Her mom looked off screen, her face instantly readable. Lucy was there, in the room, but didn’t want to come to the phone.

Her best friend didn’t want to talk to her.

Her mom made some lame excuse that didn’t really register, then the phone was passed to Will. “Hey, Jules. Merry Christmas.”

“And to you!” she said brightly as she faked a smile. The phone was on the move again and Jules waited, uneasy, for her brother’s face to reappear.

“Hey,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. Jules saw that he was back in the kitchen and she tried to concentrate on the mundaneness of his surroundings, dreading what she knew was going to come out of his mouth. Oh look, they got a new kettle. That must be for Lucy.

“So, Jules, Lucy, man, she’s …” Yep. He’d gone straight to where she knew he would.

“She is, isn’t she?” Her brother’s grin nearly broke her heart. He was already in deep.

He ran his hand through his hair. “Yeah, look, it’s really new, but I don’t know, I feel something, something … and uh, it’s …” He blew out a breath, the smile growing bigger if that was even possible. “It’s, well, you know …?”

Her brother was babbling, yet everything he was thinking and feeling was right there on the screen. Yep, she had totally screwed this up. She really needed to talk to Lucy and make things right.

*

“Are you sure you don’t want to come?” Jules was packing her carry-on bag for the weekend at Matt’s vineyard. He was due in the next half-hour to collect her.

“Nah, I’m good,” replied Ash from the doorway. “Besides, you don’t want me being a third wheel.” Ash climbed on the bed and hugged one of the throw pillows.

Jules stopped in the middle of folding a T-shirt. “Had you ever intended on coming?” She fixed Ash with a look, but she seemed wholly absorbed in the tassels on the pillow. “Ash, hello?”

“Sprung,” Ash grinned with a shrug, “You guys are cute together, you know.”

“Cute?” Another shrug. Jules finished folding the T-shirt and tucked it into her carry-on.

“Chloe and I had a hunch that you guys might like each other.”

“What, seriously? Chloe was in on this? And if you shrug one more time …”

Ash’s shoulders made it halfway to her ears and dropped. “Look, I’m not going to apologise. I mean, why would I? Matt’s been single for a while, you’ve apparently been single for, well, forever according to Chloe, and what’s the harm in a little holiday fling?”

“Your argument is flawless,” Jules teased. “Did Chloe really say I’d been single for forever?”

“Yeah. So, what does that mean? How long are we talking here?”

“Well, it depends. Are you asking about a relationship or sex?”

“Both, either—no, both.”

“My last serious relationship was in my early twenties.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Why so long ago?”

“That was when my parents split up. Doesn’t take a rocket scientist to connect the dots. I just saw what it did to the two of them, especially my dad. And yeah, they’re friends now, like I said, but my dad was devastated back then. I know he thinks he hid that from me, but I was dialled into it.”