“Lin?” I ask quietly, seeing that my friend still hasn’t shaken off the shock.
She gulps hard, then straightens her back. A split second later, she carries on talking as if nothing ever happened.
“…we’ll have to work with that,” she finishes. “I don’t have anything going on after school—shall we make the cards today?”
I blink in surprise, then nod hastily. “Sure.”
“Great.” You’d have to know Lin really well to notice how stiff her shoulders are and how forced her cheerfulness is right now. “Let’s do that.”
When we get to the door, Cyril pushes himself away from the wall and stands up straight. Lin stops in front of him, and for a moment the two of them look at each other without a word.
I walk into the room and shut the door quietly behind me.
I don’t get the chance to ask Lin why Cyril was waiting for her. Almost the moment I went into the group room, Camille and Doug turned up, closely followed by Kieran; Jessalyn and James arrived less than two minutes later. After the meeting, Lin gave James and me a lift home, and however much I was burning up with curiosity, I didn’t want to talk about it with him around.
Now James has gone off to a meeting with a woman who might buy his Beaufort’s shares, and we’re sitting on my bedroom floor with Ember, cutting out little onesie-shaped cards for thebaby shower so that people can write their guesses for the twins’ genders, lengths, and weights. And if I don’t ask Lin right now, I am actually going to burst.
“What did Cyril want?” I blurt out, so fiercely that she jumps. Ember looks up in surprise. For a moment she looks from one of us to the other, but then her eyes rest on Lin’s stiff shoulders. Without a word, she picks up another piece of card and starts drawing around the template with a white pencil.
Lin stares at the romper suit she’s just cut out. “He said sorry.”
I frown. “And?”
She shrugs. “There’s nothing more to tell.”
I put my pen down. “What was it like? Was he…kind?” Not a word I’d normally have connected to Cyril, but I get the feeling there’s more to Lin’s silence.
“I don’t know. He was…odd.”
“In what way?” I ask cautiously.
“He said we’d be seeing each other at the baby shower at the weekend and that he didn’t want things to be weird between us. He even asked if he should stay away.”
Lin makes it sound like that’s the weirdest thing Cyril’s ever said.
“He apologized to me too. I think he’s in the middle of getting his life back together,” I suggest. “James reckons he genuinely regrets what he did.”
“Sounds more like he wants an excuse to get out of the party,” Ember says, not looking up.
I blink in confusion. “What?”
Ember shrugs her shoulders indifferently. “Lin said he was acting odd. I bet he wants to avoid seeing the girl he loves together with the mansheloves.”
“You think?” I say dubiously.
By Ember’s standards, that’s a worryingly dark view of things. Normally, she’s the optimist, the one who believes in the good in people, while I overthink everything.
I’ve been suspecting that there’s something wrong for a while now. She’s throwing herself into her blog more than ever, barely leaving her room, and if I ask her if everything’s OK, she immediately changes the subject to something innocuous. After all those weeks when I was wondering who she was spending so much time with, I’m now wondering why she’snotspending time with that person anymore.
And why she still doesn’t get that she can talk to me about it.
“I think Cyril hit rock bottom, and now he’s working his way back up again. After what you told me about you and him, I think it’s respectful of him to ask,” I say soothingly to Lin. “It can’t have been easy for him. Anyway, do you want him to not come to the party?”
Lin shakes her head. “No, that would be childish. We’ll both be in Oxford, and we’re bound to keep bumping into each other. And I won’t be able to tell him to piss off then.”
“Youcould. Theoretically speaking.”
Lin’s lips twitch. She tucks her hair back behind her ears and reaches for the scissors. “Anyway, I’m over him.”
