Page 6 of When I Awake

‘Why am I not surprised,’ Ryan said with a wry smile.

‘You should probably blame me,’ I apologised, standing back in an unspoken invitation for him to come in. ‘We stayed up late last night, chatting.’

Ryan followed me down the narrow hallway to the sun-filled kitchen, where the smell of breakfast toast still lingered in the air.

‘It was lovely having Hope stay in her old room again,’ I said, my voice soft with nostalgia. Last night had been a different kind of sleepover from the type I remembered sharing with Hope. This time the bed was free of cuddly toys; there had been no bouncing on the mattress or bedtime stories, but just knowing my daughter was asleep in the room next to mine made it the best night I’d had in a very long while.

We had stayed up long after midnight, snug and cosy in fleecy pyjamas, sipping on mugs of sweet hot chocolate, and sharing stories. Hope was endlessly fascinated about my life before I had met Ryan. And I was hungry for everything I had missed in hers. We were like two jigsaw fanatics, determined to find all the missing pieces of each other’s past.

‘Did Grandma and Grandpa like all your boyfriends before Dad came along?’ She had been sitting cross-legged at the foot of my double bed, while I had occupied the pillow end in an almost identical pose. We had been like the mirrored halves of a slightly imperfect Rorschach inkblot. One side crisp and clear, the other a little blurred with age.

‘Who said therewereother boyfriends before your dad?’ I had said, trying and failing to pull off sweet and innocent.

I snorted and ducked as she lobbed a scatter cushion my way. ‘Yeah, right, Maddie,’ Hope had said scornfully. I was mostly ‘Maddie’ rather than ‘Mum’ and I was okay with that. Well, mostly okay.

‘Your grandparents liked a few of them, but there were one or two who they took an instant dislike to.’

‘But they were the ones you liked best, weren’t they?’ Hope had asked with surprising insight.

I had shrugged, as though the arguments that had raged about the length of my boyfriends’ hair; the tattoos on their arm; or the motorbikes they drove, hadn’t felt like the end of the world to me at the time. But it had, and I could still remember those feelings. Because for me those rows weren’t buried deeply in the past; for me they seemed almost recent. It felt as though I was straddlingbothsides of the argument Hope was having with Ryan and Chloe. I could see both sides with equal clarity.

‘I am not going to stop seeing him,’ Hope had muttered darkly. ‘Dad can’t make me.’

I sighed softly. Feeling as though I was tiptoeing through an emotional minefield. One wrong step and everything could blow up in my face.

‘What’s his name, this boy of yours?’

‘Dan,’ Hope had replied, her entire face lighting up in much the way I imagine Juliet’s had probably done whenever she had spoken about Romeo.

*

‘Coffee?’ I now asked, waggling the flask in Ryan’s direction. The flat was quiet and the drum of water from the shower carried easily to the kitchen.

‘I might as well. It looks as though she’s going to be a while. Somehow Hope manages to take three times as long as Chloe does to get ready!’

I came perilously close to reminding him that he used to jokingly complain about how long it tookmeto get ready, but wisely thought better of it at the last moment. Reminding Ryan about anything from our past was like playing hopscotch on quicksand; it was way too dangerous and could only take us somewhere we really shouldn’t go.

‘I suppose Hope told you about this boy she’s met,’ he muttered.

I placed his coffee in front of him, with exactly the right amount of sugar and milk without having to ask. Some things remain so deeply imprinted in your brain you simply never forget them.

‘She did mention him… in passing,’ I said, playing down our conversation and still managing to feel disloyal to Hope for sharing, and also disloyal to Ryan for not disclosing more. Double agent was clearly another career choice I shouldn’t bother pursuing.

‘Well, he sounds like a right twat to me.’

‘Yes. I got the impression you didn’t exactly approve of their relationship,’ I said cautiously, pulling out a kitchen chair to sit opposite him.

Ryan might have forgotten a great many things about the way we once were, but he was still pretty good at reading my conversational subtext.

‘You think I’m wrong, don’t you? Thatwe’rewrong,’ he corrected, making it clear he and Chloe stood shoulder to shoulder on this one. I had no intention of getting in the middle of a family feud and raised both my hands in the universal gesture of surrender.

‘I’m not taking sides here, Ryan. I’m Switzerland.’

His eyes met mine in a way they seldom did any more. It’s true what the poets say about them being the windows to your soul. Once, a long time ago, my soul had been so closely entwined with his I thought nothing could ever separate us. But I was wrong back then. And Ryan was wrong now. I just didn’t have the nerve to come straight out and say so. He’d had sixteen years of experience being a parent, whereas I only had a year or so under my belt.

‘Just be careful how you handle it with her,’ I urged. ‘The more you try to pull her away from this boy, the tighter she’ll hold on.’

‘And you know that how?’

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