Second Chance - Jane Green [8]
She hasn’t been in that much recently, not least because of her exhaustion. Sleep is becoming a growing problem, and Holly’s defences are nowhere in sight when she wakes up in the middle of the night, her heart pounding with fears she refuses to acknowledge. She is finding herself sleeping more and more in the middle of the day, yet however much sleep she gets, she never feels truly energized.
Now, sitting at the kitchen counter after another daytime nap, Holly finds herself thinking about when she had last been truly happy. School? Well, no. She hadn’t been happy there, but outside school, when she, Olivia, Saffron, Paul and Tom had been together, then she’d been happy.
And at university. She and Tom, best friends, in love with one another since the day they met at fifteen, but somehow never managing to make it happen… Those had been happy times.
Holly smiles as she remembers those days. She hasn’t spoken to Tom for weeks. They kept in touch for ages with phone calls, then dwindling emails; but once Tom had met Sarah while she was working in his London office, then moved to her home town in America to marry her, their friendship never seemed quite the same, although Holly always thought it was just a phase.
Olivia, she has discovered, works for an animal charity. Every now and then Holly will spend an afternoon Googling friends from a previous life, hence her discovery of a picture of a smiling Olivia holding a kitten at a benefit to raise money for her charity. She had looked the same, other than that her beautiful waist-length hair was now in a short bob. Holly had sent her an email, years ago, to which Olivia had responded warmly, but somehow they had never managed to follow through.
Saffron, as befits someone named Saffron, is now a semi-famous actress trying to become a movie star in Los Angeles. She has been in several low-budget British films, has had tiny parts in major films, and is often recognized in the streets. She is regularly profiled in British magazines and newspapers as the next big thing; however, at thirty-nine – even though Saffron would never admit it – Holly knows that Saffron is unlikely to be the next big anything in Hollywood movies.
Holly hasn’t seen Paul for years. He and Tom have kept in touch. Tom, in fact, seemed to keep in touch with everyone, albeit sporadically, but now and then he’d send Holly an email, making her laugh with stories of what Paul, the eternal womanizer, was up to.
Tom would say, once he married Sarah, that he was able to live his life vicariously through Paul, but Holly remembers that Paul got married a couple of years ago, to a beautiful girl, someone successful, if Holly remembers correctly, and Paul had sworn to Tom that she had changed him completely.
Holly remembers sitting at the hairdresser’s, flicking through Vogue, and stopping short when she turned the page and suddenly came across Paul, lounging across an oatmeal-coloured Eames sofa, dressed head to toe in Prada, looking suspiciously like a male model, with a gorgeous blonde draped between his legs, a Chloé dress on her spectacular figure, her head thrown back, hair like a silken wave over his arm.
Her mouth had dropped open as she started reading about the marriage of this new power couple: Paul Eddison, journalist and man-about-town, and Anna Johanssen, founder and CEO of fashionista.uk.net.
Of course Tom had told her that Paul was getting married, but she had no idea it was such a big deal. She had pored over the pictures, stunned at how trendy Paul had become, but when she’d phoned Tom to squeal about it, Tom had just laughed.
‘It’s not what he looks like,’ Tom had said.
‘But I saw it with my own eyes,’ Holly had insisted. ‘He looks like a bleeding model. What happened to the permanent stubble because he couldn’t be