Page 74 of Not in a Million Years

‘Two years, actually.’

‘All of two years’ – he placed mocking emphasis on the words – ‘you know what’s best for him, and the rest of us don’t.’

‘Matt and Abbie agreed with me. And Matt’s known Andy years longer than you have, if length of tenure as his friend is how we’re judging whether people are qualified to know what’s best for him.’

Daniel shrugged. ‘Just strikes me as a bit dramatic, that’s all. The bloke likes a bit of ching – it’s hardly the crime of the century.’

‘I never said it was. But stealing money from friends who trusted you strikes me as pretty high up there.’

His eyes widened, and I realised he hadn’t been privy to this part of the story.

Sensing victory, I pressed on, forcing myself to adopt as reasonable a tone as I could. ‘Look, like I said, I didn’t do this out of spite. I want Andy to be happy and well and not destroying his life and losing the people closest to him. Surely that’s what you want too?’

‘Hear me out, Kate. I get that you think Sinclair’s on a bit of a self-destruct mission. But what you don’t seem to see is, he can’t. He’s bulletproof.’

Part of me was horrified by this idea – I’d seen Andy at his most vulnerable, his most fragile. When I held him in my arms, his body sweating and shaking, I felt like I was cradling a child, or a precious possession I needed to protect at all costs, with invading robbers banging on my door. But also, I felt a flicker of understanding.

‘How do you mean?’ I asked warily.

‘Where did you grow up, Kate?’

Surprised, I said, ‘Somerset. Why?’

‘So tell me about that. What was it like?’

‘My uncle’s a farmer. He was the eldest son, so he got to inherit the land and all that. My dad’s a solicitor, Mum works in a school – she’s head of year now. I’m an only child and I guess they wanted the best for me. So I went to uni in London and now I’m here. No apple-growing for yours truly.’

Daniel grinned at my half-hearted attempt at humour, but his smile lacked any real warmth. ‘Tough gig, huh?’

‘Of course not. Not at all.’

‘Exactly. Not at all. If you’d fallen through the cracks – if there’d even been cracks for you to fall through – what do you think would have happened?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Come on, Kate. You’re a smart woman. Take where I grew up. Small town on the south coast. Massive deprivation. Huge unemployment. Substance abuse off the scale. I look at the kids I did GCSEs with, and half the girls didn’t get to twenty without having babies, and at least half a dozen of the boys have done time. I got lucky – my stepdad was a carpenter, and I was passionate enough about learning from him to go to college and study design. And then I met Andy.’

I knew from Abbie that Andy’s parents’ Oxbridge ambitions for him had been thwarted when he tanked his A levels and he’d ended up at what Andy himself had described as a ‘no-hopers’ former polytechnic’. So I just nodded.

‘He swanned around there like he was some kind of god come to earth,’ Daniel went on. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I love the guy. But the difference between him and the rest of us was – well. You know.’

‘Of course, I know Andy’s parents were wealthy,’ I said. ‘But they aren’t any more, right? They got totally rinsed in the financial crisis. Abbie said.’

‘Totally rinsed in the sense that they had to flog their four-mil house in Hampstead and the investment property Andy was living in rent-free, sure. But Andy’s godfather, who owns that art gallery, will always have a job for him when he gets desperate. Andy’s rich grandmother would have paid for him to go to rehab if you hadn’t.’

‘If Andy’s rich grandmother could have persuaded him to go to rehab,’ I pointed out.

‘Fair point. Your powers of persuasion must be quite something. But that’s not the point. You know – and I know, and Matt and Abs would know if they weren’t so busy being fucking kind to everyone all the time – that nothing truly bad will ever happen to Andy Sinclair. He’ll always have a safety net.’

‘He needs us,’ I insisted. ‘We’re his friends. He’s fallen out with his family. He needs people who love him. He needs help. That’s why I helped him.’

Daniel shrugged again, pushing his too-long fringe back from his eyes. ‘Well, I guess we’ll just have to see if it works. I’d hate to see you throwing good money after bad.’

It did work. Andy checked out a month later, tanned and relaxed, and moved back in with me, just until he could get back on his feet. It wasn’t an arrangement either of us would have chosen – I liked my privacy and Andy liked his freedom. But it was what it was, and we did our best to make it work. He slept on the sofa in the living room, only sometimes coming into my bed. If he was seeing other people, he did it elsewhere, and I turned a blind eye.

But it meant seeing a lot of Daniel. With Matt sticking to his decision to cut Andy out of his life, a vacancy for Andy’s best friend had been created, and Daniel stepped in to fill it. Daniel never voiced it to me, but I sensed he felt relieved at how happy Andy appeared, and gradually his manner to me warmed. And I could see how close the two of them were and felt myself gradually warming to Daniel in return.

And we had fun, in those first weeks and months. Mindful that we didn’t want to put temptation in Andy’s way, we devised a programme of entertainment that would have gone down well in a swanky old-people’s home. We cooked our way through Anna Del Conte’s Gastronomy of Italy. We played endless games of Scrabble. We went to the opera and the ballet and to the beach for fish and chips.

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