Page 93 of The Fate Of Us

“I kissed her. This morning.” I look over to Flo. “She found the books.”

Flo’s gasp rattled in my ears. “Oh shit.”

I saw Jacob’s face change. “What books?”

It was then that I remembered that I hadn’t told my best friend any of this. Not even whathad happened between me and Addy. Nothing.

“Addy’s books,” Flo answered for me.

“Like, her favourite books?” His eyes went narrow as his eyebrows screwed together.

Flo shuffled to face him. “The books she wrote.”

Jacob pulled his head back, his legs falling to the ground and pacing the tiles. “What doyou mean? Addy doesn’t write books.”

“She does, has done since she was ten,” I say to him, my eyes baring no barrier that anyof this was a joke.

His hand racked through the strands of his hair, saying there for a moment or two as hebreathed, “This is news to me.”

Flo takes a sip of her wine before she speaks. “It was news to me too before he told me afew weeks ago—”

“Wha— You knew about this?!”

“Not for long!”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Becausehetold me not to.” They both look at me, before Flo shakes her head andsqueezes her eyes closed. “But can we please get back to the more pressing matter, which is the fact that you two kissed this morning?”

I let out a sigh as Jacob stopped pacing, his arms crossing over his chest andleaning against one of the booths as he eyed me.

“She called me last night, early in the morning. She was at a bar, alone, and I didn’t evenhave to think before I went to find her. I eventually did, and then I brought her back to my place because she’d lost her purse and didn’t have her keys. Anyway, I woke up this morning and found her looking through her books.

“We talked, kind of, before she got a call from Goldie, who’s now moving to London. Shebroke down, curled up against me, and just … sobbed. Then she looked up at me, and I wiped away her tears because seeing her cry always makes me start crying, and then… I kissed her.”

I look up from my hands, twitching and fidgeting, nothing to ease the thumping in mychest. Both of them are fixated on me, as though I’d just told them the meaning of life and everything in their minds finally made sense.

Flo was welling up, I could see that from where I was sat, the sheen that glazed her eyes.

She loved Addy probably just as much as I did, Jacob too.

Then I feel like an asshole, guilt settling in my stomach. The unwelcome tension thattied us all together never should have been there, existing purely because I was too scared to clue them up about what happened, letting them dance around our awkwardness and navigate how to exist in our deafening silence.

It wasn’t fair. On either of them.

But as my eyes drifted over to find my best friend, the brown in his eyes the dullest I’dever seen them… I’d never felt worse.

Jacob was long overdue an explanation. He was there the day we crossed paths again,watching us catch up on the differences seven years and time and space caused us.

But before I can ask whether or not the closedown of the bakery can be delayed for at least a few hours for a deep dive into our history, Flo takes a step closer to me.

“Did you… tell her about…”

I know what she’s going to ask me. It was the one thing she told me I had to tell her assoon as possible, barricade the angst and end the war we’d started. And I didn’t. Couldn’t. It didn’t feel right to, not this morning. I couldn’t tell her that the day she thought I wasn’t at the pier, I was, not when she was sobbing. Not when she’d just found out her baby sister was moving halfway across the world.

“No… but I will.” she eyes me. “Soon. I promise.”

Silence hovers over the three of us, before a rush of air, one that sounded like a crashingwave, blew out of Jacob as he leaned off the booth, his hands back in his hair. “I feel like I’ve just watched the last episode of a ten-series show. I’m so confused it’s not even funny.”

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