewing.
‘I mean, I know he’s pretty but that’s all there is to him; he was so busy working out and working his way up the career ladder he barely noticed you at all.
You deserve better than that. He’s just a fluting narcissist.’
‘But he –’
Heather held up a hand, her expression serious. ‘Nina. He cheated on you. You deserve better. Now drink some wine, get it out of your system and move on.’
Nina opened her mouth to argue, but found she had nothing to say. Heather was right. Sam was a worthless, cheating waste of time. Not to mention a few other choice words that she couldn’t say in front of her swearing-avoidant friend. She drank instead.
‘So,’ Heather said. ‘What’s all this Theo tells me about you going to Kefalonia with him for the summer?’
‘You know those things are basically poison, don’t you?
’ Nina said as Heather shoved another handful of cheese puffs into her mouth.
‘No nutritional value at all. They’re not really food, just a bunch of chemicals and salt.
’ Nina was strict with her diet. The most sinful thing that had passed her lips recently was a piece of homemade cereal bar, if you didn’t count the current boozing, but these were exceptional circumstances.
Heather grinned, showing an orange mush in her mouth. ‘And they’re blooming delicious.’
Nina lifted a lip in disgust, trying to ignore the watering of her mouth as she breathed in the smell of chemicals and salt. She gulped her wine instead, and Heather refilled their cups.
‘Tell me something,’ Heather said as she carefully placed the bottle on the bedside table, leaning in with a serious expression. ‘When was the last time you had fun?’
Nina was stung. ‘I’m fun!’
‘When you let yourself be. When was the last time? The great drunken night of twenty-twenty-one?’
‘Hey! I do fun stuff.’
Heather raised an eyebrow. ‘Like what?’
‘Work.’ The word popped out of her mouth before she could stop it. ‘And – and I go to bars. And the gym.’ Lame, she knew. She was about to start listing the hairdressers and nail salon, but somehow she had a feeling that that wouldn’t do anything to shift the sceptical look from Heather’s face.
‘My god. We missed the chance for an intervention, didn’t we?
’ Heather sighed. ‘Look, I love my job too, and I know yours is more glamorous than mine, I mean anything’s more glamorous than wiping cute little snotty noses all day, right?
But it’s not fun, Nina. And those bars you went to were all at Sam’s work dos. ’
‘Still counts.’
‘Does not.’
Nina sighed, gulped her wine and eyed the rapidly diminishing cheese puffs.
Her life had been good, hadn’t it? She’d worked so hard to make it that way.
She’d progressed at work, she had excellent taste; she’d had a handsome, successful boyfriend.
She looked good, she went to the gym and kept up with beauty appointments, she ate well; her body was a temple.
Perhaps it wasn’t a laugh-a-minute riot. But who had time for that, in the real world? Fun was overrated.
‘I just don’t know where it all went wrong,’ she said, tears beginning to trickle down her face.
‘Come here, you sad sack.’ Heather leaned over and enveloped Nina in a tight hug. She smelled of Dolce & Gabbana’s Light Blue, wine and cheese puffs. Nina found herself clinging to her friend.
‘You know,’ Heather said, releasing her and holding out a tissue. ‘This might even turn out to be a good thing.’ She smiled at Nina’s frown. ‘I know it doesn’t feel like it now. But it might be a chance to rethink things a bit, start over, do something completely different.’
Nina snorted. ‘Like what?’
Heather shrugged. ‘Well, like spend the summer in Kefalonia, for a start.’
‘I can’t do that, I need to find a new job! And a flat. For god’s sake.’ An image of herself lying on the beach, listening to the sound of lapping waves and reapplying sun lotion as she ordered a mojito drifted through her mind. If only.
She sighed and grabbed the bag of cheese puffs. ‘And stop pigging all of these, leave some for me,’ she said, shoving a handful into her mouth.