bathroom suites in the city. More fool her for hoping to get away with paying that much. The agent had said that avocado bathroom suites were having a renaissance. Lisa had almost snorted her lungs out through her nostrils. The second place was fine; Lisa knew that the agent was right when she said that it probably represented the best she could hope for within her price range. Lisa had hated the agent. Some impossibly young girl called Felicity with perfect teeth and hair, who wore four-inch heels and a one-inch cushion-cut Tiffany diamond engagement ring. Everything about her expression when she’d looked at Lisa screamed, “I know your story. You’ve blown it with a bloke, and you’re on your own again, and you’re climbing back down the property ladder and it’s killing you.” At least that’s how it felt. Paranoia was a new and desperately unattractive habit, she knew. She could have lived there, in the second place. It had a newish bathroom—which was white, meaning that the current owners had let their subscription to 25 Beautiful Homes lapse and clearly had not heard about the avocado renaissance—and an okay kitchen, as long as you weren’t into swinging small domestic pets, and built-in shelves, and it wasn’t painted in a palate of ever more hideous colors, like the first place, which progressed from a navy blue dining room, through a forest green living room into a dark red bedroom that said agent managed to describe as “womblike” without any hint of irony. The second place was beige. “Slipper satin,” according to Felicity, but then she was a wanker. And it was so…empty. So much a house and not a home. Not easily fixed with a sectional sofa and a few framed canvases from Ikea. She missed the mess of Andy. And Cee Cee. Even Mark and Hannah’s was too tidy for her, and this place had made their place look like Pete Doherty’s hotel room. She wanted DVDs strewn around with no hope of being reunited with their boxes, and red wine stains on rugs: muddy footprints in the hallway and grubby fingerprints on the door frames. Anyway—and she knew this was churlish—she hadn’t wanted to be a part of engaged girl’s success story. She didn’t want her to get a bonus for meeting sales targets that she’d use buying lingerie from Janet Reger for her honeymoon at the Ritz in Paris. Oh no. She’d said no. It was too far from the tube. She’d said she’d look again at the budget, which was a joke only she got and not even she found amusing. She was already at her maximum, and probably a little bit beyond it.
She didn’t want to go out there again. She wanted a huge gin and tonic in a pub garden and a good laugh.
ANDY WAS WAITING FOR HER THIS TIME. IT FELT LIKE AGES SINCE she’d seen him. Her heart lurched. He looked so absurdly handsome, and the thought surprised her, because she wasn’t used to thinking of him as being absurdly handsome. He was, though, tonight. He’d cut his hair different, and his glasses looked new. They’d only been apart a couple of months. Maybe he’d washed her right out of his hair, and developed twenty-twenty vision so he could see her clearly. She hoped not.
Making herself walk slowly, refusing to let herself get excited, she went over to him. His expression betrayed nothing of his motives. He might just have come over to ask for her share of the council tax. Or to return the Georg Jensen silver earring she was pretty sure she’d left on the bedside table.
Again a bench. This was all getting very Forrest Gump. Except that if life was a box of chocolates right now, she thought she did know what she was going to get. The marzipan one no one else ever wanted.
Maybe it was more CIA classic movie. They were both wearing raincoats. He didn’t look at her as he spoke.
“Your sister came to see me.”
“Which one?”
“Jennifer.”
She would have guessed Amanda, or Hannah. Jennifer surprised her a little.
“I’m sorry. She shouldn’t have interfered.”
“She was trying to help. It was pretty nice of her.”
“I know. But you made yourself abundantly clear, and I’d told her that. She shouldn’t have come. She’s got things back on track with