No, no, no, no. Unless she hadn’t been paying enough attention. Unless Andy, noticing the grey shadows, the later nights, the earlier mornings, the missed weekends, hadn’t wanted to give her anything more to worry about. ‘Was he a smoker?’ No. He hated it. She’d given up for him, more or less.

Apparently sometimes, hearts just stop. Literally and otherwise.

Harri needs to centre herself, regroup. She’s OK. She’s alive. She’s got through winter. She’s had a little too much to drink, but she’s a relatively solvent adult woman, in the twenty-first century. She can press a button on her phone and someone will take her home. She rewinds through the evening. What was happening, before Tom arrived? Imogen. Birthday. The Know. All of those young women, under her care, talking—moaning—about their bloody careers, their insecurities, their anxieties and fears. Something weird had shifted. Youth was supposed to mean confidence. Being a go-getter, untouched by tragedy, feeling as though you had nothing to lose. Harri had lost everything, and she was supposed to sympathise with people who were sad because some boring business website hadn’t put their name on a list?

But a memory, a feeling, has been knocked loose. Harri hasn’t wanted to remember the end of her twenties for a reason. Now, she realises how vulnerable she was. How naive. Lit up by hope, soaring, untouchable. Most of the time, her career had seemed to be running itself, carrying her along with it. She felt sure of herself. Her anxieties and insecurities came from a different place. From the back of a Prius, Harri thinks about her twenty-seven-year-old self, and twenty-seven-year-old Imogen, and composes a speech she will never be able to give to either of them:

You will meet people who promise everything, people who seem to flood you with love, who drown you with it, and then kill you with contempt. You will meet people who claim that they want someone to complete them, when they mean that they are so frightened that they are missing something that they’re too scared to give any of themselves away. You will meet people who are so fucked up and angry that they will make it their mission to tarnish your shine.

But if you’re incredibly lucky, you’ll meet someone who is kind and decent. They will want you to grow strong and sure. They will let you build your home with them, inside them. They will never make their own not-enoughness into an excuse to use you up. They will fill your life with joyful noise, the sound of their footsteps in the hall will become the beat of your heart. And all they will ever ask of you is that you love them and let them love you back. THAT’S what matters. That is happiness. And nearly everything else you think you want is bullshit.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

A love story

Harri