Page 115 of The Twelve Dates of Christmas
“Why are you telling me this now?” asked Kate.
Laura blinked and bit at one of her nails.
“In case this changes things,” said Laura. “If you love him, well, maybe he still loves you too and you’re both too stubborn to admit it!”
“Clearly he is not harboring feelings of love for me,” said Kate. “I’d say he’s pretty well channeling the opposite right now.”
“But if you just talked to him,” said Laura.
“It’s a little late for that,” said Kate. “You should have told me when it could have made a difference.”
Her voice was quiet. She was feeling so many things, but her overriding emotion was anger toward Laura. Her best friend, Laura. Herbest friend, who hadn’t bothered to tell her that Matt had been in love with her. How different might her life have been if she’d known?
“I promise you,” Laura began, “that if I’d thought for one minute that the feeling was mutual, I would have told you straightaway, but you were all about Aaron!”
“You should have told me regardless,” said Kate.
“Let’s just say that I had,” said Laura. “And you dropped everything and rushed back to find he’d changed his mind. It wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility, Kate; he was up and down like a bloody yo-yo. He was married to someone else three months later, for God’s sake! He wasn’t exactly a reliable barometer of emotions back then.”
Kate rose from her chair. Laura looked up at her, her eyes glassy with tears, a pleading expression on her face. Kate didn’t care.
“I hope you feel better now that you’ve purged yourself of guilt,” said Kate. “It must be a relief for you.”
She left her friend sitting alone at the table in the deserted tearoom and set off into the cold dark evening.
•••••
The cold wind bit at her cheeks but Kate hardly noticed. She’d been unfair to Laura and she knew it, but it didn’t make her any less angry with her. And why tell her now? All these years later, when Matt hated her and she was leaving? Why now? Other than to assuage her own guilt.
The snow whipped at her face as she trudged down the lonely lane home. The snow was deep here, almost as deep as her boots. Sheep huddled together on the other side of the wire fence, ghostly forms on the landscape. The wild weather and bleak farmland echoed her mood.
Kate was struggling to understand what cosmic influences had found her at odds with the two people she considered to be her best friends in the world. She didn’t know which betrayal stung more. How could Laura have kept something like that from her?
She found herself haunted by ghosts of a life that could have been. She saw Matt’s arm round her shoulders in the snow instead of Sarah’s. She saw anniversaries and Valentine’s Days and Christmases and birthdays and holidays rushing past her eyes: a phantom life that might have been hers if only Laura had decided differently.
Kate arrived home to find a pie on the kitchen table with a note:
Kate,
Evelyn thought you might need cheering up, she’s made you a steak and mushroom pie.
Love you. Dad xxx
It was still warm. Kate grabbed a fork and took the pie into the sitting room. She switched on the tree lights, built the fire, and put the TV on. If ever there was a time for pie, it was now, Kate thought.
•••••
Kate’s phone buzzed loudly on the coffee table, causing a fork that rested on a discarded plate next to it to vibrate. Kate jolted awake. The sitting room was dark except for the glowing embers in the fireplace and the flicker of an old black-and-white horror movie on the TV.
Kate leaned over and picked up her phone. The time said 5:17 a.m.
“Oh God.” As she moved, a shower of pastry crumbs fluttered off her boobs and onto the carpet. She wiped her cheek; it was wet. She casta glance at the cushion, where a wet mark stood out dark against the velvet.
“Oh, disgusting!” she moaned, realizing she’d been sleeping in a pool of her own dribble.
The phone buzzed in Kate’s hand and she jumped, accidentally dropping it onto the carpet, where it glowed angrily, the wordMumlit up in red letters. Kate scrabbled about and got the phone to her ear.
“Mum?” she said. Still dazed and confused.
