Husband Material (London Calling #2)(11)

And not even say I told you so when we totally wrecked the table.





FOR THE NEXT COUPLE OF days I back-and-forthed on whether I wanted to go to Miles’s wedding or not. The con column was looking pretty long because it would be a faff, Oliver would have an unbelievably shitty evening on account of not knowing anybody, and, oh yes, there was that tiny, insignificant detail that showing up at all would be a tacit admission that I was totes chill with that one time Miles completely fucked me over.

But somehow, that didn’t stop me secretly wanting to go.

Because things were good. I was—not that I’d ever admit it to anybody at CRAPP—actually enjoying my job. My relationship with Oliver was as strong as it had ever been, although it wasn’t like two years in with Miles I’d been thinking to myself, Wow, this guy’s going to hurt me worse than any human being has ever hurt me in my life.

And, God, what was my brain doing? Why was it comparing the selfish prick I’d dated nearly a decade ago with the objectively better man I was seeing right now?

I mean, Oliver was objectively better, wasn’t he? Our relationship was objectively better. We were older and more mature and more sensible and… Wait. Were we just boring? Safe and predictable and full of table lamps. Of course, given recent events, we were getting to the point of having more lamps than tables. Which definitely wasn’t boring. After all, if we were still breaking the furniture, we were doing something right.

Okay. This was exactly why I needed to go to the wedding. I need to show my ex-boyfriend, my ex-boyfriend’s fiancé I’d met once, and a bunch of strangers that I was free and happy and over it and moving on with my new, infinitely better boyfriend. And if I did that well enough, maybe my own brain would believe me.

Until then, though, I needed to get (a) a grip and (b) back in the moment. Especially because Oliver and I were going out this evening on a proper grown-up, we-are-in-a-relationship date. We were doing—and it was kind of hard to say this with a straight face— dinner and a show. He’d booked us a table at this place called Stem & Glory, which was apparently one of the best vegan restaurants in London, and I was slowly coming to the conclusion that the best vegan restaurants in the city really were nicer places to eat than an average restaurant that would just serve me a piece of dead cow.

Then afterwards…well, that had been complicated. Oliver had wanted to see Death of a Salesman at the Young Vic, but I’d told him that if I was going to a vegan restaurant for him, he had to go to Pretty Woman: The Musical for me. And honestly, I was kind of psyched about it.

Well, psyched-ish. It had been quite a long day all told because the photocopier had jammed and then Alex had insisted on trying to fix it and got his hand stuck somewhere inside, and Barbara Clench had refused to let me get an engineer to come and extract him because she was concerned that if he was seen interfering with the machine, it would invalidate the warranty. Not that there was much chance of our keeping the incident secret anyway, since Rhys Jones Bowen had been livestreaming the whole time and soliciting possible solutions from his ever-growing army of followers. Or Rhystocrats as they’d apparently taken to calling themselves.

Anyway, I was just leaving when my phone rang. It was Bridget’s number, but that was the only clue I had that it was actually her because for a long time she had trouble getting words out. Which was the first sign that something was seriously wrong. Because sure, Bridge lived from disaster to disaster, but she dealt with that by loudly declaring how ruined everything was while at the same time calmly fixing the actual problem. It was a slightly peculiar process but seemed to work for her. When she got quiet, though, that meant she was genuinely stuck and was falling back on my preferred strategy: pretending the problem didn’t exist in the hope that it would go away.

“Bridge?” I asked into the silence. “Bridge, what’s going on?”

“It’s…” The voice was her, but she sounded choked up. “It’s Tom.”

Shit. There were two ways this could go, and neither was good.

“Is he okay?”

“Probably.” That was her angry voice. So this was a Tom’s-done-something call, not a something’s-happened-to-Tom call. I wasn’t sure which was worse.

My phone buzzed and a text came in from Bridget. It was a photograph. A photograph of Tom looking furtive with his arm around a pretty young woman. A pretty young woman who wasn’t Bridget.

For which there must have been a million reasonable explanations that a person who hadn’t spent most of his adult life developing deep-seated trust issues could have articulated. Unfortunately, Bridget had called me.

“Crap, Bridge,” I said finally. The trick here was to walk the line between being supportive and encouraging her to blow up her own wedding. And I could do that. I could do that. I just had to be nice and as noncommittal as possible and ignore the part of my brain that was screaming, She’s doomed, and so are you. Meeting Miles was a sign, and everything you think you can count on is wrong. “I’m so sorry. Have you…” What would an emotionally mature and undamaged person do? “Have you talked to him about it?”

There was a burbling sound from the other end of the line that eventually resolved into “I can’t get hold of him.”

On its own, that wasn’t unusual. Tom’s job often required him to go quiet for a couple of days, sometimes longer. But it wasn’t exactly reassuring. Or at least I wasn’t reassured, and I didn’t think Bridge would be either. I tried to stick with neutral questions. “How did you get the picture?”