over again.
Unable to bear it for a moment longer, she pulls into a petrol station, even though her tank is almost full, and climbs out of the car, slamming the door behind her. The silence that follows almost makes her cry, but the respite is only temporary, for as soon as she drowns out the demands of her children, her thoughts are dragged back to Jess, Kate and her mother.
Lauren knew it was never going to be easy to bring Jess into the fold, but she’d hoped that the way she’d done it would have been better received. Though she had to admit that she had had three months since Jess’s email to get used to the idea before she’d turned up at her parents’ house. Kate and her mother hadn’t even had time to take a breath.
Lauren had known she was potentially opening a can of worms by essentially inviting anyone with a tenuous family link to stake their claim. She’d thought she’d find nothing more than a great-grandfather’s cousin, so to find Jess was a shock she was still absorbing when she’d turned up at the house. Lauren wonders if Jess had known that, and decided to force her hand. But she wishes she hadn’t, as all it’s served to do so far is to make people say things and hear things they weren’t ready for.
‘Can I get some paracetamol please?’ she says absently to the man behind the counter. He reaches behind him for a box of tablets and hands them to Lauren.
‘Anything else?’ he asks dourly.
Lauren eyes the miniature bottles of gin that line the shelves and wonders whether it would make her pounding head better or worse.
‘Erm, no thanks, just these,’ she says, instantly regretting it.
He hands her change from a five-pound note, and she turns, practically bumping into the man standing behind her.
‘Lauren?’ he says, startled.
She looks at him, before pulling back, as if she’s trying to shrink herself. She wishes she could turn back around and become anonymous again, because nothing about this encounter is how she’d imagined it being for all these years.
‘Justin!’ she says, once she’s made the split-second decision that there’s no way out of this. She instinctively runs a hand through her hair, as if hoping that by some small miracle, her straggly ends have transformed themselves into lustrous curls. Are her cheeks still mascara-stained from when she’d sobbed at the traffic lights earlier? Does she look like a crying clown? Or had she even put make-up on this morning? She doesn’t know which she’d rather right now.
‘Oh my God,’ says Justin. ‘Lauren! I can’t believe it. How . . . I mean . . . how are you?’
She allows her hair to fall forward, in the naive belief that it will cover the colour in her furiously burning cheeks.
‘I’m good,’ she says. ‘Gosh, it’s been a while – a long while. I heard you moved to Chicago.’
He nods animatedly. ‘Yes, about twenty years ago. Not long after we – you know.’
Lauren looks at the floor, wishing it would open up and swallow her whole.
‘But I’ve been back for a few months now.’
She wants to ask him all the questions she’s spent the last two decades asking herself. Who did he marry? Does he have children? Has he changed? Why did he leave when she needed him most? The only one she can safely answer is he looks even better than he did when he was eighteen. A few grey hairs pepper his temples and his jawline isn’t quite so defined, but his eyes are still the kindest she’s ever seen.
Sweat is prickling under her arms, and although her heart wants to stay in this moment for ever, her practical head is yelling at her to say what needs to be said and get out of there.
‘So, what are you doing now?’ she says, finally finding her voice.
‘Well, I got divorced a year or so ago,’ he starts, and Lauren can’t help herself from doing a virtual leap. ‘So when my company asked if I’d be interested in running the UK operation, it seemed like the right time to come home.’
The weight of the next question lies heavy on her lips, knowing that the answer will impact her far more than she’d like. Yet still she can’t stop herself.
‘And . . . children,’ she says. ‘Do you have children?’
He looks away, out onto the petrol station forecourt, where time seems to have stood still, and swallows hard. Lauren knows