Page 20 of The Key to My Heart

‘It’s, er …’ Jodie stops fiddling with the oversized sunglasses on the mannequin and looks down at her Apple watch. ‘Is it at one you’re meeting him? It’s ten to. And—What?Well, that is such bollocks.My Apple watch is telling me I have barely moved today.’

‘Ihatethose watches.’

‘I haven’t stopped today. I never do, but looking at my stats you’d think I was a packet of lard. A pork scratching with a bank account.’

I laugh. ‘They are nothing butshamingwatches, my dear sibling. Although Russ loved his. Swore by it.’

‘It was Russ who convinced me to bloody get one,’ says Jodie with a smile, leaning down to a box at her feet, full of a new range of lemon-yellow and mint-green cardigans.

‘He convinced me too.’

‘Should’ve been on Apple commission, that bloke,’ Jodie remarks, and I love, so much, when other people, besides me, talk about Russ asRuss,and not in the context of anything else, other than who he was as a person. Not the bike accident. Just him.

‘Mine’s in the drawer somewhere,’ I admit as Jodie hands me a cardigan for my mannequin, who Jodie wants to dress ‘like Taylor Swift on the school run’. ‘So is Russ’s watch actually. Down with all of them, I say. But then I suppose I would say that. I’m not sure what my Apple watch would say about glasses of wine before bed at one a.m. and three croissants in a row.’

Jodie straightens, then rests a hand on her hip. A smile slowly spreads across her face, a perfect arc. ‘You’re different today.’

‘Am I?’

‘I don’t know.’ She leans towards me, pushes hair out of my face, like she used to when we were young. She was always doing it – neatening me up. Before school photos were taken when we’d both been gathered up from our different classes by the school receptionist, or when I’d pad into her room late at night at fourteen and tell her I liked a boy. Three years older than me,but more like a second mother sometimes. ‘You do,’ she says. ‘You look – different. All sort of … glowy and bouncy and sort of—What the—Natalie?’

I can barely register her face before my body reacts without my permission. I throw myself down behind the Sienna Miller mannequin, crouching like someone hiding from a hold-up at a bank. And that’s because Iamhiding. At my place of work. At thirty-two years old. In broad daylight. On the streets of Camden Town.

‘Natalie, what are you –’

‘Shut up,’ I hiss.

‘What?’

‘Shhhhhhh!’

It’s her. I’ve seen her. Edie. And I haven’t seen her in over two and a half years. All this time, frequenting the same city, the same streets, and I’ve managed to avoid her. Yet here she is, ambling along the street, four shops down, her purse in her hand, her keys in the other. She knows Mum’s shop is here. She doesn’t know I work here though. Thank God.Thank God.

‘What is it?’ asks Jodie, bending to speak to me, on the floor.

‘Nothing. Um. It’s … cramp.’

Jodie’s face bunches up in confusion, sunlight catching the perfect sheen of highlighter on her cheeks, which I’m sure she applied at her neat and organised dressing table this morning, in plenty of time, her alarm never once being pressed on to ‘snooze’. An adult. Jodie the perfectly turned-out adult, and me,the ridiculous woman-child crouched on the floor in the street. ‘Cramp?’ she says. ‘What are you actually on about bloodycramp—’

‘Jodie, I need you toshush,’ I hiss. I sound mad.

My sister looks down at me, her eyes wide. ‘Is this one of your weird jokes?’ she whispers. ‘I mean, you’re funny, but sometimes they’re so abstract they’re sort of – lost on me …’

Then two neat loafered shoes scrape to a stop on the pavement, and I’m faced with two bare ankles, straight-legged jeans just skimming them, one encircled with a glittering anklet with a horseshoe charm.Mum.Ah, fuck. Mum. And she looks down at me like I’ve just taken a shit in her pot pourri.

‘Hi,’ I say.

She doesn’t respond, except tips her head, looks up and down the street, because she knows. SheknowsI’m hiding. But, then again, you don’t have to be a detective inspector to know that. I am quite literally hiding behind a mannequin that looks like it got itself dressed while totally inebriated and/or on fire.

‘Natalie,’ says Mum sweetly. No judgement, but the slightest edge of concern for her youngest daughter.

‘Hello, Mum.’

Mum nods. ‘Edie’s car, isn’t it?’

‘What?’ Jodie tiptoes to see over the mannequin’s bald shiny head.

‘The little Peugeot,’ says Mum. ‘K O C. The number plate. Don’t you remember – cock, I used to say.’ Mum laughs to herself.

---