Page 29 of The Fall-Out

She laughed. ‘Of course it’s safe! I’ve been staying here for years. All the models use this place as a base for fashion week – it’s dirt cheap and obviously dirt everything else as well, and the breakfast’s inedible so they all stay lovely and thin.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Seriously.’ She seemed to have sobered up a bit, recovering some of her usual poise.

I still wasn’t sure. I was far from sober myself, and the shock of finding myself here made me feel kind of distant from reality, as if I’d fallen into a weird drunken dream and I’d wake up any minute to find myself standing in a warm, fragrant corridor at the Dorchester.

Zara moved swiftly, as if to take advantage of my confusion. ‘Nighty night, Nome. Thanks for looking after me. You can tell the girls Cinderella’s safely back from the ball.’

She leaned in and pecked me on both cheeks, then opened the door and darted through it. I glimpsed the interior of the room for only a second, but afterwards I was almost certain of what I saw: a person in the bed, silhouetted in the light from the street lamp shining through the curtains. And I was equally sure that, over the hum of traffic from outside, I heard a man’s snore.

Then the door clicked shut behind Zara and I heard the key grind in the lock.

There was nothing more I could do there. I wanted nothing more than the comfort of a crowded night bus and the familiarity of my own bed. My mind made up, I turned and hurried away, the lights snapping on and off and on and off as I made my way out into the street. All the way home, the details replayed in my mind: the shape under the bedclothes, the rasps of a sleeping breath. Thinking about it, I was almost sure I had smelled something, too – a masculine fragrance like juniper, entirely different from Zara’s perfume.

I tried to convince myself that I was wrong. Zara didn’t keep secrets – if anything, she over-shared, freely spilling out details about her life and feelings. If she’d been there with someone – a man – surely she would have told us. But then, perhaps she wouldn’t – because of Patch, who was our friend too.

However much I tried to convince myself that my mind – helped along a bit by the strawberry mojitos – had been playing tricks on me, I couldn’t quite do it. I thought, when I messaged Rowan to tell her that Zara had got back safely, about mentioning what I’d seen to her, but I couldn’t bring myself to. It would have felt like a betrayal of Zara, who I’d promised to take care of.

Unlocking my own front door half an hour later, I realised something that had never occurred to me before. I thought of Zara as one of my best friends – but, really, I knew almost nothing about her.

TWELVE

‘Well, cheers. I guess.’ Rowan raised her glass of chardonnay, and Abbie and I followed, our glasses clinking in the centre of the table with a sound more cheerful and celebratory than any of us were feeling.

It was the first meeting of the Girlfriends’ Club since Andy’s funeral, and we were in a bar we’d visited before. It was not a particularly nice one – the tables were small and cramped, the music was too loud to hold a conversation over, the wine was indifferent and expensive and the food was limited to packets of crisps with fancy and off-putting flavours like Brie and prosecco or fried egg.

‘What happened to our reservation at that new place in Shoreditch?’ I asked.

I didn’t want to seem as if I was complaining – this was more of a second, mini-wake for Andy than our usual monthly catch-up, and crisps that made you burp sulphurically for hours after eating them were an insignificance compared to the loss we’d all suffered.

‘Kate cancelled it.’ Abbie took a sip of wine and winced. ‘She’s not coming, and the reservation was on her credit card. Apparently they’ve got some weird policy about the person who made the booking needing to be there.’

‘Is she okay?’ I asked, concern flashing in my mind like the red police car light emoji.

Of all of us, Kate had always been closest to Andy – just how close, we’d only discovered recently. Andy’s bisexuality and his physical relationship with Kate had been a secret they’d kept for years, placing enormous strain on both of them.

‘She’s devastated, obviously,’ Abbie said. ‘You know, she never got over the idea that she’d be able to save Andy somehow – that if she loved him enough and gave him enough and tried hard enough, he’d eventually be okay.’

‘But that’s not true.’ I looked at my friends’ faces, mirroring my sadness and worry. ‘There was nothing she could have done. Nothing any of us could have done.’

‘I think,’ Abbie went on slowly, ‘she thinks that if she’d somehow made her and Andy’s relationship work, she’d have been able to stop him taking the drugs.’

‘But she tried that,’ Rowan said. ‘She tried for years and years.’

‘And if she’d carried on, she’d still be being made miserable by Andy, instead of being happy with Daniel,’ I added.

‘But then Andy might still be alive.’ Abbie put her feet up on her chair, her knees tucked under her chin like it was cold in the bar, although it wasn’t. ‘Maybe she thinks her happiness would be a price worth paying for that. But I’m not sure, because she won’t talk to me about it.’

‘She’s grieving,’ I said. ‘It makes people behave strangely. Maybe she just needs some space.’

‘I hope so.’ Abbie gazed miserably down into her glass. ‘I just wish she’d open up about it. It makes me feel kind of helpless.’

‘Maybe you could ask her for a coffee or something,’ Rowan suggested. ‘Just the two of you.’

‘I tried. She says she’s busy.’

Rowan and I both glanced involuntarily down at our phones. I knew she wanted – just the same as I did – to look at the Girlfriends’ Club WhatsApp chat, to see when Kate had last posted, analyse the tone of her messages for something different, something wrong.

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