‘Have you thought any more about contacting Alice, or your other friend, Nina?’

Cindy was keen for Jules to reconnect. That’s why Jules had found herself in Guildford a few weeks ago, to tell her mother everything. She’d expected denial or derision from Nancy, she hadn’t expected her to burst into tears and blame herself. Jules had been confounded until her mother explained that Jules’s father had had a gambling addiction too, which had started shortly after he’d sold his business and retired. ‘His busy brain got bored,’ her mother said. They’d protected Jules and her brother from it. That was why they downsized and moved, why they never decorated, why her mother would roll her eyes when Jules would sit with her father placing bets for him. He couldn’t do anything by then, after his stroke, but the damage had been done. She’d sold the house after he died and moved to a small flat back in Guildford, near her friends, where she’d never wanted to leave. ‘I should have warned you,’ Nancy said. ‘I didn’t think…’ She didn’t need to finish that sentence. No one, least of all Jules, would have thought that could happen to her. But it did.

As well as Cindy being keen for Jules to connect with Nancy, she wanted her to find a way back to her friends. ‘Perhaps you should discuss this with them? Among other things,’ she said now, her eyebrows raised.

Jules shook her head to indicate ‘no’ but answered, ‘I do want to explain. I feel like I’m ready, or close to being ready – are you ever totally ready, I don’t know? But also I still feel let down by them. I look back and I was acting so strangely that weekend and didn’t they notice? Didn’t they wonder what was going on? I think they had to have noticed and it must have pissed them off and that’s why I’ve not heard from them since. But can twenty years of friendship come undone in one weekend?’ She was animated now, because this was something she thought of often, something she pored over in meetings with other addicts who had wiped out decades of friendship and family ties.

‘Maybe they had their own things going on that weekend?’ Cindy asked.

‘Hm,’ Jules frowned. It seemed unlikely they were experiencing anything on the same scale as Jules, but then Alice had seemed worried about Charlotte and Nina wasn’t quite herself either, come to think about it. A small thought burrowed its way up from her subconscious: Nina wasn’t drinking. She was stressed about work. Stressed enough that it had irritated her IBS. Jules googled Nina most days and there was always something new: a profile piece or expansion to the La City Pâtisserie product range: her cutlery and glassware was now being sold at Anthropologie. Work stress still didn’t seem like enough though. It wasn’t very Nina, to have cut her off because she was busy at work.

‘What does Paul think?’ Cindy asked.