‘Agnes, I don’t know how you can hide this for ever. It’s too big. It –’
She reached out a hand and laid it on my arm. Her fingers closed firmly around my wrist. ‘Please. We are friends, yes?’
I swallowed.
There are no real secrets among the rich, it turns out. Just people paid to keep them. I walked up the stairs, this new burden unexpectedly heavy on my heart. I thought of a little girl across the world with everything but the thing she wanted most in the world, and a woman who probably felt the same, even if she was only just beginning to realize it. I thought about calling my sister – the only person left with whom I might be able to discuss it – but knew without speaking to her what her judgement would be. She would no more have left Thom in another country than she would have cut off her own arm.
I thought about Sam, and the bargains we make with ourselves to justify our choices. I sat in my room that evening until my thoughts hung low and black around my head and I pulled out my phone. Hey, Josh, is that offer still open? But for, like, a drink-drink instead of coffee?
Within thirty seconds the answer pinged back: Just say where and when, Louisa.
21
In the end, I met Josh at a dive bar he knew off Times Square. It was long and narrow, covered with photographs of boxers, and the floor was tacky underfoot. I wore black jeans and scraped my hair into a ponytail. Nobody looked up as I squeezed my way past the middle-aged men and autographed pictures of flyweights and men whose necks were wider than their heads.
He was seated at a tiny table at the end of the bar in a waxed dark brown jacket – the kind you buy to look like you belong in the countryside. When he saw me, his smile was sudden and infectious and made me briefly glad that someone uncomplicated was pleased to see me in a world that felt impossibly messy.
‘How you doing?’ He stood and looked like he wanted to step forward and hug me but something – perhaps the circumstances of our last meeting – prevented him. He touched my arm instead.
‘I’ve had a bit of a day. A bit of a week, actually. And I really need a friendly face to have a drink or two with. And – guess what – yours was the first name I pulled out of my New York hat!’
‘What do you want? Bear in mind they do about six drinks here.’
‘Vodka tonic?’
‘I’m pretty sure that’s one of them.’
He was back within minutes with a bottled beer for himself and a vodka tonic for me. I had shed my coat and was oddly nervous to be opposite him.
‘So … this week of yours. What happened?’
I took a sip of my drink. It sat too comfortably on top of the one I’d had that afternoon. ‘I … I found out something today. It’s kind of knocked me sideways. I can’t tell you what it is, not because I don’t trust you but because it’s so big that it would affect all sorts of people. And I don’t know what to do about it.’ I shifted in my seat. ‘I think I just need to kind of swallow it and learn how not to let it give me indigestion. Does that make sense? So I was hoping I could see you and have a couple of drinks and hear a bit about your life – a nice life without big dark secrets, assuming you don’t have any big dark secrets – and remind myself that life can be normal and good, but I really don’t want you to try and get me to talk about mine. Like if I happen to drop my defences and stuff.’
He put his hand on his heart. ‘Louisa, I do not want to know about your thing. I’m just happy to see you.’
‘I honestly would tell you if I could.’
‘I have no curiosity about this gigantic, life-altering secret whatsoever. You’re safe with me.’ He took a swig of his drink and smiled his perfect smile at me, and for the first time in two weeks I felt a tiny bit less lonely.
Two hours later the bar was overheated and three-deep, exhausted tourists, marvelling at three-dollar beers, and regulars rammed along its narrow length, the vast majority focused on a boxing match on the TV in the corner. They cried out in unison at a swift uppercut, and roared as one when their man, his face pulped and misshapen, went down against the ropes. Josh was the only man in the whole place not watching it, leaning quietly over his bottle of beer, his eyes on mine.
I, in turn, was slumped over the table and telling him at length the story of Treena and Edwina on Christmas Day, one of the few stories I could legitimately share, along with that of Granddad’s stroke, the story of the grand piano (I said it was for Agnes’s niece) and – in case I sounded too gloomy – my lovely upgrade from New York to London. I don’t know how many vodkas I’d had by then – Josh tended to magic them in front of me before I’d realized I was done with the last one – but some distant part of me was aware that my voice had acquired a weird, sing-song quality, sliding up and down not always in accordance with what I was saying.
‘Well, that’s cool, right?’ he said, when I reached Dad’s speech about happiness. I may have made it a little more Lifetime movie than it had been. In my latest version Dad had become Atticus Finch delivering his closing speech to the courtroom in To Kill a Mockingbird.
‘It’s all good,’ Josh went on. ‘He just wants her to be happy. When my cousin Tim came out to my uncle he didn’t speak to him for, like, a year.’
‘They’re so happy,’ I said, stretching my arms across the table just so I could feel the cool bits on my skin, trying to not mind that it was sticky. ‘It’s great. It really is.’ I took another sip of my drink. ‘It’s like you look at them both together and you’re so glad because, you know, Treena’s been on her own for a million years but honestly … it would be really nice if they could just be a teeny tiny bit less glowy and radiant around each other. Like not always gazing into each other’s eyes. Or doing that secret smile which is all about the private shared jokes. Or the one that means they just had really, really great sex. And maybe Treena could just stop sending me pictures of the two of them together. Or text messages about every amazing thing that Eddie says or does. Which apparently is pretty much anything she says or does.’
‘Ah, c’mon. They’re newly in love, right? People do that stuff.’
‘I never did. Did you do that stuff? Seriously, I have never sent anyone pictures of me kissing someone. If I’d sent a picture of me snuggling with a boyfriend to Treena she would have reacted like I’d sent her a dick pic. I mean, this is the woman who found all displays of emotion disgusting.’
‘Then it’s the first time she’s been in love. And she’ll be delighted to get the next picture you send her of you being nauseatingly happy with your boyfriend.’ He looked like he was laughing at me. ‘Maybe not the dick pic.’
‘You think I’m a terrible person.’
‘I don’t think you’re a terrible person. Just a fairly … refreshed one.’
I groaned. ‘I know. I’m a terrible person. I’m not asking them not to be happy, just to be a teeny bit sensitive to those of us who might not be … just at this …’ I’d run out of words.
Josh had settled back in his chair and was now watching me.
‘Ex-boyfriend,’ I said, my voice slurring slightly. ‘He’s now an ex-boyfriend.’