Neil Osborne. If she’d felt distanced from her friends before, it was Neil who sealed her alienation.
‘Because Sunday afternoons were family time, which, for Mona and Dan, meant long lazy roast lunches around Nicci’s big oak table. And for Mona Thomas’s lover meant roasts at home. With his wife, Tracy (although Mona did her best not to give the woman a name, just as she didn’t want to see her face). Tracy, she forced herself to think, and his three teenage daughters.
So it was always just Mona and Dan. Mona’s lover was never there to top up her glass or squeeze her knee under the table at some private joke; never there to kick a ball around David’s back garden or talk sport in the kitchen.
But then, to be fair, Neil had never been invited.
It wasn’t that Nicci and David excluded him, more that they didn’t know he existed. None of them did.
They knew he had existed. To begin with, they’d even managed sisterly empathy. ‘He wants to have his cake and eat you,’ Jo said, thrilled at her own witticism. Mona had just confessed she’d fallen for a married man, with all the usual qualifications: I didn’t know to begin with . . . She doesn’t understand him . . . He’s not happy . . . They’re only together for the sake of the children . . .
‘Mona,’ Nicci said, as Jo and Lizzie rolled their eyes.
And they all chorused their favourite line from their all-time favourite movie, ‘He’s never going to leave her.’
Mona’s mouth had twisted as it always did when she was a little bit hurt, a little bit guilty, but didn’t want to show it.
‘You’re right,’ she said, forcing a smile and channelling Carrie Fisher as she knew she was required to do. ‘You’re right. You’re right. I know you’re right.’
But that was three years ago. More. What they didn’t know was that he was still around. They thought Mona had dumped him because that was what she’d told them. It wasn’t a lie, exactly; more a lie of omission. She’d intended to end it, putting it off each time she saw him, but then, out of the blue, he dumped her, and to her surprise and horror she’d thought her heart was going to shatter all over again.
In the end, it was easier to let the others think she’d been the one to do the dumping. And when they’d been so pleased they cracked open a bottle of Nicci’s favourite pink Laurent Perrier to celebrate, Mona knew she’d been right. Better by far than telling the truth, which was that she’d do anything – anything at all – to have him back.
Despite the fact she’d been on the receiving end of a cheating husband herself, and knew precisely how it felt to be left.
So when Neil turned up at the fashionable organic restaurant where she was manager, claiming he couldn’t live without her – literally, that was what he’d said: ‘Mona, I can’t live without you’ – well, Mona just ‘forgot’ to mention it the next time she saw her friends. And the next time, and the next. And because there’d always been a part of herself she’d kept private, the deception hadn’t even felt that unnatural. And then it felt too late, like she’d missed her chance to tell them the truth. And now . . . well, now she had.
The sound of an engine igniting brought Mona to, just in time to step back into the shadow of a six-foot garden wall as David’s people carrier appeared, indicated and turned in the opposite direction. Nearly seven thirty. And still no Jo. Lizzie was going to be livid.
Chapter Seven
‘Where the hell have you been?’ Lizzie had barely opened the front door before she started in on Mona. ‘It’s nearly half-past!’
‘You want the honest answer?’ Shaking the rain from her umbrella, Mona leant it against the wall of the porch.
‘Would I like it?’
‘Doubt it,’ Mona said.
‘Then forget it.’ Turning her back on her friend, Lizzie marched back to the kitchen. Charlie and Harrie were charging around in increasingly small circles, but they were now washed and wearing pyjamas. The kitchen table still looked like a battle in a biscuit factory, but the washing-up was done and the wood worktops were, at least, visible.
‘I was hiding round the corner like the pathetic coward I am,’ Mona said, pointing to the drenched lower half of her jeans, ‘waiting for David to leave. I just didn’t bank on a monsoon.’
‘Shhhh.’ Lizzie’s gaze flicked towards two pairs of small but flapping ears. ‘You could have texted me; at least waited somewhere dry. I’d have let you know when the coast was clear.’
‘Where’s Jo?’ asked Mona, hanging her damp jacket over the back of one of the mismatched kitchen chairs.
‘Stuck in traffic, she said. And she had to nip home. Should be here any minute.’
‘Probably avoiding you know who too,’ Mona concluded, turning her attention to the tiny hands now clinging to her wet legs. ‘Hello, my lovelies.’ Sweeping Charlie and Harrie up, one under each arm, she spun them around until their squeals pierced Lizzie’s ears.
‘When did you get so big?’ Mona groaned, setting them down with a kiss each.
‘Again!’ Harrie insisted.
‘Don’t. You’ll make them si—’
‘Just one,’ said Mona, spinning on the spot.
‘Mo . . .’ Lizzie protested.
‘Shouldn’t you two monsters be in bed?’ Mona asked when she’d stopped.
‘Nooo!’ Harrie shrieked.
‘No bed!’ That was Charlie. ‘Auntie Lizzie say no bed.’
‘That doesn’t sound like Auntie Lizzie to me.’ Mona raised an eyebrow.
‘Did!’
‘It’s true.’ Lizzie waved an open bottle of Sauvignon Blanc at Mona.
‘Just a small one.’
Lizzie raised her eyebrows. ‘No small glasses in this house.’
‘As it comes then.’
‘We agreed, remember? It’s for them, after all. They should be there for the ceremonial opening of the wardrobe.’
‘Wardrobe!’ Harrie and Charlie shrieked, running around the kitchen again. ‘Wardrobe!’
‘Do you feel weird?’ Mona asked half an hour later when they had transferred to the large bedroom that took up the entire front half of the first floor, where Nicci had spent most of the last six months of her life, when she hadn’t been in hospital.
‘Not weird, exactly,’ Lizzie lowered her voice. ‘Just, you know, empty. Like a piece is missing.’
‘I do, really weird.’
‘Well, you would, wouldn’t you?’ Jo said, walking in with a bottle of pink Laurent Perrier and three fresh glasses. She set the glasses on the bedside table, slit the foil and began unfurling the wire.
‘Why me more than anyone else?’
Jo smiled grimly, although she didn’t feel much like laughing. If a year ago someone had told her they’d be standing here, the three of them . . . Three . . . She shook herself.
‘Pot-kettle,’ Mona said. ‘And anyway, isn’t it about time you mentioned your little bequest?’
‘Stop it, you two,’ Lizzie said. ‘Little ears.’
But the little ears were shut. Their owners fast asleep, curled up, their dark blond heads like inverted commas on the pillows of David’s bed. Thumbs