Page 42 of The Fall-Out

These twenty-four hour bugs are the worst but when they fuck off you feel SO good, like a new person.

Rowan:

We missed you xxx

Which was all very well, but told me precisely nothing about what had transpired the previous night.

I wanted to ask – I needed to ask. But I found I couldn’t. These women were my closest friends in the world. They must know how I’d feel about Zara having been there – so either they didn’t know I knew, which seemed unlikely given the photographic evidence, or they didn’t want to talk to me about it.

It felt confusing and frightening and unfair. Part of me believed – or wanted to believe – that I was being silly and irrational, that I was acting as if we were all teenagers instead of grown women who knew how to navigate relationships and use our words. But the problem was, I didn’t feel like a grown woman – I felt just like a teenager who was being left out by a clique of her friends.

‘Babe?’ Patch’s voice interrupted my thoughts. ‘Are you going to stare at your screen all morning, or are you going to kiss me goodbye?’

‘Sorry.’ Without me noticing, he’d showered and dressed. I reached up and gave him a peck on the lips, barely noticing the fresh oak moss smell of his aftershave and the breadth of his shoulders in the crisply pressed shirt. ‘Have a good day. Will you be home for dinner?’

‘Doubt it. Got a late meeting. I’ll grab something in town.’

‘Okay.’ Suddenly needy, I added, ‘Love you.’

‘See you later.’ He shouldered his laptop bag and hurried through to the hallway. I heard the brief pause and rustle as he pulled on his coat, then the rattle of his keys, then the crash of the front door closing behind him.

‘Mummy!’ Toby’s voice immediately pierced the silence. ‘I’m bored.’

‘How would you like to go to Granny’s?’ I asked.

Both children leaped up from the sofa like it was an ejector seat, sending the blanket they’d been snuggled under flying, along with their empty toast plates.

‘Yay!’ Meredith squealed.

‘Can we go now?’ demanded Toby.

‘Can we stay all day?’

‘Yes, you can. Come on, let’s get our coats and I’ll take you there on the bus.’

I felt a twinge of guilt, but it melted away almost immediately. Patch’s mother loved having the children – the longer the visit, the better as far as she was concerned. The games that left me seething with frustration after playing them for twenty minutes would keep her happily engrossed for hours. And as for my worries about whether she was capable of looking after them alone – well, nothing had happened so far, and there was no reason to think that it would today.

So I wasn’t surprised that she replied to my text delightedly agreeing to my last-minute plan, assuring me that she had a cast-iron stomach and hadn’t come down with anything worse than a cold in years, and telling me to leave them there as long as I liked.

‘And what are you going to get up to today, then, Naomi?’ she asked when I dropped them off. ‘Anything nice?’

‘I’m going to meet a friend for lunch in town.’

‘How lovely – good to see you getting out like a proper lady who lunches. You deserve a break.’

If only you knew, I thought, kissing her and the children goodbye. I wasn’t so much a lady who lunched as some kind of guerrilla, planning a surprise hit on an unsuspecting victim – one who I wasn’t even sure would be where I was expecting at the time I made my attack.

But she was. When I arrived in Mayfair an hour later, the streets were already packed with people braving the grey, drizzly afternoon: office workers hurrying to meetings with their laptop bags and take-out coffees; tourists shrouded in rainproof plastic capes; glamorous women sheltering under umbrellas as they made the short journey from taxi to boutique.

This used to be my turf, back when I was working. Or near enough – the law firm where I worked was headquartered on the other side of Central London to Rowan’s West End office. But still, I found myself rediscovering the familiar rhythm of the crowded lunchtime streets as I dodged slow-moving tourists, threading my way expertly through the crowd while simultaneously glancing in tempting shop windows and looking at my phone.

I hadn’t properly appreciated it at the time, I thought with a pang. I’d been too busy being stressed by work, hurrying out for a sandwich before the next meeting or averting a crisis caused by something my boss had neglected to tell me to do. But I’d loved it. I’d loved the cut and thrust of office politics, the challenges that came my way almost hourly, which I’d need to solve without appearing ruffled or unprofessional. I’d loved being a tiny cog in the huge machine of corporate London.

I’d loved it when my boss smiled at me over her coffee and said, ‘So when are you starting that law conversion course, Naomi? You’re wasted as a secretary.’

I’d lost that opportunity – or given it away – when I’d decided to stay at home with the children. At first, I’d told myself it would only be temporary, but now I wasn’t too sure. Had I left it too long? Was I too old, too out of touch? Would I ever stop missing it?

I approached the plate-glass window of Walkerson’s Elite, the estate agency where Rowan worked, as warily as if I was a burglar planning a midnight hit on the place. But I realised almost immediately that there was no point attempting stealth. Rowan’s desk was right there at the front of the office, facing the window, and she was there, her phone pressed to her ear, a pen in her hand as she jotted on a spiral-bound notebook.

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