Page 53 of The Key to My Heart

‘Well, that makes one of us.’

‘I give you a week, Foxes,’ laughs Tom. ‘Then you’ll be allOh, I fancy him, Tom. I didn’t think I did, but I do, Tom, it’s the poems, it’s the adrenaline, it’s the beachy locks and the way he smears cigarette ash across a page …’

I nudge him under the table with my knee. He does it back, grins at me across the countertop, but leaves it there, just touching.

‘This time next year, you’ll be Mrs Notebook Joe,’ he says. ‘Mark my words.’

‘You can come to the wedding, then. Bring Miss Two A.M.’

‘She doesn’t like weddings,’ says Tom.

‘Oh. So, thereisa Miss Two A.M.’

‘Sausages,’ deflects Tom. ‘Such a shame there’re no sausages.’

Chapter Seventeen

I’ve imagined for years what it would be like to see Edie again. To come face to face with the woman who tore the final thread keeping my heart in one piece. This was never in any of my imagined scenarios, though. Seeing her today, on a regular, hot, summer’s Thursday, in a back street in Euston, was never in any of my daydreams.

This morning, I’d spent what felt like an age getting ready. I’d put on a dress I’d bought at work – one I’d really liked when Jodie had me model it forTina’sInstagram stories – and I’d spent longer than ten minutes on my make-up inspired by a YouTube video I’d watched. I even followed a tutorial on TikTok to get ‘the perfect’ half-up, half-down hair-do and then (half) nailed it. I know it isn’t a date, and I know I don’t even fancy the bloke. But I wanted to make the effort for the food festival Joe and I had planned to go to after music therapy. I wanted to look nice. And there was a tiny part of me thinking, as I applied actual lipstick in my dusty dressing table mirror, that maybe Jodie was right – maybe it is sort of – and I don’t think I haveeverused this word in my whole, entire thirty-three year long life –fated.To meet someone, who has beenthrough what I have, who completely understands me and accepts me, as I am. To have him right under my nose, at Goode’s, for all those months, and have no idea we were feeling the same pain. And my steps were more like springs on the way here. I felt buoyant and bouncy and part of the world. Like I was skipping, on the path to bloody Oz.

But now. Now I’m frozen. Rigid. Because Edie is in front of me. And I can’t run like I do in my daydreams, I can’t keep walking, pretending she isn’t there, or that I haven’t seen her. I can’t even dash for an imaginary taxi, or bus. I’m stuck here, feet on the bottom step of the rehearsal rooms’ stairs, Edie having just arrived through the heavy, cranberry juice coloured door.

‘Natalie.’ Her hands fly to her chest, then to her round cheeks. ‘Oh my God. Natalie.’ Her words are more breaths, than sounds. Whereas I feel like all the breath has left my body and I’m just bones, frozen here on the stairs.

‘Hi,’ I say. No other words will come out. Even my ‘hi’ has blunt edges. I can hardly look at her. Edie looks the same. Her long hair scuffed up in a messy bun, a long, floral, sack of a dress drifting down to her feet. Like an effortless FatFace model. She looks kind. Edie has that face. Kind and sympathetic. The sort people spill their life stories to in club toilets, unprompted.

‘I’m … Oh, I can’t believe it’s you.’ Her beautiful, angular pixie face breaks into a smile. ‘Are you … What are you doing here? This is—’

‘I’m meeting a friend,’ I say. ‘He’s waiting.’

‘Oh.’

Joe. Joe’s waiting outside for me, to walk to the festival in Regent’s Park. I’d stayed behind after therapy today to talk to Devaj about an idea he and James have for a song writing therapy workshop – a class to encourage people to write and compose their own songs, about their experiences, about their pain – and Joe had told me he’d wait downstairs. Devaj and I had talked for ten minutes, and from the window upstairs, I could see Joe, patiently waiting for me on the hot concrete below, adjusting his hair awkwardly in a car windscreen’s reflection, flattening a part of it, then roughing it back up. It made me smile. I just had no idea this was waiting for me downstairs instead. A moment I have dreaded, imagined in detail, with a churning stomach, for almost three years.

‘Wow, Nat, I can’t … this is … Wow.’

‘I’ve got to go.’

‘Natalie –’

‘I’ve got to go,’I say again.

Edie’s deep brown eyes are glistening now, like sunshine on water, as I walk past her, and I know Edie Matthews almost as well as I know myself. She wants to cry. Edie always did cry easily. Soap operas, puppies, little old men at bus stops in pressed trousers and brogues. I loved it about her. Would almost tell her things sometimes, little stories, embellished, just to make her cry, then we’d lose ourselves with laughter over it, Edie dabbing at the blobs of mascara under her eyes, saying, ‘Why do you do this to me, Nat!?’

‘I’m rehearsing,’ Edie says.

I stop on the thin carpet.

‘We use this space sometimes. And other times we use one over in the West. Do you remember the one – Gosh, I can’t remember the name of the street, it was—’

‘I need to go,’ I say again. My heart is thumping, like it might drum itself free. I feel sick. Physically sick. I place a hand on the heavy, metal exit – then stop. ‘Edie,’ I say, turning. ‘Can I ask you something?’

‘Of course.’ Edie smiles a watery smile, and I see her eyes take me in. A drift from head to toe. I wonder what she’s thinking. Does she think I’ve changed? That I’ve aged? That I’ve let myself go, since Russ, since we stopped talking. Will she text Lucy later, say, ‘Gosh, Luce, she looked terrible. I can’t believe what it’s done to her, the grief. So bloody sad. :(’

‘What is it?’ asks Edie. ‘Is everything okay, Nat?’

And I soften then, because – it’s Edie. My best friend. My writing partner. My do-or-die. Those words that have come out of her mouth countless times over our lifetime. Break-ups and rejections and toxic jobs and accidents and creative wobbles and self-doubt. I love her, and I always will. That’s why it hurts so much, seeing her. I love her. And she lied to me.

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