Page 9 of One Moment in Time
Eileen popped the top off another beer and handed it to her son. ‘Did you mean what you said about having a party?’
Aiden sighed. ‘Truthfully? Nope. But it seemed like the right thing to say. To be honest, I just want to split and go find Layla and find out what the fuck is going on.’
Her son rarely swore in front of her but Eileen didn’t even flinch. If she was ever going to give him a pass, it was today. She could sense his despair and knew that the speech he gave a few minutes ago was inspired by equal parts embarrassment and regret that he’d dragged all his friends here for nothing.
‘Well, here’s the thing, son. You can go try to track down a woman who has just performed a public ramraid on your heart. Or we can sit here and gaze at the ocean and feel sad. Or we can postpone both those things until tomorrow and go back to your first suggestion – take advantage of the fact that your friends are here, there’s loads of booze ad food and I’m in close proximity to your father and, just for you, haven’t attempted to kill him yet.’ The sheer effort he put into smiling at her joke made a piece of Eileen’s heart turn to mush.
He didn’t answer though, so she nudged her suggestion along.
‘So, what do you think? Want to dance with your aging mother, while she’s still got the energy? I could drop dead at any moment and you’d regret saying no.’ It was a low blow but right now she just wanted to protect him, to help him get through this, and the best way for him to do that was to stay here, with people who loved him and could take care of him until the sting of this subsided enough for him to think straight.
‘Ah, emotional blackmail,’ he said, but the corners of his mouth were turning up, so she knew she was making a dent. ‘You know you’re shameless, don’t you?’
‘I absolutely do,’ Eileen said. ‘Now come dance with your mother before I have to go drag my fake boyfriend over here instead. You really don’t want me dancing with him. I think he used to be a Chippendale so there’s every chance we’d make a spectacle of ourselves.’
Eileen held out her hand and for a few seconds she wondered if he was going to overcome his urge to go find Layla. Just when she thought she was going to have to pile on some other layer of coercion to keep him there, he took her hand and spun her round.
‘You definitely won’t kill Dad?’
‘Not today,’ she promised.
‘Then I guess my broken heart can wait until tomorrow.’
5
ZARA
April 2023
Gary Gregg still hadn’t replied to Zara’s Facebook message.
He hadn’t even responded to her friend request. Although, in fairness, as far as Zara could see, he hadn’t done anything else on Facebook either, so maybe he was just one of those people who had opened an account and then promptly forgot about it, or decided it was too much work, switched off notifications and then, as before, promptly forgot about it.
‘Or maybe reunions with old pals are just not his thing and he can’t be arsed,’ Kev suggested unhelpfully over breakfast. He was a coder for a software company in offices just a couple of streets away from Blooming Sisters, so he had a regular sleeping-over schedule that generally consisted of five nights a week at Zara’s place. She tended to ignore Millie when her sister questioned whether their relationship was love or just a convenient place to stay for Kev, because he could leave their flat above the shop at 7.50, for his whole ten-minute walk to work. Not that Millie actually knew this for sure, because half the time he was gone by the time Millie came home from whatever party or premises she’d ended up at the night before.
The front door banged. Yep, case in point.
Millie staggered in, still in the dress she’d been wearing when she’d headed out with friends the previous evening, holding her heels over her shoulder with one hand, clutching her handbag with the other.
‘Ooops. The grown-ups don’t look happy,’ she joked, her gaze going from Zara to Kev and back again.
Zara tried not to laugh, but she couldn’t help herself. At twenty-eight, she almost always went to bed early so she could be up and feeling good to open the shop the next morning. It was nothing to do with any kind of adult maturity. She just liked to be organised. To be prepared. To avoid chaos and panic where possible. Being inherently sensible was her lifelong affliction and there was no getting away from it.
Kev pushed his coffee mug across the table and grabbed his backpack from the floor. ‘Right, I’d better go. See you tonight?’ He framed it like a question, but it really wasn’t. Today was a Thursday. And every Thursday night, Kev stayed here. Just like he did on a Friday. A Saturday. A Monday and a Tuesday. He didn’t stay Sunday, because Zara had flower market at the crack of dawn on a Monday, and he didn’t stay Wednesday because he played five-a-side football with his mates down at the local sports centre. Every other night? A veritable fizzle of excitement that invariably involved some form of microwave pasta after a long day in the shop, then alternate choices on what to watch on TV, followed by one of them falling asleep first on the sofa.
As the front door banged behind Kev, Millie plonked down on the chair he’d vacated, swaying a little as she reached for Zara’s mug of black coffee. ‘Tell me you two got naked last night, then had raunchy sex while swinging from our extremely stylish IKEA paper light shade?’
‘We did,’ Zara deadpanned. ‘Twice. If you look closely, you’ll see the marks my fingers left while I was clutching on for dear life.’
Millie groaned. ‘I really wish I hadn’t made that joke in the first place. I’m too close to a hangover to have that image in my brain.’ She plonked her head down on the table. ‘I will give you all my worldly goods, including my Ninja air fryer, if you make me some toast.’
At the other side of the table, Zara focused back on the laptop. ‘I don’t want any of your worldly goods and, eh, the Ninja air fryer is mine.’
Millie raised her head slightly and cocked open one eye. ‘It is? Then it needs cleaning. Someone – and I’ve no idea who – tried to make fish fingers in it the other night and it all went wrong.’
Zara had been about to push her own toast towards her sister, but air fryer outrage stopped her and she pulled it back, taking a large bite to emphasise the point.
She checked her laptop again, just in case, by some miracle, Gary Gregg had responded in the last five minutes. Nope.
