When Olivia Berrington gets the call to tell her that her best friend from college has been killed in a car crash in New York, her life is turned upside down. Her relationship with Sally was an exhilarating roller coaster, until a shocking betrayal drove them apart. But if Sally really had turned her back, why is her little girl named after Olivia?
As questions mount about the fatal accident, Olivia is forced to go back and unravel their tangled history. But as Sally’s secrets start to spill out, Olivia’s left asking herself if the past is best kept buried.
Excerpt:
“I know. I’m saving you from yourself.”
He’s towering over me, ruddy and damp from the g ym,
smelling not of sweat or of aftershave, but of a smell peculiar
to him. He’s ginger y-blond, with a boyish lankiness that
suits the irrepressibility of his personality. He’s bendy and
spring y and unstoppable, constantly in motion, and yes,
before you ask, I’m more than a little bit in love with him. I
always have been, ever since he walked into my high school
politics class, his timing impeccable: my parents were in
the middle of their gruesome separation and I was ripe for
distraction.
James was an army brat, the youngest of three boys, and
the family had recently been transported to Northwood, the
boring north London suburb we lived in, which was dominated
by the naval base. A life spent being uprooted from place
after place could go two ways. For James, rather than making
him shy and mistrustful, it had given him the cast iron certainty
that he could walk into any situation and charm his
way to the very heart of it. It wasn’t oiliness or manipulation,
it was pure self-belief combined with an innate knowledge
that he was attractive.
It was that age and stage where boys and girls first peek
over the barricades and try out being “friends”—a funny
old version of friendship in which you can snog furiously
at a party one night and go back to being mates the very
next day. Or at least other people could do that. James and
I had one such night at school, an hour spent kissing in the
boys’ cloakroom during the first- year Christmas prom— it
was brief and clumsy and awkward, and yet I did nothing
but daydream about it for months, staring wistfully through
my clumsily applied eye makeup and playing “Wuthering
Heights” on a loop, while he remained utterly oblivious.
I hoped with every fiber of my being that he’d come back to me, that I’d be able to prove myself the second time around, but he’d already moved on, climbed back aboard the romantic merry-go-round and recast me as his long-lost sister. That’s not strictly true, there was one more time but now— now is not the time to think about it. Sally whispers across my consciousness but I push her away. Perhaps it’s the ferocity with which I suppress her that makes her continue to surge up, like those schlocky horror films where the hero tries more and more elaborate methods to destroy the invincible slasher.
James leans across me, digging the wooden spoon into
the pan and taking a greedy mouthful.
“Perfect,” he says, grabbing a bottle of wine from the
fridge and plunking down plates on the table.
“It needs another ten minutes,” I protest.
“Yeah but you’ve got a date.”
It’s yet another soul-destroying Internet date born out
of necessity— I’m thirty- five, and most of my contemporaries
are coupled up, though not necessarily happily. Even
so, I don’t think many of those discontented partners are
looking to roll the dice again, and even if they were, I never
envisioned being someone’s difficult second album. I want
to be the answer to a question they’ve never been able to
phrase, for me to feel the same way about them, rather than
a compromise born out of a disappointment.
It’s not like I haven’t tried the compromise route. My last
proper boyfriend was a perfectly nice man called Marco
whom I met at a Christmas party a few months after my
sister Jules had got married. I was secretly, silently panicking,
and I managed to convince myself that I’d alighted
on my one true love, rather than admitting that it was the romantic equivalent of a game of pin the tail on the donkey, the two of us flailing around in the ark, desperate to believe we’d somehow found the sweet spot. We moved in together far too quickly, and immediately started arguing about the kind of piffling, trifling things, like whether the pepper should live on the table or in the “condiment cupboard,” that made it clear that when we had to make decisions about things that really mattered, we wouldn’t survive. As I wept fat, salty tears of disappointment on James’s shoulder he came up with the brilliant suggestion we should live together and here we are, eighteen months on. He’s an employment lawyer—unlike me, he easily earns enough to live alone—but I think that he values having someone to come home to just as much as I do.
By now he’s shovelling the curry into his mouth like he’s
rescuing a very, very small casualty who is trapped under
the rice.
“Let me have a look at him then.”
“Who? ”
I know perfectly well who.
“I’ll get your laptop.”
As he goes off to find it, I try not to brood about the
unfairness of the fact that he doesn’t have to submit himself
to this kind of indignity. Women just seem to appear
in his life, like fruit flies around a mango, and, while he’s
not exactly a bastard, he’s not exactly not. Take last month’s
victim (Anita? Angela . . . something beginning with an A).
I met her shaking the last of my granola into a bowl. W hen I
futilely rattled the empt y box she fashioned her mouth into
a theatrical “oh!” and promised to replace it. She was as
good as her word, leaving a replacement on my bed the very
next day with a sweet, flower y postcard saying how much she was looking forward to getting to know me better. No time: before I’d got so much as half way through it James had finished with her, spooked by the seven individually wrapped presents she’d lovingly bestowed for his birthday. “How did she take it? ” I asked, knowing from even those brief fragments of contact how gutted she’d be. “It was like shooting a fawn,” he said, shoving his gym bag into a backpack, and I thanked my lucky stars for how it had played out between us.
It’s not like I’m one of those weird masochists who marries
serial killers and gaily drowns out the sound of their
victim’s screams with the vacuum cleaner: James as a
friend is a million miles away from James as a boy friend.
He truly is my best friend—the only person in the world
that I’m as close to is Jules—and until I meet someone I feel
a real heart connection to I’m truly grateful to have him
there to shield me from the chill.
“Do you really want to go out? ” he says, coming back
in, with my ancient laptop whirring into life between his
hands.
Of course I don’t, what I want to do is slob out on the sofa
watching The Apprentice and getting drunk with the person
I like being with most in the world, but 365 more days
like that equals another whole year consigned to a loveless
wasteland.
“Yes,” I say, slightly unconvincingly, “sort of.” I’m fighting
to stop myself from melting in the face of his obvious
glee that I might nix my plans and stay in with him. “Anyway,
I have to.”
“We haven’t hung out for days,” he says, turning the
machine toward me so I can log on, while he gives me
puppy-dog eyes from over the top of it.
“And whose fault is that? ”
“I miss you,” he says. “It’s been a mad week. But here I
am, your willing slave, ready to go out and buy more wine
and watch Siralan kick some corporate butt.”
“You know perfectly well he’s Lord Sugar,” I say, swivelling
the computer back toward him so he can check out Luke, a
quantity surveyor with kind eyes, who at this very moment
is probably sitting in his office mentally rehearsing a few
witty opening gambits in his head. I hate Internet dating.
“Why are you meeting him so late? ”
“I told him I’d probably get stuck in the office.”
“Or is it because he looks like the spawn of Mr. Baxter? ”
“He does not!”
Mr. Baxter was our chubby, well-meaning history
teacher, whose sweat y hands invariably left a damp imprint
on your essay when he handed it back.
“Look at those cheeks. He’s definitely got a bulimic hamster
vibe going on.”
“Don’t be mean!” I say, peering critically at his picture.
He’s not madly good looking, it’s true, but there’s something
honest about his gaze, and I liked the way his profile didn’t
read like a psycho’s shopping list of nonnegotiable attributes—
he sounded like a proper human being. Sounds.
“Just saying, Livvy, I don’t think we’ve found the one.”
It was half an hour later when I stepped out of the house,
having guiltily and inevitably cancelled my date, and somehow
ended up volunteering to be the person to go to the
liquor store. James called me as I got to the end of the road.
“I know, I know. I won’t get any thing rank just because
it’s on special.”
“Livvy, you need to come home.”
“I’ll only be five minutes.”
“Seriously. Turn around now,” he said, his voice shaking.
James never sounded like that.
“What is it? ” Slivers of dread crawled dow n my back like
icy raindrops dow n a w indow pane. “Tell me.”
“I’m just going to say it,” he sa id, steel ing hi msel f.
“Sally’s dead.”
About Eleanor Moran:
Photo Credit: Charlie Hopkinson.
Eleanor Moran is the author of three previous novels: Stick or Twist, Mr Almost Right and Breakfast in Bed, which is currently being developed for television. Eleanor also works as a television drama executive and her TV credits includeRome, MI5, Spooks, Being Human and a biopic of Enid Blyton, Enid, starring Helena Bonham Carter. Eleanor grew up in North London, where she still lives.
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