Things I Want My Daughters to Know_ A Novel - Elizabeth Noble [77]
She was standing as patiently as she could manage, patience never having been her strong suit, reading Sarah Dunant—completely absorbed by The Birth of Venus—when her mobile rang. Tintin. His name flashed up insistently on the screen and she was almost surprised that she had kept it in the address book.
Ed. Now. Picking at the scab that was starting to heal over. Why did guys do that? Too little too late. She wasn’t interested. She pressed the red button vehemently and made Ed go away.
Three paragraphs of medieval Italy later he rang again. And she pressed again.
By the third call, people in the queue were gazing at her inquisitively. She pressed the green button and held the phone to her ear, thinking that if the phone had video capacity he’d be bloody terrified by her scowl.
The scowl was a fake, though. It wasn’t how she felt. She felt foolish, and embarrassed, and confused by her apparent ability to get something so wrong. When it had felt so right.
She should never have slept with him. She’d been on the money when she identified that as Lisa’s modus operandi and not hers. She didn’t have the right emotional constitution. She’d segued straight into behavior you could only get away with with someone who really cared for you. However entitled to that behavior she might have been…That was what messed it up. When she’d slept with him, before they even knew each other, she’d put herself in the category of girls who weren’t entitled to throw emotional wobblers and that was the same category as girls who didn’t need to be called afterward. It wasn’t really his fault.
Calling now was, though.
“Amanda.”
“Yes.” She sounded as haughty as possible, which wasn’t very haughty. He sounded a little panicky.
“Don’t hang up on me again. Please.”
She didn’t speak, but she didn’t hang up, either.
“Amanda?”
“I’m here.” Her queue mates were openly listening now, killing time, grateful for the one-sided minidrama sideshow.
“Thank God. I’ve been trying. I mean, I’ve been wanting to try…to get in touch.”
“What do you want, Ed?” She heard the hardness in her own voice.
“It’s not what you think, Amanda. At least it’s not what I think you think, if that makes sense.”
It did, to her. She thought she’d scared him off, going off on one that morning, after they’d just spent two days blissfully happy in bed together. She thought he hadn’t bothered to call her for—for what—for two weeks since then. She thought she was crazy to be talking to him now, come to think of it.
“You don’t have to explain anything to me, Ed.”
Which was true. She’d have been scared off, too. It was shaming even to be reminded of it.
She’d left that message, almost as soon as she’d got home, which he’d ignored. Then two weeks had passed. She’d been distracted. All this Mum stuff. She’d been jittery and anxious, then sad, then resentful, and now she was trying to forget about him. And about Mum. About everything. And, right now, in fact, trying to buy tickets to fly somewhere far away from him. She didn’t really want to be having this conversation with him now. In the queue.
“I want to. I need to. My dad…he had an accident. A heart attack and an accident, actually.”
“God, Ed.” As excuses went, that was a pretty good one.
“That’s why I haven’t spoken to you.”
That didn’t immediately make sense. He could have called her at any point, couldn’t he, and let her know what was going on? If he wanted her to know.
“They called—my mum called me—practically the