Chapters (51)
- Cover
- Praise for A Season for Second Chances
- Also by Jenny Bayliss
- Dedication
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- Thirty-six
- Thirty-seven
- Thirty-eight
- Thirty-nine
- Forty
- Forty-one
- Forty-two
- Epilogue
- Acknowledgments
- Discussion Guide
- About the Author
- What’s next onyour reading list?
“Won’t it be lovely to be together with all your old friends again, love?” her mum said. “Well, not all of them, but you know what I mean,” she added. Nory did know.
Her eyes wandered over to a framed photograph on the windowsill. A picture of the leavers picnic on the very last day of sixth form. Eight smiling young faces, excited to be moving on to the next chapter of their lives. Tristan sat between Nory and Pippa on the picnic blanket, an arm casually slung over each of their shoulders. He was laughing. Happy. Nory waited for the familiar ache to settle and smiled back at the image.
“Well anyway,” her mum carried on, “I’d better leave you to it. Vera’s about to start on ITV3. Say hello to Andrew for me. Love you!”
“Love you too, Mum. Bye.”
Tristan had been everyone’s friend. At school he’d fallen into the role of peacemaker; there were some big characters in the group and some even bigger egos, but Tristan had a way of calming down heated situations. It was no surprise to anyone that he aspired to be a doctor; his mum was a surgeon, and his dad was a fertility specialist, so it was in his DNA.
He had his ups and downs, but that just seemed to be the way he ticked; he’d have months of being okay and then the cloud would fall, and it would take a while for him to come back out from underneath it. None of them had ever expected that one day he wouldn’t be able to.
Tristan used to say he was his therapist’s favorite client because he was a guaranteed repeat customer. He’d not long come back from a stint working in a hospital in Nairobi when Nory had last seen him. They’d bumped into each other quite by chance in Soho when they’d both wandered into a vinyl record shop. They went for coffee, which became lunch, which ended with both canceling their evening plans and going to dinner together near Leicester Square. Tristan seemed okay—better than okay; he’d said the therapy was really helping.
In fact, he’d been more worried about her. She’d been struggling since moving to London. School and university had felt like a safety net; in those places, she’d always been surrounded by people. Now her friends had scattered, busy building their careers, and the big wide world was lonelier than she’d expected. She felt like she was failing at adulthood while, through the lens of social media, her old friends were adulting like bosses.