to bed now?’
He doesn’t wait for an answer.
‘Night,’ I call after him.
Once he’s gone, I look at his computer’s search history: LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter. He’s been busy. No Facebook, though. Why didn’t he check if the Braids were on Facebook? I haven’t either, not once in twelve years. I assumed I knew everything I needed to know about Flora and her family. I knew they’d moved to Wyddial Lane because they sent us a ‘new address’ postcard – nothing personal written on it, just the address, minus the house’s name. They must have added that later.
I remember thinking it odd that we’d be on their list; Flora must have known, just as I did, that our friendship was over. Why would she want me to know where she was moving to? Perhaps she thought a complete cut-off would be too stark and obvious; easier to shift to a Christmas-cards-only friendship, allowing us both to pretend nothing was wrong, that we were simply too busy ever to meet.
I go to the bottom of the list of Dom’s search results and click on the one he went to first. Might as well follow the same chronological order. I feel more alert than I have for a long time.
It’s time to find the Braids.
Lewis is on LinkedIn, though there’s no photograph of him, only a grey-man silhouette. So he couldn’t be bothered to upload a picture. I skim over the list of his former jobs, several of which he had while I knew him. His current position, ‘2015 to present’, is ‘CEO of VersaNova Technologies, an application software company based in Delray Beach, Florida.
Dominic was right. How absurd that I needed to see it with my own eyes to believe it, given that my eyes have been seeing the impossible lately, in broad daylight.
Still. Lewis working for a company in America doesn’t mean Flora couldn’t have been in Hemingford Abbots this morning. Yesterday morning, I correct myself. It’s after midnight; tomorrow is now technically today.
In Lewis’s ‘Contact Information’ there’s a VersaNova email address for him, and a link to a Twitter account. Clicking on the link, I find myself staring at his smiling face. The photo that he’s chosen to represent him on his Twitter page, the one that appears in a little circle next to each of the short messages he’s posted, is of him suntanned and grinning, wearing a black and grey baseball cap.
Like most people, after a gap of more than a decade, he looks older than when I last saw him.
Like everyone except his children, Thomas and Emily, who look exactly the same as they did twelve years ago.
His official name on Twitter is VersaNovaLewB. I remember Ben joining Twitter and having to choose a name like that. He called himself boycalledBen, which prompted Zannah to say that she was embarrassed to be related to him.
Lewis’s smile is exactly the same: wide and full enough to dimple his cheeks and narrow his eyes, and alarming in its intensity, as if he might be about to start teasing you in a way you’re not going to like very much. He used to do that a lot. There was no point asking him to stop – he’d only do it more. For nearly a year he called Dominic ‘Rom-com Dom’ after we all went to see a movie, About a Boy, that Dom liked as much as Flora and I did, despite being a man. Eventually Lewis professed to find this hilarious, though at first he found it implausible. On the way home from the cinema, he hounded Dom relentlessly: ‘Really? You liked it? I mean, liked liked? You actually thought it was good?’
There’s a larger photograph, a kind of personalised banner at the top of his page. This one’s a picture of Lewis and two other men in suits and ties, all grinning as if in competition to look the most triumphant. Lewis is in the middle and holding a knife, about to cut into a large, square cake covered in white icing and decorated with blue piped writing. The cake has four candles. Further down Lewis’s Twitter page, I find this same picture again, underneath the words ‘Happy 4th Birthday, VersaNova Technologies!’
That was posted on 28 January this year. So Lewis’s company is four years old.
‘If it looks like it’s four, it’s probably sixteen,’ I mutter, then laugh. ‘Like Thomas and Emily.’ Sorry, Lewis. You always hated my sense of humour.
I’m exaggerating. He didn’t hate it, but he didn’t