Page 105 of For Real

I tried to explain what had happened, but I couldn’t because I didn’t know. There was only Toby’s absence.

She could have confronted me with all the nonsense I’d told them over pancakes, but she didn’t. She just put a hand on my arm and asked if he wasn’t answering his phone and what messages I’d left him.

Which was when I had to admit I’d never asked for his number.

Grace blinked. “Okay. Well, there’s no need to panic. Toby’s a young person. He probably lives on the internet. Google him.”

“Isn’t that basically stalking?”

“Public domain, and you wouldn’t be reduced to stalking him if you’d communicated with him properly in the first place.”

The truth was, it simply hadn’t occurred to me. I’d been so resigned to the notion that something like this was going to happen anyway that I’d practically engineered it. And now it had and I was devastated and I had only myself to blame.

“Even if he is on the internet,” I said, “what am I supposed to do? Sign up for Facebook so I can Like him? Twitter at him?”

“Tweet, love. It’s tweet.” She turned on my laptop and opened up Chrome. “What’s his name again?”

Fifteen minutes of dedicated Googling later, we had comprehensively established that Toby was not on the internet except for the occasional fleeting reference connected to his mother or his school life.

“Sorry.” Grace put my computer aside and curled up on the end of the sofa. “I thought it was worth a shot.”

“I wouldn’t have known what to say, anyway.”

She shrugged. “How about, ‘Are you okay?’ Something might have happened.”

A hundred and seventy—no. No. I closed my mind to statistics. “Or he might simply have decided to stop coming. I did nothing to keep him, really, except quietly fall in love with him while telling everyone—including him—I wasn’t and wouldn’t.”

“You’re…um…you’re in love with him?”

I dropped my head into my hands. A ridiculously melodramatic gesture, but one in keeping with a ridiculously melodramatic statement. “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore. Maybe. Probably. I’ve forgotten what love feels like, so how would I recognise it?”

She shook her head, sympathetic and exasperated as only an old friend can be. “You think way too much.”

“I know. The world makes most sense to me when I’m working or…”

“On your knees.”

We sat in silence for a while. I knew I was being poor company, but I was selfishly glad I wasn’t alone.

“I don’t like not knowing,” I muttered, finally. “Did he just wake up on Friday morning and fall out of love with me? At least with Robert, I understood.”

“See, I never did quite figure out what went on there. I thought after what happened, you’d be the one to leave, not him.”

“My forgiveness wasn’t even in question. He just couldn’t forgive himself.”

“I live in abject terror of that, you know.” She drew in a sharp breath. “Hurting someone in the wrong way.”1

“It was a couple of fractures. They healed.” I realised I was holding my wrist protectively, my own hand a cuff. I wanted Toby’s touch. “I would have trusted him again, if he’d ever let me.”

“But he dropped you, Laurie.”

“So? His horrible aunt once called me unnatural at a family dinner party. He dropped me then, as well, when he laughed it off.”

She frowned. “It’s not the same, though.”

“Isn’t it? It’s just love and trust. Hurt and kinky sex is neither here nor there.” I took a deep breath and let the truth slip out. “God, I miss him.”

“Robert?”

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