Page 65 of Forever, Maybe
“Don’t tell me off. Swear to God I’m quitting again at the end of the month.”
Ah. That explained the faint trace of smoke clinging to her during their night out the other week. Nell had been right. She’d taken it up again.
Nell held up her hands in mock surrender. “Not a word, I promise. Fancy sneaking out the front so you can avoid the judgy mums acting like you’re personally poisoning their precious darlings with second-hand smoke?”
Stephanie’s eyes lit up. “Absolutely.”
Sod topping everyone up. The party-goers were familiar enough with the Murrays’ house and the easy-going, help-yourself nature of the annual barbecue. They could sort out their own booze, and she could escape from the noise and the small talk.
These days, smoking had one undeniable perk: because it was so taboo, it guaranteed you ten minutes of blissful solitude. Almost enough to tempt her into taking it up herself again.
Stephanie topped up her glass and took a generous sip, pausing mid-thought. “Oh! That reminds me! Remember thatScottish Postjournalist? Jennifer Frazer.”
Not her again.
“Someone told me the other day who she used to be married to. You know what the journalism and PR crowd’s like—can't keep anything to themselves.”
She leaned in, eyes gleaming. “Come on, let’s go outside. I’ll spill everything. You’ll never guess who…”
Nell, ninety-nine per cent certain she didn’t want to know, followed Stephanie down the hallway toward the front of the house. As they passed the living room, a door left half-closed let voices slip through. Familiar ones.
Trish. Shane.
Shane was mid-sentence. “Stirling Castle? Doesn’t look anything like it. What’s wrong wi’ a nice wee watercolour, or portraits of folk like that one she did of Brenda? If she’d stuck to that kind o’ thing, maybe she’da sold stuff. Took me four bottles of the best single malt to talk MacLennan into putting her in that exhibition years ago…”
The words faded, but the damage was done. A hot wave of humiliation rose in Nell, swamping everything else. That long-ago triumph, the exhibition she’d clung to as proof she was talented, that she mattered, was suddenly tainted. It hadn’t been about her work at all. Just a favour. A quiet nod from one Glaswegian bigwig to another.
A nightclub owner with alleged ties to drugs and extortion no less.
Stephanie had frozen mid-sip, her glass suspended halfway to her mouth. When she turned toward Nell, her expression was stricken with sympathy and worse, pity.
She took Nell’s hand, her grip firm. “C’mon. Let’s get out of here.”
Chapter twenty-seven
Stephaniewaiteduntiltheywere both outside—the weather still dry and warm—before handing Nell her glass. With the smooth efficiency of long habit, she shook out a cigarette, snapped open a Zippo, and lit up, the flame briefly casting her face in gold.
Nell took a generous gulp. It was her first drink all day, on top of barely eating, and it surged through her veins like rocket fuel. The front garden lacked the sprawl and splendour of the back, but its scatter of wildflowers nodding gently in the breeze, while bees weaved in and out of their sunlit petals, offered a quiet charm that soothed the eye.
“Absolute rubbish,” Stephanie said fiercely, her voice low but resolute as she exhaled a stream of smoke from the corner of her mouth. “MacLennan’s Galleries wouldn’t have taken you on if they didn’t believe your work would sell. They arenota charity. Don’t let that old git rewrite history. Come on, Nell, youknowwhat he was like. Strutting around Glasgow like he was the Big I Am. I doubt he was ever half as powerful as he made out.”
But the sting lingered, raw and unshakeable, as though Shane’s words had peeled back layers of confidence Nell hadn’t even realised that she still needed. She leant against the wall, eyes on the road, as a cobalt blue Volkswagen Vista crept past, nosing its way along the street like it had all the time in the world.
A fresh wave of mortification crashed over her. Danny must have known—must have known all along—that the exhibition had been nothing more than a favour pulled by his uncle. He would have been the one to ask. How would he have phrased it?Uncle Shane, any chance you could ask your pals if one of them might consider putting on an exhibition o’ my wife’s stuff? Just to keep her happy?
Worse than the favour itself was the deceit, the fact that he’d sat through that conversation with her—her excitement, her out-loud wonderings about how her work had been picked up after all this time—without so much as flinching.
That rankled more than anything.
With a sigh, Nell turned to her friend, gesturing towards the cigarette in her hand. “Can I have one?”
Stephanie arched an eyebrow, the universal sign forare you sure—are you really sure?But she flicked out a second cigarette and the lighter anyway. Smoking was like riding a bike. Muscle memory took over. The lips knew how to purse, how to inhale, how to exhale. The body, despite all common sense, remembered not to cough and splutter, as Nell’s did now.
The first hit of nicotine sent a rush through her empty stomach, dizziness blooming behind her eyes and her heartbeat thumping a drumroll behind her ribs. She blinked, swayed, then took another drag. Two more. Enough. She handed the cigarette back to Stephanie and wrapped her arms around herself.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t apologise.” Stephanie dismissed it with a wave, flicking ash onto the gravel. She launched into a scurrilous tale about Shane’s so-called glory days—the time police had stormed a basement flat he owned on Blythswood Square, flushing half-dressed women and men (including senior officers and lawyers) onto the streets in the middle of the day.
