it probably wouldn’t have happened if Roo’s best friend Marsha hadn’t recently moved to New Zealand, leaving her with a friend-shaped gap in her life. But Ellie was grateful for that; Roo was entertaining company, funny, impulsive, and with an outrageous track record when it came to men. It had also been an education pretending that they were just two single girls, living charmed lives in Primrose Hill, with nothing more to worry about than where to buy the best balcony bras and whether Chanel lipsticks were better than Dior. So she made two mugs of tea and spent the next hour talking about Jamie. She told Roo everything, about how they’d first met, what he’d been like, and how he had died. Roo asked to see more photos and together they pored over an album.
Finally, Roo turned and said emotionally, ‘Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?’
‘OK, keep your face like that. Don’t move a muscle.’ Jumping up, Ellie took the beveled mirror above the mantelpiece off its hook and brought it over to the sofa. ‘There, now just take a look at yourself.’ She held the mirror in front of Roo. ‘That’s why.’
Horror, sympathy, pity… it was all reflected there in Roo’s face. Seeing it for herself, she said, ‘Oh. Right. Sorry.’
‘It’s OK. You get used to it. But it’s been nice to be treated normally. Sometimes at work it just feels like everyone’s tiptoeing through a minefield when they talk to me.’
Roo said at once, ‘I won’t do that.’
‘They don’t mean to, but they do treat me differently.’
Vehemently Roo shook her head. ‘I promise I won’t. It’s just not the way I am.’
‘Except you’ve just looked through a whole album of photos,’ Ellie pointed out, ‘and you haven’t once made fun of how we look.’
‘Oh well, but that’s because it wouldn’t be fair. And it might hurt your feelings.’ Roo pulled a face, willing her to understand. ‘I’d feel awful if I said something to upset you, after everything you’ve already been through…’
‘Sshh. This is what I get all the time.’ Ellie finished her second mug of tea. ‘I’d rather you were normal.’ She tapped her watch. ‘And it’s seven o’clock. Aren’t you supposed to be meeting Niall at eight?’
Roo jumped up as if she’d been electrocuted. ‘It’s what? But I haven’t done anything yet!’ She was still at the stage where getting ready for a date entailed hours of painstaking preparation. Having leapt to her feet, she hovered awkwardly and said, ‘Oh God, I feel terrible leaving you on your own.’
‘Sshh.’
‘OK, sorry, I’m going.’ Roo paused in the doorway. ‘Look, are you sure you’re going to be all right?’
‘Sshhhhh!’
‘Oh I know, but it’s just—’
‘I’m not three years old,’ said Ellie. ‘I can cope. Go and have a fantastic time with Niall and tell me all about it tomorrow.’
She saw Roo take this in. Finally. Thank God.
‘All about it?’ Roo said it with a raised eyebrow and a glint in her eye.
‘You can be selective, leave out the biological bits.’ Ellie relaxed; all she wanted was to be treated normally. ‘I’ve forgotten what any of that mucky stuff ’s like.’
***
An email dropped into her inbox at lunchtime the next day. Still at her desk at Brace House Business Centre, Ellie was working her way through a mountain of reports waiting to be typed up. Paula had brought her a coffee and she was eating a sandwich she hadn’t ordered that contained off-putting slivers of cucumber. Try as she might, Ellie was unable to understand how anyone could possibly like cucumber. It tasted wet. And green. And just… eurgh… cucumberish. Picking the biggest bits out and dropping them in the bin with one hand, she clicked onto the email from Michael, her boss, asking if she could put in a couple of extra hours this evening, to help clear a backlog of work that had built up.
Damn, how could she wriggle out of this? The last time she’d said no, Michael had launched into an interminable story about how, when his messy divorce had been going through, plenty of overtime had taken his mind off the heartbreak. The next moment, a new email pinged up on the screen and her heart gave a squeeze at the sight of it. The subject was Hi, which gave nothing away. And the sender was Todd.
Ellie put down the sandwich that she hadn’t wanted anyway. A mixture of guilt and anxiety made her mouth dry. Why was Todd contacting her