Page 81 of The Fall-Out

‘Why what?’ I asked.

Abbie took a breath. ‘Why when I kind of asked Zara if she could be a bridesmaid too and she said she was too busy, I didn’t push it.’

I swallowed, the piece of sausage I’d been eating suddenly feeling like a golf ball in my throat. ‘You asked her? I never knew.’

‘I’m sorry, Nome.’ Abbie smiled. ‘I know I should’ve checked with you first. I knew you wouldn’t be comfortable with it, after what happened. But it felt like the right thing to do. I’d have felt awful not asking, and I was ninety-nine per cent sure she’d say no, so I took the risk.’

‘You see?’ Kate said. ‘Handled it like a pro.’

‘What would you have done if she’d said yes?’ asked Rowan.

‘I honestly don’t know. But she’s in New York now, apparently, so there’s no way she could have come out for the hen night and dress fittings and everything. I was pretty confident.’

‘I…’ I took a breath and admitted, ‘I don’t know if I could have gone ahead with being a bridesmaid if she was too. I’m sorry, Abs. I’m glad she couldn’t. It would have been just… too awkward.’

‘Because of Patch?’ Rowan asked.

‘Of course. But also – the way she was the last time we saw her, it was like she hated me. Hated all of us. Even if we’d all apologised and hugged it out and stuff like that, I still feel like – like we can’t be friends in the way we were before. Not ever again.’

It was true. Zara’s dramatic departure from the group had left me grappling with conflicting emotions: fear that she’d somehow return to seek revenge for what I’d done; regret that things had turned out as they had; but mostly, overwhelmingly, relief. I’d quietly unfollowed her on Facebook and although I felt guilty about doing that, it was nothing to the general background noise of the guilt I felt about Patch and me being together.

I’d have said it cast a shadow over our relationship and in a way it did – but it was the shadow of a distant, passing cloud on a sunny day, because I was happier than I’d ever been. Although Patch’s work still took him up to distant Aberdeen for weeks at a time, we texted constantly, saw each other as often as we could, and our reunions were blissful and passionate. Already, we were talking about having a future together, and what that might look like. Lying in bed together, we’d teasingly discussed the names of our future children, where we might live and – with Abbie and Matt’s wedding approaching – had joked about him one day putting a ring on my finger and making an honest woman of me.

‘Has anyone actually been in touch with her, apart from you, Abs?’ Kate asked.

‘Andy still speaks to her sometimes,’ Abbie said. ‘That’s how I found out she’d moved to New York. She’s put so much distance between us – not just physically, you know what I mean. When we used to be so close. And we haven’t done enough to stop her.’

‘Zara’s a complicated person,’ Rowan said carefully.

‘It’s like she was always part of the group, but also kind of separate,’ agreed Kate.

I felt as if we were swimmers taking our first steps into dark, cold water, not knowing how deep it would be, where the current would take us, or whether the others would follow. As a group, we didn’t gossip about one another. I could only recall discussing one of my friends when she wasn’t present on a handful of occasions, and then it had been positively – when we’d agreed on a gift for Kate’s birthday, organised flowers for Abbie’s engagement, or talked about ways we might murder Paul after he and Rowan split up.

‘It must come from having grown up in care,’ I said. ‘Isn’t attachment disorder a thing, or something like that?’

Abbie looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language. ‘Zara didn’t grow up in care. Her dad was something massive in the oil industry and she spent her childhood in some kind of palace in Saudi Arabia with millions of servants. Boarding school, yes, but not care.’

My face must have looked just as blank with surprise as Abbie’s had. I remembered how I’d felt when Zara had confided in me about her past – shocked, of course, but also sorry for her, admiring of how far she’d come, proud that she’d chosen me to confide in.

And it hadn’t been true. Or if it was, she’d told Abbie something completely different, which wasn’t.

‘I kind of assumed wealthy parents, too,’ said Rowan, ‘although she never explicitly said. I mean, you have to have money to live the way she does. It’s not like fashion pays well, unless you’re Kate Moss or someone.’

I remembered the seedy hotel in Bloomsbury where I’d dropped Zara off that drunken night. It certainly hadn’t seemed like a place where someone who had money would choose to stay. At the time, my thoughts had been so occupied with questioning the presence of the man I was sure I’d seen there to reflect on what it meant about Zara herself.

‘But it did pay her well,’ Kate argued. ‘Wasn’t she, like, a child star and made a fortune doing that, but then when she was a teenager she was hospitalised with anorexia and had to stop because she nearly died? Or – hold on – was it only me she told that to?’

‘I think it was only you,’ Rowan said, after a moment’s silence. ‘It’s like she – I don’t know – tailor-made versions of herself to tell each one of us, because she knew we’d never talk about her behind her back.’

‘And we never have,’ I burst out. ‘Not until today. Kate, did she make you promise you’d never tell us – tell anyone – about the anorexia stuff?’

Kate nodded. ‘She bloody well did. She swore me to secrecy. I’d have felt bad keeping secrets from the rest of you normally but I went along with it because – you know – you want your friends to trust you. It’s kind of important.’

‘And we trusted her.’ Abbie raked a hand through her hair, like she was trying to reorganise the contents of her brain. ‘We never questioned any of it.’

‘I can’t believe I never asked her about her work in more detail.’ Rowan was looking past me, out of the window, as if it would allow her to see into the past, remember the detail of conversations she’d long forgotten. ‘If I had, I’d have realised things didn’t quite add up. I just took everything at face value.’

‘Why would someone do that?’ Abbie asked. ‘Just why? Did she feel she wasn’t good enough for us, or something?’

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