Chapter 15Zoe

Zoe was lying on her bed in the spare room in Avery’s flat when the message pinged on her phone.

She knew it would be from her mother (Cally still wasn’t speaking to her, which actually made her feel a hundred times worse than her parents’ divorce did), but she didn’t look at it right away because she knew her mum hated the weekends she spent with her dad and Avery, and looking at the message would make her imagine her mother all lonely and upset at home. But then she realized that if she didn’t reply she’d worry her mother, and everyone was already worrying far too much, so she picked up her phone, read the message and composed a reply.

Love you too. All good here. X

She stared at it and then deleted the second sentence. It wasn’t exactly good, was it? If she sounded as if she was enjoying herself, she might upset her mother. If she sounded miserable, she’d upset her mother. She had to sound neutral.

Love you too. Learning my lines! X

There. That was better. And her mum would be relieved she hadn’t given up on the play. Yet. She pressed Send, lay back down on the pillow and went back to staring up at the ceiling.

She didn’t hate being here, but she didn’t love it either.

The one good thing about being with her dad was that he wasn’t as emotionally intuitive as her mother, so she didn’t have to try so hard to hide her feelings. He didn’t seem to notice if she was happy or sad or quiet. Or maybe he just felt guilty and didn’t want to confront the consequences of his actions so instead chose to ignore them.

There had been that one excruciating moment early on when her dad tried to explain that he hadn’t meant to fall in love with Avery, and that the passion had taken him by surprise and overwhelmed him, and Zoe had wanted to cover her ears and eyes and tell him that if there was one thing a thirteen-year-old did not want to talk about it was her father’s passions.

Fortunately, he’d seemed to find the conversation as awkward as she did and had never mentioned it again.

Now on the weekends they were together they focused on doing things in the moment and didn’t talk about the situation. Sometimes it seemed odd to Zoe that he never asked how her mother was, but presumably if he really cared about her feelings he never would have left in the first place.

And although the first few times she’d met Avery had been stiff and awkward, it was getting easier.