‘Anyway, enough of that. What else is happening with you?’ she asks.
I tell her a slightly filtered version of how it’s really going at work, and how I managed to survive a meeting with a load of important people without screwing it up. I don’t mention Alex, or how I’d taken to sleeping with earplugs in just in case I accidentally overhear him and Emma in the room next to mine, or how I’m grateful for the solid Victorian walls that muffle most of the noise even though they unfortunately make this place freezing cold on days like today.
And then I hang up, because she’s got to get going to her chair yoga class, and I hug my knees and I smile to myself, because somehow, at twenty-nine and seventy-nine, the two of us are doing okay in our new lives.
CHAPTER TEN
Alex
14th February
Valentine’s Day is everywhere this year, even more than usual. I can’t decide if it’s that confirmation bias thing, or if we’re just going full on Hallmark, but it feels like the entire city of London is festooned with pink ribbons and covered in love hearts, and to be perfectly honest with you, it’s a bit much. I’ve had a really shitty day, and I’m well and truly over all of it.
I pull my beanie hat down low over my head as I make my way up the station steps.
‘Bunch of flowers for the girlfriend, love?’ a woman outside Notting Hill Gate tube station asks. She’s standing with two huge buckets of red roses and thrusts one in my direction. I shake my head.
‘No thanks,’ I say.
‘Or boyfriend?’ she calls, hopefully.
‘Not that either,’ I mutter, waiting for the lights to change, looking across the road where there’s another stall drowning in a sea of red roses, teddy-bear-shaped balloons, bouquets of flowers, and ribbons tied to everything.
It was a genius idea of Becky’s to turn the house into a sort of anti-Valentine celebration with plenty of wine, pizza, and a horror movie or two. Thank God I don’t have to get up in the morning either. I’ve done a week of nights – again – and a weekend. Nobody told me nursing was going to be easy, but my God, I am so tired. And today was a really crappy day, too. We lost a patient, which happens, but this one came completely out of the blue. It’s a million times harder when you’re working on the paeds ward and it’s a child. I shake my head and try and wipe the faces of her parents out of my head. Valentine’s Day was always going to be synonymous with the most painful memory for them.
I stop at Tesco Express on the corner and pick up a bottle of red wine and some tubes of Pringles. All I want to do is get the 14th of February out of the way and forget Valentine’s Day exists.
This morning I’d sat on the tube on the way into work, staring mindlessly at the adverts opposite, avoiding the gaze of the woman sitting across from me, thinking about last year. It was hard not to reflect on how different life had been. I’d taken Alice for a surprise dinner to Clos Maggiore in Covent Garden, and we’d both known why. Yeah, it was more than a little bit clichéd and cheesy, but I thought that was what romance was supposed to be about. We’d passed forkfuls of food to each other, a waiter had lit a candle between us and smiled knowingly, and the whole evening had gone exactly as planned. We’d shared a crème brûlée – two spoons and one bowl – not fighting over the last mouthful but me politely telling her she could have it even though it was my favourite. God, if that wasn’t love, I don’t know what is. I’d kill for a crème brûlée normally.
Everything, Alice had said afterwards, had been perfect. And then I’d got down on one knee on a tiny side street sprinkled with a million fairy lights (I’d even chosen the location, scouting it out beforehand) and asked her to marry me. She’d said yes before I’d even got the ring out of the box. And then I’d kissed her and she’d called her parents as we walked home, waking them from an early night in their neat Georgian house in Surrey. They’d been delighted, and feigned surprise. And if I’d climbed into bed that night with a vague sense of unease,