‘Can we have your leaving drinks here?’ Sarah asked. ‘Just the three of us? I don’t really like anyone else.’
Lee laughed. ‘Other people are overrated.’
Anna thought about all the leaving dos she’d been to, in chain restaurants and bars around the corner from the office. How the management would pay for the first round of drinks as long as you chose a cheap beer or the house wine. How someone would drink too much too early and start spillingsecrets. How some young thing from sales and someone old enough to know better from legal would sneak out together hand in hand, thinking no one had noticed. How the person leaving would cry. She’d never really thought about the day it would be her.
After they’d drunk three cocktails and it was getting on for eleven, a small corner of the bar became a sort of makeshift dance floor, and Lee pulled Anna and Sarah onto it, holding their hands and shaking his slim hips. Anna felt free and light, and wondered whether her mind had been working away on this decision without her realising it. She closed her eyes and spun around, feeling a little dizzy, a little drunk.
‘I have to go. I have a date,’ Lee said.
‘At half eleven?’ Anna asked.
Lee shrugged. ‘I mean sex, okay? I’m going to a man’s apartment for sex.’
Anna hugged him, turned to Sarah. ‘Shall we make a move?’
They left the bar together and Lee hurried off to somewhere uptown.
‘Want to walk back to Brooklyn?’ Sarah asked.
It was late, and Anna knew she would regret it in the morning, but it was a warm evening and she wasn’t quite ready for the night to end. She took Sarah’s arm and they headed in the direction of the Williamsburg Bridge. Sarah was quiet for a few minutes, and Anna wondered what she was thinking about, but she knew better than to ask. When Sarah was ready, she would say what she needed to. They’d walked almost ten blocks by the time Sarah spoke.
‘I know about you and David, you know,’ she said.
Anna hadn’t expected that.
‘How long have you known?’
‘Oh, ages.’
‘Does Lee know?’
‘I doubt it. He once told me he thinks David’s gay and doesn’t know it yet.’
Anna laughed. ‘Why did you never say anything?’
‘Because you never told me. I was waiting for you to tell me.’
‘I’m sorry, it was complicated. I loved him, and I thought for a while that he loved me, but then…’
Sarah stopped walking, rolled her eyes. ‘He screwed you over. How unsurprising.’
Anna wished she was on a subway, then. She admired Sarah’s directness, the way she never let anyone get away with anything, but she was so bruised, so broken. Couldn’t Sarah sense that, and be gentle with her?
‘Is he the reason you’re leaving?’ Sarah asked.
They were walking again, and Anna couldn’t look across at Sarah. ‘Maybe. I don’t know. Sometimes it’s just time to go home, you know?’
They’d reached the bridge. Anna thought about how her relationship with David had taken place solely in Manhattan. He’d never once come over to Brooklyn for her. He was one of those people for whom Manhattan was the whole of New York. He didn’t like things to have edges, for anything to be messy or difficult.
‘I thought he loved me,’ she said. ‘But he didn’t. And I can’t go into work and see him every day and pretend I’m okay with that. I need to remove myself, while I still have a bit of dignity.’
‘I’ll miss you,’ Sarah said.
And when Anna looked at her, there were tears in Sarah’s eyes. Anna reached for her hand and squeezed it. ‘I’ll miss you too.’
‘Have you thought about what it’s going to be like seeing Jamie all the time?’ Sarah asked.
Anna hadn’t thought about that. She’d been focused on getting away from David, on being closer to Nia, on enjoying the things about London that she’d missed. But since David, Jamie had faded. He was someone she could have imagined herself being with, who shehadimagined herself being with, for all those years. But she wasn’t going to yearn for him while he was making a life with her best friend.
