Page 20 of Better Left Unsent

Switch iPhone for basic phone? (One of Ralph’s bricks from the garage lock-up)

Bake cakes and cookies for work

Speak to Chloe

Message Petra about working extra hours/helping out on game days to show work I am not a drama making liability

Speak to Dad

Apologise to Mum for snarky email about brunches and not loving me

Send Alexis sorry letter (and her fave brownies?)

Or just forget all the above and move on anyway?LOL, nice try, Cate

The Cate Mancinelli-Grant OMG So What Now? List

To do: whatever the fuck I like

Chapter Eight

Text Message from Millie:Hi Dad, I have a new phone and no longer have WhatsApp, so it’ll be texts or calls from now on. I got your messages about Easter. Sorry for confusing you. Massive glitch at work and all my emails got sent at once, so it was an old one!!! Tell Mum I’m sorry too, about her email. But I’ll call you both soon (are you on the rigs this week?) Love you both x

Text Message from Dad:OK, darling. I’m on the rigs on shift until next Sunday. So you weren’t with your mum on Good Friday? Probably an old man moment LOL but don’t mention it to Mum please. Dad xxxxx

*

From: Millie Chandler

To: All Leigh Office

Subject: Cakes

Hi all,

Just to brighten your Monday, there are home-baked cakes and cookies (gluten-free and non-gluten-free variations are clearly labelled) in the kitchen. Please help yourself!

Millie x

Reception

Flye TV

*

Petra plonks herself down next to me at the reception desk, and smiles in the way a teacher might smile at a child she suspects might, at any moment, throw themselves to the carpet and cry, all pummelling fists and feet.

‘Afternoon, my dearest Millie,’ she says, tentatively, shrugging off her denim jacket. ‘And how have we been? How was your weekend?’

‘Afternoon, my dearest Petra,’ I parrot, with a smile. No carpet cries for me today. Not now I have my to-do list. ‘And Ithink– and bear with me because I recently learned such a thing could change at any moment – I might be fine.’

Petra grins, widely, her lips shiny with clear gloss, and pulls a gigantic bottle of chilled coffee from her handbag. ‘Oh, yeah?’

‘Oh,yes,’ I reply, and I really think I might be. I’m feeling productive. I’m feelingdetermined.I’m feeling a little bit .?.?. hopeful even. (Although I’m not sure how much of that is the faux-validation of having Chatty Martin finally actuallysmileat me again like he did ten minutes ago, and all because I made him sultana and date flapjacks, his favourite. He often talks at length, about how much he likes roughage.)

Nevertheless, though, it’s a relief to behere, and notthere, in ‘last week’ which was, of course, a total, stone-cold disaster. The weekend was better, a slow crawl from the pits of despair, to ‘maybe things might be OK’ and in the end, it even had an air of back-to-school energy. Cate helped me make a list (most of which she didn’t agree with), and yesterday, I baked and baked, as Cate went with her mum, Shanice, to pick up some things from her and Nicholas’s house, officially moving in to our flat, and Ralph used all manner of strange tools and gadgets to set up my new (old) phone: a very slow but usable 2010 Nokia, one of the favourites of his collection. And it’ssostrange being without an iPhone. At first, I spent a lot of time checking it, my new brick: for signs that Alexis wanted to talk, for messages from Owen telling me the wedding is back on (or still off), for Dad telling me he’s found Mum in bed with Andy Hilary, the handsome, grey surgeon who lives opposite them (who Alexis calls ‘Doctor Zaddy’), or that Chloe was on her way over with two sumo suits and a stripy-shirted referee. But, eventually, my brain started to get the memo. There is nothing to check. If my new (old) phone isn’t bleeping with a call or text, nothing is happening, and there are no apps I can check, no little alibis I can make up from scraps of last-seen statuses and Instagram Stories updates. There’s something quite .?.?. liberating about it too. Not knowing what my cousin packed in her husband’s lunchbox, not having to read motivational quotes on Sunday mornings from my bed that make me feel like a lazy pork scratching in a pair of fleece pyjamas.

‘So, I got your message,’ Petra says, shaking her coffee like a mixologist. ‘About helping out at more events?’

---