Page 85 of The Love of Our Lives
‘I know, I’m a horrible person,’ she says quickly, seeing my face, ‘but I bumped into him at the pub one night and he was drowning his sorrows, and I’d been having all these worries about how different Toby and I were. One bottle led to another and . . . oh god.’ Fran puts her head in her hands. But almost immediately, she lifts her head up again, looks at me dead on. ‘The next morning, I was physically sick so many times for what I’d done, and I told Simon we needed to tell you the truth straight away, tell Toby too. But then, everything sort of drifted on. You kept working more and more and Toby went away on all those business trips . . .’
‘Then you and Simon drifted on too,’ I say steadily, ‘and I found the dinner receipt.’
Fran nods. ‘Yes, and I was sure you’d see right through it. I was fully prepared to come clean, to get it out in the open. But then you decided to leave for Edinburgh and I just. . . .’ She takes a breath. ‘You and Simon had already broken up anyway, and you were starting this new life, so I figured, maybe we’d let sleeping dogs lie?’
‘But then he came up to see me,’ I say.
‘Yes . . . and I was terrified you’d find out.’
‘So that’s why you were pushing me towards Adam.’
‘Not just that,’ Fran says, eyes widening. ‘I genuinely wanted you to be happy.’
‘Funny way of showing it.’
She shuts her eyes briefly. ‘Then at the wedding, Simon started saying he couldn’t continue with you again without being honest about what happened, and oh god, I just died inside. But I wanted to say thank you . . . for not saying anything at the time.’
I don’t reply initially, as I try to gather my thoughts, as the full picture emerges clearly in my mind. Emily suspected Simon was cheating on her and that was the trigger for her to finally try a new life. Because sometimes you just know something deep inside and you don’t need proof. So she did it – left it all behind and started again. Then she went down to Fran’s wedding in London, deliberated coming back to it all, coming back to Simon, but we both found out the same thing at the same time – it was Fran he’d been cheating with. And suddenly it all came crashing down.
There would be no going back.
That was it – that was Emily’s clincher.
‘And I love Toby, I really do,’ Fran is saying. ‘It’s the worst mistake I’ve ever made, and I just can’t . . .’ she lets out a sob now, ‘I can’t handle the idea of telling him. He’ll definitely leave me, you know he will. What am I going to do?’
As Fran rambles on about how sorry she is, my mind starts to clear suddenly, settle. We might not be friends again but I know just how terrible she feels – how she’s paid for this a thousand times over in her head, like I did with Cat – and maybe somewhere beneath it all there was a silver lining for Emily; the first push she needed to get out there and change things. And although I could shout at Fran; rant about what a horrible friend she’s been, sometimes there really is nothing else to be done –shit happens in life and there is no way back. But you can still go forwards and hope the light eventually shines through.
‘What you’re going to do,’ I say steadily, ‘is stop living a lie, Fran, because that is no way to live. And don’t make Toby’s life a lie too. At least give him the chance to decide what’s right for him.’
Fran looks up at me, tears in her eyes, but then finally, she nods.
‘And what are you going to do?’ she almost whispers.
I pause, suddenly uncertain.
‘Because despite what you might think,’ she adds, ‘I really did mean it when I said I wanted you to be happy. When you moved up here, I was panicked, of course, but it was clear quite quickly that it had been a good choice – you really doing it finally.’
‘Doing what?’ I ask.
‘All of it; all the stuff you never had a chance to before. And you’re right about the work, E – you genuinely did so great with your career. But this new Emily is great too . . . this new, slower, Emily seems happier.’
‘And Adam’s not too bad either,’ Fran adds with a glint in her eye, and I can’t help letting out a laugh.
A bubble of light passes between us, the old dynamics coming through again. Then Fran sniffs; looks at me.
‘Will you ever be able to forgive me?’ she says, with tear-stained eyes.
I pause, realising my future right now is still really quite unclear.
‘Maybe,’ I say eventually. ‘Let’s see what happens.’
And with a tearful smile, she finally gets up and leaves.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Three weeks to live
For the next week, I try to just focus on living my life here as much as I can, while I can – so Adam and I cook together or go out for food most nights, and I seem to have this insatiable hunger for it all. We go up Munros, and camp under the stars again in the Pentlands, and I really start to understand what William meant by simply picking one place, one person, and just loving that life. And I think Adam is starting to understand it too, and that constant restlessness in him is calming, for now anyway. Emily’s old memories and feelings have stopped appearing for a while and I can’t help but wonder why. Will they come back?
