had said no. And now Eve was at the airport having changed her mind because she and Peter were suddenly on a break.
She’d half wanted to say, ‘No, you can’t come,’ when Eve had WhatsApped to ask if the invitation still stood.
Of all the girls in the group they had been the closest. From the first day of secondary school when they eyed each other with wary interest as they sat down at adjacent desks, to arriving in London together, post-university, ready to start their first proper jobs, ready to be cool, hip, twenty-somethings who drank cocktails after work and wore pencil skirts. They had been the ones to rent the flat in South London. It had been their adventure. They had advertised for tenants and ended up with quiet, awkward, but sardonically funny Jessica who arrived at the interview flame red curls all awry with just a rucksack of possessions and five hundred pounds cash and basically begged them to take her because she needed somewhere to sleep that night.
Little did they realise then that Jessica had spent a lifetime carving out a tiny personal niche for herself in a world suffocated by strict religious parents so fearful of the world around them they had built a shelter in the garden and stocked it with six months’ worth of survival supplies ready for Armageddon. At twenty-one, Jessica had finally broken free. And it was Libby and Eve who got to witness her humour, her verve, her personality as it was allowed to flourish unshackled. Watch her awesome highs as she would almost check to see if life was allowed to be this good, but then want to hide their eyes at her crashing lows as she experienced the turbulent relationship emotions that everyone else had been allowed to experience in their teens.
And then there was Dex, who pretty much told them he would be moving in because that was his way. He wouldn’t be there long, he’d said, he’d go when his cash was flowing again, but at that time his father had cut him off for hacking into his university’s computer system and changing his degree to a First—the result he needed to be gifted a Ferrari—and he’d been sent out to fend for himself over the summer. However, in some twisted logic, he’d been allowed to keep the Ferrari and whiled away most of time cruising the streets of Chelsea picking up rich, beautiful women and then having to apologise for the humble flat he was bringing them back to. Libby had spent many a morning having breakfast opposite a girl in some flash designer dress, It bag on her lap, tapping away on her phone while casting haughty sneers at Libby’s Primark pyjamas.
But Dex didn’t move out after that summer; in the end he stayed for as long as they all stayed. It transpired that his billionaire dad wasn’t as squeaky clean as his punishment of Dex implied when one morning every building he owned was raided at dawn by armed police, including their flat, simply because of the connection to Dex. Libby, Eve, and Jessica stood sobbing with terrified shock as Dex went mad, desperately trying to protect them, swearing to the police that he had no clue where his dad was, the phone going to voicemail, trying to hold back tears as a lifetime of hero worship was shattered in just under an hour.
The raids turned up nothing, as his dad, on the phone from southern Spain the next day, assured Dex that they would, but the damage was already done. Dex drove the Ferrari to a multi-storey carpark and never went back for it.
For three years Eve, Libby, Jessica, and Dex lived together in their second floor flat underneath medical students Jimmy and Jake and aspiring musician Miles. And over the course of those three years all their lives intertwined like vines. But it was the link between Libby and Eve that always remained the strongest. From the first day they’d met they had burrowed beneath the other’s surface. They had understood one another with a look, a laugh, an infinitesimal raise of an eyebrow.
Jake always said that Libby placed too high an expectation on their friendship. That she set the bar and waited for Eve to fall short so she could feel hard done by. But she wasn’t convinced. To her, a mark of a true friend was how far you would put yourself out to help the other. And Eve, as always, was wrapped up tight in Eve world.
By the time Libby pulled up at the airport, in her mind Eve had become a giant monster, so it was a surprise when the car door yanked open and instead of the vivacious, effervescent, self-absorbed blonde she was expecting, there was Eve. Tall, willowy, tired-looking. Shaggy pale hair. T-shirt half off her shoulder. Bulging handbag.
‘God, I always think I’m going to get done at airports,’ Eve said, breathless, chucking her bag into the backseat. ‘It’s my parents’ fault. Do you know what they used to do? Bags of weed in my teddy bear. Of course you know. I must have told you? Have I told you that? Can you imagine doing it now? Can you imagine if I was like: Maisey, Noah, just so you know, there’s a couple of hundred quid’s worth of drugs in your teddy. God, now I get nervous if I forget to even turn my phone off. Shit, that reminds me, I need to turn it back on.’ She rifled through the contents of her bag at top speed. ‘I think I’ve lost my phone. No, here it is.’ She dropped it back into her bag and then sat back with a sigh, her eyes closed for a moment. ‘Sorry. Hi,’ she said, clicking her seatbelt and leaning back against the headrest. ‘Sorry. I get so nervous at airports.’ She breathed out. ‘How are you, are you OK?’
Libby felt suddenly a bit shy. Sitting next to her once best friend. Acting over-polite as a result. ‘Yeah, fine. Are you OK?’
Eve blew out a breath that flicked her fringe out of her eyes. ‘Fine. Apart from the on-a-break thing. We’re like a bloody sitcom, aren’t we? Although less funny.’
Libby couldn’t laugh along. It embarrassed her that they were both facing the same challenge in their relationships. It wasn’t meant to happen like this. Libby was always the together one and Eve the shambles.
Eve tied her hair up, half of it immediately falling out because it was too short for a ponytail. ‘God, I’m all over the place. I feel really weird without the kids. No one has dropped anything on me or whacked me in the face. You know, that’s what they don’t tell you about kids. How often you get unintentional injuries. They sit up and whoomph, their head has smashed you in the jaw.’ She toyed nervously with her phone as she spoke. ‘Sorry, I won’t talk about the kids. I know it’s really boring.’
As Libby pulled out of the maze of airport roads and onto the motorway she couldn’t resist a glance across at Eve’s profile. She was fascinated by how many lines she had round her eyes and the grey tint to her skin. Eve used to glow, that was her thing. Her skin shone like a mermaid’s. Her hair was the envy of everyone. She’d do those big messy plaits in her hair, all intricate and knotted, that would have taken Libby two days to achieve while Eve would do it watching Countdown. Now she had almost half a head of black roots and it looked as if she’d done the blunt chin-length cut herself.
Eve seemed to sense the scrutiny and redid her ponytail self-consciously. ‘It’s all a bit shit really,’ she said, and Libby turned back to the road ahead saying nothing.
While Jessica waited for Dex to wake up so they could finish a work project they were meant to have done before they left, she decided to go for a walk. First she explored the local town which took mere minutes as it consisted of a shop, a church, and a square, but then she found the lake—the main attraction. An epic expanse of blue that stretched like a mirage out towards the Tuscan mountains in the distance, their peaks jutting into the horizon like fat kings on thrones.
Jessica stood and watched the glassy water from a slatted boardwalk that seemed to run the circumference. The wood was warm beneath her bare feet, like walking on soft leather; the water lapped gently against the pebbles and shivered through the reed beds, and the shimmer of the sun made her shield her eyes.
She knew she should be thinking that this
