My Best Friend's Girl

  “I see what you mean…We’re not doing a very good job of planning a future together, are we?”

  “I guess not.”

  “But I do want us to have a future, though,” Luke said.

  “Really and truly.”

  “Don’t Teganize me,” I replied, with a thin smile.

  He laughed, then his features fell into seriousness. “I want us to be together for…for the rest of our lives. And I’ll think carefully about moving in, OK?”

  “OK.”

  Luke grinned, kissed me full on the mouth without checking if there were any Angeles staff around first. As he held me close and kissed me deep, a small treacherous inkling began in my mind. It started growing at an alarming rate until it was a full-blown thought that eclipsed everything else: that whole conversation would have gone so differently if I’d had it with Nate.

  “And we found the response we had to the vouchers had increased five percent on the last issue of Living Angeles,” Betsy was saying to the assembled members of the advertising, merchandising and marketing teams for our weekly roundup meeting. “We’re investigating why this is the case, although Kamryn thinks it’s because we used a picture of people instead of the usual still lifes to push them.” She’s impressive, I thought as I listened to her. And she’s glowing. Glowing because she was madly in love with the man she’d met back in the days when Luke and I hated each other. She’d been right, he was The One.

  I glanced down at my notepad and instead of notes, it was covered in drawings of houses. Houses that my “The One” had told me a couple of hours ago he had to “think carefully” about moving into with us. That still stung. Betsy stopped talking and, because I wouldn’t be called upon now to participate, I tuned out as Luke’s PA, Carla, started the diary check, where she listed all the meetings the three departments had in the coming month to ensure there were no clashes. “And I’ve just had confirmation that the Edinburgh direct marketing campaign rollout meeting will take place on the fourteenth, Luke. Shall I go ahead and confirm your attendance?” Carla asked.

  My pen froze in doodling on the page. The fourteenth? Hang on. I glanced up at Luke, who had paled as he looked at Carla. His eyes slid across the room to me, then moved away as he seemed to immerse himself in thought. I didn’t know what he was thinking about. What was there to consider? Of course he couldn’t go. Of course he couldn’t.

  “Luke?” Carla asked when he’d been silent for a full minute and the quiet had caused all eyes in the room to fall upon him. “Shall I confirm your attendance and book the hotel?”

  “Erm,” Luke’s eyes moved back to her, via me. “Erm, sorry, Carla. Yes. Please confirm my attendance.”

  My fingers closed in a death grip around my pen, tight enough to crush the plastic case as the heat of anger burned through my veins.

  “If there’s no other business then let’s end there,” Luke said. “Thanks, guys.” Everyone picked up their pads and pens, cups of tea and coffee, and glasses of water and filed out of the boardroom. I remained in my seat, rage stampeding through me. Luke stayed in his seat as well until the last person to leave shut the door behind him.

  “I can’t believe you’re going away on the fourteenth,” I said, my voice quiet and measured, a far cry from the bile I wanted to scream at him.

  “I was never meant to,” he said, trying to placate me. “I was hoping it would get canceled, we’ve been dancing around with dates for weeks now and I was hoping that this wouldn’t turn out to be the only time in May we were all available.”

  “But you’re not available; it’s Tegan’s birthday. You’ve known about it for months. We’ve been planning her party for months. You’re not available.”

  “Ryn, you remember what it was like to have a career, what extra you have to put in. I can’t say that I’ve got a child’s birthday party so I can’t make the meeting.”

  Remember what it was like to have a career? I still had a career, I was still in charge of the magazines and they were bloody good even if I did say so myself. The extra you have to put in? I was always putting in extra. The only other people who worked as many extra hours as I did without the glory, without the recognition and chance of promotion were other mothers who had to do it to keep their head above water. Wouldn’t I love to be working all those hours during the day, stopping to do another type of work, and then picking up all over again a few hours later because I’d get a promotion at the end of it. Or even recognition. No one went on about the magazines being a success but I’m sure there’d have been trouble if my work slipped. The board of directors would notice the quality of my work then.

  Of all the things Luke said that made me want to swing for him, though, it was “a child’s birthday party.”

  “A child?” I said venomously. “Since when has Tegan been ‘a child’?”

  “That came out wrong.”

  “Really. Well, this certainly won’t come out wrong—I’m taking back asking you to move in,” I said.

  “What?”

  “You called Tiga a child. We can’t live with someone who can put his job before the girl he’s been treating like his daughter for the best part of a year, then dismiss her as ‘a child.’ She thinks of you as her dad. Even though she knows Nate’s her father, you’re the one she wants to be her dad. And you see her as ‘a child.’”

  “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “Don’t care.”

  “I’ll see if I can change it.”

  “Don’t do us any favors, Mr. Wiseman. I can vaguely remember what it was like to have a career, and I remember that if you cancel meetings you don’t look professional. I wouldn’t want you to have to look uncommitted in front of your colleagues, what with you having a career and everything.”

  He glared at me, not willing to concede he was wrong in this. “Fine!” he spat, throwing his pen across the long meeting table.

  “Fine,” I stated.

  I got to my feet, picked up my notepad, pen and mug of cold tea. My heart was beating at triple speed in my chest and my limbs were trembling as I walked the length of the room.

  “I’ll see you tonight,” he said as I fumbled with the door handle.

  “Not at my flat you won’t,” I replied without looking round. “Why don’t you go back to that flat you were so desperate to hang on to earlier and plan some more meetings.”

  His reply was a heavy sigh.

  I stomped down the corridor, rage pulsing in my temples. I was as angry with myself as I was with Luke. Because I understood why he’d chosen to go to the meeting. There was a time when nothing would have stopped me working. He’d always been über-ambitious. And, much as he loved Tegan, she wasn’t his daughter, wasn’t his responsibility, so he was allowed to put his career before her, before us, because, in the grand scheme of things, he only had to look after number one. That was all true, but it didn’t mean I had to like it.

  chapter 43

  Tegan turning six meant she was going to be an official grown-up, at least that’s what she kept telling people. “I can do lots of things when I’m six,” she’d remind me on a daily basis in the run-up to her party.

  I couldn’t think of anything she couldn’t do at five that she could do at six, although my answer was always, “I know,” so as not to put a damper on her enthusiasm. The day her birthday dawned Luke wasn’t there. He was at work before he left for the meeting that I had asked him not to change on our account. The rough patch we went through before Christmas was a walk in the park compared with the preceeding three weeks. We’d been silently fighting about the Scotland trip since that meeting. Three weeks of not getting on, of him going back to his Alwoodley flat after Tegan had gone to bed, of us making love only three times because I’d discovered this huge reason to believe we weren’t Plan A with Luke. “When you get to the end of your life, I’m sure you’ll be grateful that on the day Tegan turned six you were off at a meeting,” I said to him the night before he left.

  “Please…I feel
bad enough as it is, Ryn. I didn’t think and there’s nothing I can do now. I’m sorry.”

  “Tell it to your kid. Oh, I mean, my kid. The ‘child.’”

  Luke drew back and looked away, furrowing his brow and grinding his teeth together, his face pinched as though he might cry, and I knew I’d gone too far. I’d seriously wounded him. “I’m sorry,” I said, taking his hand, kissing it, “that was an awful thing to say. I know you don’t think that. Let’s call a truce, OK?”

  “You’re right to be angry, I was out of order. I do think of Tegan as my kid. You know that, don’t you?”

  I nodded. “Course I do.”

  We kissed and made up.

  Tegan took the news better than I had done. “But are you coming back the tomorrow of my birthday?” was all she asked.

  “Yup, first thing.”

  “OK,” she shrugged happily. “I’m going to have balloons, you know.”

  We had hired the community hall down the road for the party and were having a red and yellow bouncy castle out back. We’d invited thirty children, most of them from Tegan’s class at school and a couple from her holiday playgroup.

  I’d had considerable help from Mrs. Kaye when it came to organizing the party and, where Luke would have been, Nate stepped in. He took me to the supermarket the day before and we’d spent nearly two hundred pounds on party food: sausage rolls, mini sausages, mini pizzas, burgers, crisps, cakes, fizzy drinks and more white bread than I’d ever seen in my life. As a concession to healthiness, I’d bought strawberries, pears and apples to make a fruit salad. Nate had then stayed most of the night handmaking beef patties, and cutting round shapes out of the white bread to make them into burgers. The fridge was crammed with food, and he’d said he’d arrive early to help make the sandwiches.

  I’d been up since five o’clock buttering bread for sandwiches by the time Tegan ran into the kitchen at seven o’clock, holding on to Meg, screaming, “It’s my party day!”

  “I know!” I said and scooped her up into my arms. She felt real now. A proper human being, not the shell of a girl who’d been too scared to breathe when I’d taken her from Guildford. Her royal blue eyes looked keenly into my face and I couldn’t help but smile.

  “Does Tegan want her present now or would she rather wait for her party?”

  “Now!” she squealed.

  We moved to the sofa and I put her down beside me. I reached down the side of the sofa and pulled out the parcel that I’d hidden there last night when Tegan had gone to bed. It was wrapped in gold paper and tied with a red bow. Ever cautious, she put down Meg and took the parcel in her little hands and stared at it in wonderment. “Is it really for me?” she asked.

  “Read the tag and find out.”

  “For my darling Tiga. Happy sixth birthday, love Mummy Ryn,” she read dutifully. “It is for me!” she laughed. She held on to the present as though it was a doll.

  “Open it, then,” I coaxed.

  “Oh yeah.” She giggled. She examined the parcel, looking for somewhere she could open it without tearing the paper. When she didn’t find it, she bit her lower lip and looked up at me in bewilderment.

  “Do you want me to help you?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  I found where I’d taped down the thick gold paper, and peeled it back carefully so as not to distress my obsessively neat child. “There you go.”

  With glee, Tegan opened up the parcel and her mouth fell open, her eyes wide. “Wow,” she said and reached into the paper’s folds and pulled out a white dress with red spots. It had a full skirt, long sleeves and a red ribbon around the middle. “It’s a dress!” she exclaimed. “It’s very pretty.”

  “I thought you might want to wear it to your party.”

  “Am I ’lowed? Really and truly?”

  “Well, yeah. Although, I think you should see Luke’s present as well.”

  I reached down and found the package Luke had wrapped and left the night before. To save time, I untaped the box-shaped parcel and gave it to her. She pulled off the paper and revealed a shoebox. She opened it and found white shoes with red spots on them. “It’s the same as my dress!” she said.

  “So you can wear them today.”

  “Thank you!” she said and threw her arms around my neck. “I love it, Mummy Ryn.”

  “There’s one more present for you to open right now.” I pulled another parcel, smaller than our other packages from the side of the sofa, and repeated the opening procedure. “To Tiga, with love from Nate.” She gasped with delight. “Mr. Nate brought me a present!” She eagerly opened it and then squinted at the contents in a confused manner. He’d bought her a small silk bag that matched her dress and shoes.

  “It’s a bag, so you can carry things in it today.”

  “It’s very pretty,” she decided.

  “Yes, and you’ll look very pretty with it.”

  “I wish my mummy could see me.” She scrunched up her face and nodded at me. But, instead of looking sad, she seemed fine. As though she’d resigned herself to the fact that her mother wasn’t going to be at the party, had come to accept the reality of the situation.

  “So do I. But, I do have something from your mummy.”

  Tegan’s already wide eyes widened even more. “She sent it from heaven?” she gasped.

  “No, sweetpea, she gave it to me before she went to heaven.”

  I’d known she was ready to get this, she seemed so much more settled than when we’d arrived in Leeds, but still I had toyed with the idea of opening it and reading it first. I just wanted to check that it wasn’t anything upsetting, then realized that Adele wouldn’t put anything that would hurt her daughter. And anyway, the white envelope wasn’t for me, it was for Tegan. I took the card from my dressing gown pocket and handed it over. Her little fingers received the envelope and, biting her lower lip, she stared at the white square before she sought my guidance.

  “Shall I open it?” she asked.

  “If you want to, baby.”

  She opened it carefully and just as cautiously pulled out the card. On the front was a blond princess with a pink crown and a huge number six on her pink dress. “Happy Sixth Birthday” the front declared. Tegan opened it.

  My darling Tegan,

  Happy Birthday.

  I’m sorry I can’t be there with you today but I’ll always love you.

  Never forget that, OK? Mummy loves you.

  I’m sure you’ll have a fabulous time today.

  Have a dance for me.

  I hope you’re being good for Kamryn.

  Love, Mummy.

  A smile lit up her face as she turned to me. “My mummy loves me,” she stated. “She said so. In my birthday card.”

  “I know.”

  Her smile grew. “You are Kamryn, aren’t you, Mummy Ryn?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Am I being good for you?”

  “You’re being more than good for me, you’re being perfect for me.”

  “So my mummy will be pleased.” Again, the kind of logic I never expected from a six-year-old. I leaned forward and took her in my arms. I frequently had a need to hug Tegan these days. She’d be minding her own business, watching television or drawing or reading, and she would find herself swamped by one of my hugs. Unexpected and unsolicited. I couldn’t help myself, I just needed to remind myself that she existed, that she was touchable. Our roles had been reversed these past few weeks. After Adele died, Tegan always needed to have me around, so I could ground her with a touch or a look. Now I needed to know she was always going to be there. I needed to be reassured that she was real and that she wasn’t going to do what Adele had done and leave me. There was a limited time, too, before she’d squirm out of my hold, too grown-up and cool to be hugged by me. Right now she accepted my cuddles without question or resistance.

  “Right, baby,” I said releasing her, “we’ve got a lot to do before your party. Let’s have your bath, and then you can have breakfast before Mr.
Nate, I mean Nate, arrives to make sandwiches? Does that sound OK to you?”

  She nodded and, still holding the card in one hand, she scooped up Meg. Tegan was going to carry the card around with her all day, as it turned out. She would only forget about it much, much later in the day.

  chapter 44

  Tegan beamed at her princess cake.

  She’d been grinning for most of the day and she showed no signs of stopping. With every present, she grinned; with every kind word, she grinned; with every game, she grinned. But her biggest smile of the party so far was reserved for the cake. The six candles reflected in her royal blue eyes as I set down in front of her the large square chocolate cake with pink icing and a picture of a princess on top. Everyone crowded round and sang “Happy Birthday” to her. She paused to make a wish before blowing out the candles in one huge puff. After the candles, she opened her mountain of presents. My parents had bought her a digital camera, my sister’s children had sent her the complete set of Roald Dahl books. My younger brother’s two children had both sent her Disney DVDs and my older brother’s children had bought her a karate suit.

  After the cake most of the children ran back to the bouncy castle and swings outside. Tegan went with them while I took the cake into the hall’s kitchenette to cut it up for the goodie bags. This party was going well—during the last two hours only a couple of children had cried, and most of the food sat in uneaten heaps on paper plates rather than being stamped into the parquet floors inside or the neatly cut grass outside. And no one had wounded themselves. That was a perfect party as far as I was concerned. The two parents who had stayed for the party followed the children outside, leaving only me in the kitchenette, while Nate, the fourth adult, sat in the hall, talking to a young lad who hadn’t really joined in with the others.

  Nate had made himself indispensable. He had been on bouncy castle duty when we’d first arrived, overseeing its inflation, then making sure that no kids ended up on it with their shoes on. When one of the other mums took over, he went round picking up rubbish and dumping it into black trash bags. He’d whizzed back to the flat a few times to grab things I’d forgotten, like the camera and some of Tegan’s birthday presents. He’d then made a mercy dash back for the candles for the cake. No one who saw how useful he had been would guess that he didn’t like being around children, didn’t understand them and didn’t know how to relate to them.