making an old man very happy.’
‘I can’t imagine the world without him,’ I said, raising my bottle and giving my brother the filthiest look I could muster. ‘I’ve tried but I can’t.’
Chris nodded, his cheeks flushing from the booze and the pizza and the general adulation while Dad carried on putting away his pizza, gazing at his children in such a perfect state of joy I couldn’t help but think Mum had wasted her money on a two-week yoga retreat. Forcing my pizza down my throat with a mouthful of beer, I stared at the wall and waited for someone else to change the subject. Now I was really buggered. There was no way my dad could keep schtum about this and there was absolutely no way Mum would leave me alone until I fessed up about what was going on. Meaning I really should make an effort to work out what that was before she got home.
‘You all right, Adam?’ Dad asked, red sauce all round his mouth. ‘You look a bit peaky.’
‘Right as rain,’ I assured him, raising my pizza up high as Chris stifled a laugh. ‘Never been better. Never been better.’
If only Liv were as easy to placate as my dad, I thought to myself as he carried on munching until his plate was clear. I knew I should have taken her a pizza instead of flowers.
Thursday night drinks at the local pub had been a tradition for Abi and me well before our eighteenth birthday but in honour of my relationship implosion, we took the unorthodox move of bringing it forward to Wednesday. It was necessary. After Adam left and I finished up all my appointments, I sent David home early and spent the rest of the afternoon hysterically crying in a corner of the surgery while all the doggy in-patients howled along in sympathy. It was like a really terrible deleted scene from Lady and the Tramp. Without going into the details, I summoned my girls to the pub and steeled my liver in preparation.
‘Evening all.’ Abi shuffled into our regular corner of the Blue Bell, setting a bottle of white wine on the table. Her chin-length brown hair was half up, half down, secured by endless hair grips and her accidental cool girl glasses were so smudged it was a wonder she could even see. ‘I’ve had a shit day, let’s get smashed.’
I shuffled along the seat to make room, banging my knees on the underneath of the table as I went. Booths were the devil’s invention; it was impossible to get in or out of one without laddering a pair of tights and yet we always sat here. It was hard to break a habit after more than a decade.
‘What happened?’ I asked, pouring for everyone, my hand still shaking.
‘My lab assistant broke a very expensive piece of equipment, buggered three months’ worth of test results and I really don’t want to talk about it,’ she said as Cass picked up the bottle I had just put down and filled it up to the top. Cass and I had already talked. ‘Liv, you’re back, yay. You look nice.’
‘No, I don’t,’ I replied, my eyes dry and sore from all the horrible, horrible crying. ‘I look like shit. I haven’t had a proper night’s sleep since Sunday and an Alsatian had explosive diarrhoea all over the examination room when I tried to give him a rectal exam and – well, we’ll get to the rest.’
‘Good tan though,’ she said with a shrug. ‘Go on, then, what’s the big news that couldn’t possibly wait until tomorrow?’
It was only as she sank half a bottle of wine in one swallow that I realized she was expecting me to announce my engagement.
‘Nothing major,’ I said as Cass, who had already heard the story at least a dozen times since I arrived at the pub, held my hand under the table. ‘Me and Adam broke up.’
Abi picked up her glass, emptied the second half of her glass and put it back down. ‘Well, my dishwasher’s been on the blink for a week, so, you know, we’re all going through stuff right now.’
Determined not to cry in the Bell, I covered my face with my hair and snorted a half laugh, half sob as she bundled me up in a hug. Apart from a brief flirtation with Impulse Vanilla Kisses in Year Seven, Abi never wore perfume, so her hugs always smelled the same. Burying my face in her armpit was almost enough to push me over the edge.
‘He didn’t break up with you,’ Cass said, stroking my back. ‘You’re on a break, that’s not the same thing. Don’t freak out.’
‘I love how you know more about this than I do,’ I said, sniffling as I extricated myself from Abi’s hug. She stroked loose strands of my topknot back into place. ‘Feels a lot like a break-up, Cass. I mean, it’s six thirty on a Wednesday night, there are two open bottles of wine on the table and my friends are telling me not to freak out. That doesn’t paint a scene of everything being hunky-dory, does it?’
‘I didn’t tell you not to freak out,’ Abi said, refilling her glass as I leaned forward to sip from mine without taking it from the table. ‘I’d definitely be freaking out if I were you.’
‘Not helping,’ Cass said with narrowed eyes. ‘Adam told Chris it’s just a break. Chris thinks he’s got cold feet, that’s all, nothing to panic about. Everything will be back to normal by the weekend when he’s calmed down.’
‘Liv, what happened?’ Abi’s phone was flashing with a picture of a half-naked man with ridiculous muscles. She frowned and cancelled the call. ‘I thought you were coming back engaged. I’ve spent all day practising my excited face for when you ask me to be your bridesmaid.’
‘What makes you think I’d ask you to be my bridesmaid?’ I asked, sliding my glass back and forth across the table. ‘And more importantly, who was on the phone? Are you shagging Fabio?’
‘He’s no one. I was warming him up as a wedding date, but if you’re not getting married any time soon, I don’t need to answer that call.’ She tossed her phone into her bag then hid it underneath the table. ‘Seriously now, what’s going on?’
‘Technically Cass is right, we’re on a break,’ I explained, turning over my own phone to check for messages. Nothing. ‘All holiday, Adam kept going on about this amazing restaurant in town, how he’d heard it was so great but we couldn’t get a reservation until the last night, and so obviously, I’m thinking he’s going to propose then. But there we were, on our way out, and then I don’t even know what happened. One minute we’re walking down the beach on our way to a fancy night out, and the next thing I know, we’re in a taxi on our way home. No swanky restaurant, no proposal, not even any last-night-of-a-holiday shag. It was all very confusing.’
‘Chris said Adam said he wants to work out some stuff,’ Cassie said, twisting the wine bottle to check the label. I wasn’t sure what she was expecting to see: the Bell had two kinds of wine, red and white. We were drinking the white. It was not good. ‘He definitely said you hadn’t broken up.’
‘Chris said that or Adam said that?’ Abi looked distinctly unimpressed.
‘Adam said it to Chris, who then said it to me,’ she clarified, stroking the ends of her sleek, black ponytail. Everything about Cassie Huang was sleek. The word most commonly used to describe her was ‘willowy’ which I especially enjoyed hearing from my mum who had generally referred to her own teenage daughter as ‘sturdy’. And she wondered why I’d gone on the Haribo and Diet Pepsi plan in the first year of university.
‘They
