Page 4 of The Day After Christmas
‘I know, right? I’d forgotten just how awful she can be.’
‘You didn’t forget. We’ve managed to avoid having anything to do with Bex’s family since school.’
‘You’re right. We have. And now we actually have to spend a whole weekend with her mealy-mouthed mother and her revolting relatives at the wedding. What have we done to deserve this?’ Sophie laughed, then stopped short when she saw Felicity’s face.
‘We haven’t done anything,’ said Felicity, her voice flat.
They pulled into the drive in silence.
And then…
‘Are you okay?’ said Sophie.
‘Of course I am. Why wouldn’t I be?’ said Felicity.
‘Why are you doing this, really?’ said Sophie quickly as Felicity started to unpeel herself from the front seat of the expensive Range Rover. One of three that Sophie and her husband owned.Who needs more Range Rovers than you have people to drive them?
‘Doing what?’ said Felicity, frowning.
‘This. All of this. Helping Bex. Sticking by her. Being her goddamn maid of honour for heaven’s sake. After what she did?’
Felicity turned to look at her friend for a long moment.
‘You keep asking me that.’
‘I know but you never give me a straight answer.’
‘You want a straight answer?’
Sophie nodded.
‘Honestly? I have no idea,’ said Felicity, slipping out of the car and shutting the door behind her.
But she did.
Of course she did.
CHAPTER 3
Felicity had had the perfect opportunity to walk away.
When Bex told her that she and Adam were getting married, Felicity would have been entirely and legitimately entitled to kick them both out of her life forever. Hell, she probably could have sold the story to a dodgy women’s magazine. At the very least, she probably should have slashed holes in their clothes or their tyres or put out an advert in the local paper or something else vengeful, and at the same time suitably petty, to make herself feel better. Instead, she had found a way to, while not exactly forgive them, at least come to an acceptance of the situation.
That way’s name was James.
He’d been furious at first, of course, when Felicity told him how her friends had betrayed her. Hopping mad, in fact. Gradually, though, after many a late-night chat over tea and biscuits, they’d concluded that Felicity would regret it if she ended the friendship with Bex forever. Bex and Sophie were her oldest friends, after all, and, aside from her boss, Andrea, and now James of course, really her only ones. Felicity had no family to speak of, her only brother being rather a difficult case to say the least, and Bex and Sophie had been at her side through theabsolute worst times in her life. Her adult life, at least. So, it followed that she should try and make it work, somehow, right?
That was when she was feeling rational and calm. But every so often, usually after a glass of wine, Felicity would do a bit of hopping herself. Bex had been sleeping with Adam. Of all people. Weren’t there rules about that sort of thing? Some kind of Girl Code? Didn’t breaking it basically make the whole friendship null and void?
In the end, it all came down to one thing. When Felicity first agreed to all this, to supporting Bex through the wedding (as long as she didn’t have to spend too much time with Adam, that was the deal) it was because she was in love. She’d fallen head over heels for James the Penguin Man and it made everything else seem unimportant. When she fell pregnant, that sealed it. Nothing else mattered. It was just the three of them from now on and if Felicity’s friend wanted to marry her noxious ex-boyfriend then at the time she couldn’t have cared less.
Until it all went wrong.
Until their world shifted on its axis.
Now it was all she could do not to cry every single day.
Over dinner that night, James instantly knew something was up.
