Jessica grabbed my hand. “You’re kidding?”

“No.”

“This is too much. Fucking hell.” She wiped under her eye with a leather gloved finger. “Anyway, a drink? Maybe next week? Mum is being very good on the babysitting front, what with all the sympathy she has for me being a pathetic divorcée.”

I knew there’d been a time where it was abundantly clear I needed to cut Jessica from my life. That the only healthy option was to take a scalpel and carefully trace around our friendship, lifting it out clean. The anguished tears, regret, grief, and missing her before I’d even undergone the surgery. And yet, standing there in the green room, being offered a drink with her, I felt weirdly excited by the prospect. “Yeah, of course. Message me a date,” I said, reminding myself I could always blow her off if I needed to.

“That would be amazing. What’s your number?”

She peeled off a glove so she could thumb it into her latest iPhone and drop-call me. My eyes traveled across her phone, to her leather gloves, to the Chanel handbag draped casually on her arm. It had been a day of shocks that kept coming. “Right, there. I’ll give you a date ASAP. Shit, the time. I literally have to run.” She squished me into another hug. “Fern, this has been amazing. Tonight was amazing. All of it. I’m so happy to be back. Oh my God, my train’s in less than twenty-five minutes.”

“Go go go.” I watched her run off like a gazelle in her knee-high boots. Even in her mad dash, she was perfectly put-together. I pictured everyone noticing when she collapsed onto the Tube, glancing up from their phones and Evening Standards, and taking in this magnet of a woman.

I sighed into my chair and took in the green room around me, the excitable chatter from the theater seeping around the stage doors. Stacy let out a shriek that pierced my ears and I winced. I didn’t need to tell anyone I was leaving. Gwen was way too busy.

Jessica’s missed call sat on the screen. I pulled up the unfamiliar digits and clicked “save contact”—thumbing in her name. I hesitated and then added the “warning” emoji next to her name. Just as I’d saved it, two messages came through.

Heather: Did it go OK? Sorry again I couldn’t make it. Up to my eyeballs in coils. Don’t worry about being a sellout. Sometimes that’s just work. I mean, I have to help literally EVERYONE who comes into the clinic, even if they voted Brexit xx

Ben: How did it go, my glorious sellout? I bet you smashed it.

I reply quickly to Ben’s.

Fern: It went OK. Stacy was exactly who I expected her to be. But hey ho, and yay for the money. Just getting on the Tube now.