Page 100 of One Night in Edinburgh

‘Exactly that.’ Jamie rotates his beer can absently. ‘And meeting at weekends gave us more time together than an evening after work. Thankfully my friend was more than happy to help me out and kept insisting that I take some cash whenever he knew I was meeting you. It was also why I never called you. I couldn’t afford the phone top-ups – and why I sometimes didn’t answer. I didn’t want to you to hear things in the background that might make you suspicious or concerned.’

‘Wow… Jamie.’ I shake my head in amazement at what I’m hearing. ‘I can’t believe you went to those lengths to keep seeing me. I kept asking myself, how did I miss this? But there were no signs at all. You hid it so well.’

‘I had a gym membership nearby that I’d paid an upfront fee on – it had till mid-May left on it. When everything went south, rather than cancelling it for insolvency reasons, I kept it active. I’d gotten to know the staff there and was too ashamed to tell them anyway. It was somewhere I could escape to that wasn’t someone else’s place or a drab room in a hostel. And I kept the remaining decent clothes I still had in a locker there. They were pretty lax about people leaving their stuff.’

‘Wait, you lived here in Edinburgh? I thought you lived on the west coast before this… situation arose.’

‘That’s where I grew up, as you know. I actually had an apartment up Bonnington way, but I went to the gym in Leith because it was near my business.’

‘Your manufacturing business.’

‘Uh… no.’ A guilty look crosses Jamie’s face. ‘That was a previous venture. I sold that business and bought a brewery.’

‘A brewery?’ I try and fail to hide my confusion.

‘Yes, with my friend… my now ex-friend. I didn’t give you any details about my life that were current, because I didn’t want to risk you finding out the truth before I was ready to share it.’

‘Which is?’

Jamie pulls his phone out of his pocket, looks something up on the internet and hands it to me. My eyes scan the headline and text in front of me. I’m so baffled, I can’t take it all in, but the key words dance in front of my eyes.Local artisan brewery… accounting fraud… missing funds… questioned by police… facing prison time.I look up at Jamie in dismay.

‘You went into business with your friend and he screwed you over?’

‘Yes.’ The pain in Jamie’s eyes is clear. ‘He was a mate from uni. Convinced me to invest in the brewery with him as a start-up. I sold my business, re-mortgaged my flat, ploughed all I had into the project, and we also took out a business loan. It was a magical three years, creating a brand that I was so proud of and all these great products – then one of our tax returns flagged an anomaly. We were audited and I was convinced it was an error, but it turned out we were in dire straits financially speaking. The police were brought in to investigate and it turned out my so-called friend had been siphoning money out of the business for nearly two years.’

I inhale sharply from the astonishment that someone who was meant to be a friend could do something so awful. ‘Jamie, that’s unforgivable.’

‘I know. I still struggle to believe it myself. Anyway, long story short: he’s recently been handed a five-year prison sentence, and after losing my home as well as the business, I’m just getting back on my feet.’

Hearing all this, I’m consumed by a jumble of emotions. A deep rush of sympathy for Jamie, incensed anger at his uni friend for ruining Jamie’s life, and a generous portion of guilt and self-loathing, knowing that I must have made an already impossible situation even harder for him.

‘Jamie, I’m—’

‘Don’t, Steph.’ Jamie puts a finger to his lips to stop me. ‘You knew none of this. You are not to blame. I chose to keep it from you, and you drew the conclusions you drew, because I didn’t give you the information to arrive at anything else.’

‘But I could have at least—’

‘No, you couldn’t. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. I have no bad feeling towards you at all. You were incredible. You wanted to be with me even when you found out I was homeless. It was me that pushed you away, because I couldn’t swallow my pride. I was ashamed and I struggled to deal with the humiliation. But I’ve dealt with that now and I realise that I should have put my faith in you from the start.’

‘Oh, Jamie…’

Feeling a bubble of emotion in my throat, I leap out of my seat, rush to the other side of the table and on to his lap, kissing him with the strength of all the kisses I’ve missed out on these last months. As we lose ourselves in each other, I drink in his familiar scent, the feel of his close-cut beard tickling my face, the taste of the beer on his lips.

Wait a minute. The beer.

I pull apart from him and look at him questioningly, my brain flicking back to the news article I’ve just skimmed.

‘Serve Minus Pigs. Is that your beer? From your old brewery?’

‘Ten out of ten, Sherlock.’ He grins at me. ‘The place got sold on as part of the bank reclaiming the money it had loaned us, so at least the beer still exists.’

‘It’s your legacy.’

‘Yes, I suppose it is.’

‘So did you come up with that bonkers name, or was it your so-called mate?’ I wrinkle my nose as I mention the evil bastard who screwed over my wonderful Jamie.

‘It was my idea.’

---