“It was. But that’s OK. We were all still friends. Until you started going out and I was the third wheel.”

There was too much truth in that to deny. Hannah and I spent a lot more time together without Izzy after that. We were a couple, that was normal. But then every time Izzy was with us it felt a bit like she was crashing a date, even if it wasn’t actually a date. I got kind of annoyed with her sometimes even though I knew it wasn’t her fault. I’d thought I’d hidden it better because she’d never mentioned it.

“We both loved you, though,” I offered, and I immediately wondered if love or loved was the right tense.

Izzy bit her lip. “What if part of me was happy, then, when Hannah told me she wanted to end it? I didn’t think I was, but what if I was?”

“You weren’t.” I shook my head.

“How do you know?” she said.

“Well, what if you were? So you had a selfish feeling. I know you, you have a lot fewer of them than most people.”

We sat for a couple of seconds in silence and I thought about how I really did know the person next to me. I knew the contours of her face more than I knew my own. I knew her so well I could pick her out of a crowd at the funfair, in a sea of people. And I knew what kind of person she was. Even if things changed, if she took up knitting or deep-sea diving or she got married or she adopted fourteen cats and lived in a lighthouse, some things would never change. The years of petty squabbles and sleepovers, first loves dissected, notes passed and secrets shared. It hadn’t disappeared because they were over, and it couldn’t be undone.

“What now?” Izzy asked.

I didn’t know if we could be friends again after one conversation. Had too much time passed or did a few months mean nothing in the grand scheme of things?

“Now we open these envelopes,” I said, unsticking the seal and pulling out a sheet of paper.

30.

“Beth, we have a genius in our midst,” Dad boomed as soon as he got in the door. He waved my exam results like they were a trophy he’d won.

Beth was holding a bottle of bleach and the house smelled like she had disinfected it entirely. In the last couple of weeks of living together, I’d discovered Beth’s nervous habit was cleaning. It was also what she did when she was angry or upset about anything ranging from not being able to find her late father’s watch to running out of tea bags after the shops were closed.