Page 78 of The Fall-Out

‘I’d have come home early.’

‘It’s been in the diary forever. You didn’t offer.’

It was true – but also not true. I’d added the monthly Girlfriends’ Club to my calendar years before and set it to repeat in perpetuity. Almost always, I’d gone, sorting out childcare one way or another. Occasionally, I hadn’t been able to make it and then I’d grumbled to Patch about how miserable I was to miss it. But this time, I hadn’t mentioned it. Sometime, I supposed, I’d delete the recurring event from my schedule, but I couldn’t bring myself to do that just yet.

‘How are they all, anyway?’ Patch asked.

‘Okay, I guess. Busy.’

And ‘busy’ was a guess, too. Every day, I’d looked at my WhatsApp home screen hoping that I might have been added back to the group, but I hadn’t. Rowan had sent me a message asking if I was okay, and I’d replied coolly, saying I was all right, and how was she?

ROWAN:

Good

I miss you, Nome.

I’d left that olive branch there, read and unreplied to. I missed her, too – I missed them all so much it was like a part of me had been torn out, leaving a wound that wouldn’t heal. But I stopped myself from reaching out to Rowan and asking her to meet up, or to intercede with the others, or to – something. Something that would make things go back to how they were.

One gloomy Tuesday afternoon, in the time when the children had been at nursery long enough for me to start missing them but pick-up time wasn’t close enough for me to wish I could leave them there a bit longer, I was hunched at the kitchen table with my computer. The house was silent apart from the muted hum of the laptop fan. The day wasn’t cold enough to have the heating switched on, but for some reason it appeared to have gone into overdrive. Perhaps it wasn’t used to being worked so hard – a bit like my brain.

I wouldn’t have been surprised if my own CPU had been about to burst into flames.

But I was getting nowhere.

I stood up from the kitchen table, stretching my tight shoulders, and poured another glass of water from the tap. I’d been sitting there, hunched over in a posture that was unfamiliar to me after so many years of not working at a desk, since getting back from dropping the children at nursery, and now it was almost time to pick them up again.

I’d sat down with the intention of catching up on LinkedIn, putting out some feelers to recruitment agents to let them know I might be back on the job market in the autumn. But my mind kept veering to Zara. The fragments of information she’d shared with me about her past. The different stories she appeared to have told my friends. The version of her past that Patch had kept secret for so long.

And, overshadowing it all, the revelation from Rowan that Zara was ill – Zara could be dying.

I couldn’t believe it – I didn’t want to believe it. But the picture Rowan had shown me on Zara’s social media had all the hallmarks of authenticity. Before, when I’d felt vague doubts about the truth of something Zara had said about her background, or her family, or her whereabouts, I’d been able to brush it off –It doesn’t matter. She’s our friend, and that’s all that matters. Besides, all the versions of her history I’d been exposed to before had been second-hand – something she’d said to Kate, or Patch, or Rowan, that didn’t quite match with what I recalled her saying to me.

But this was about Zara today, not some shadowy past Zara.

The more I thought about it, the more puzzled I became. And then something had awoken in my brain – a part of my own past that felt so foreign to me now it was like a different version of me. Way back when I was at university, before the Girlfriends’ Club, before Patch and the children, I’d imagined myself qualifying as a lawyer, prosecuting people who’d done wrong or defending those who’d been falsely accused.

I’d imagined my working life becoming a remorseless quest for justice and truth.

In the end, of course, it hadn’t happened. My final degree was good, but not good enough for law school. So I’d decided to find work as a legal secretary, learn the ropes, gain contacts and experience, and seek to qualify later on. But life had got in the way – the need to pay the rent, the fact that I found the job I was doing interesting and absorbing enough not to hunger for more. Then I met Patch and our relationship took on such importance that I was happy to put my career on the back burner – and once we had the children, I’d had no choice but to put it on hold entirely.

Now, though, I could feel that old Naomi resurfacing – the girl who’d studied all night long, only realising when my alarm clock went off that I hadn’t been to bed. The girl who’d loved to read and research and remember details.

I could put those rusty skills to work now, I thought, and discover the truth about Zara.

Except I couldn’t.

A Google search for her name brought up a handful of unsurprising results – Zara Lovejoy reporting on the Fendi show at Milan Fashion Week, Fall 2015. Zara Lovejoy on the return of the over-the-knee boot. Could Natalie Bryant be the next Tyra Banks, asks Zara Lovejoy.

All of it was consistent with what Zara had told us about being a freelance fashion editor and stylist. But it all seemed – incomplete, somehow. There was no Zara Lovejoy profile on LinkedIn – well, there was, but she was a structural engineer based in Michigan. Entering zaralovejoy.com into my browser tab took me to a page offering to let me register the domain myself. Searches for freelance fashion writers in Paris yielded a number of names, but not Zara’s.

So I turned back to social media, where I knew she had a presence. I was reluctant to look at her Facebook feed, because that would have meant following her again, and I didn’t want her to see a notification warning her that I had. Fortunately, I discovered when I logged out of my profile and searched for hers, it was public, so I was able to view it anonymously.

Until recently, her feed had been full of fabulous clothes, trips to Milan, New York and Shanghai, Zara exuding effortless glamour. Then a few months back – shortly before Andy’s funeral, I realised – all that had stopped. There was a post from early January with no picture accompanying it; it was just a few words on the screen.

So I went for a smear test last week. It’s true what they say – French gynaes are the best! Dr Hubert can look at my bits any time he likes, haha! And he’ll be seeing a lot of them over the next while, because I got the results back and they’re not good.

There were a couple of dozen replies. Mostly along the lines of, Oh no, hun, are you okay? but others saying things like, Try not to worry. This happened to me and I freaked out! But I had a procedure to zap the cells and now I’m fine. Bet you will be too.

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