She is relaxed about it, a little dazed, and I wonder again if she has had something more than alcohol. Drugs may well be kicking around their house; Mitch was always a fan.
But not Emma, I think temporarily, as I picture her bursting through the door of the café half an hour after everyone else, agonising over whether to have a brownie.
Not Emma.
This is a different Emma though, I remind myself.
Normal rules do not apply. Normal rules, it turns out, were bullshit.
She gets comfortable against my deep purple cushions and I feel like I am emptying out, the final traces of hope and human connection gone now.
They were all I had, those women, and if it sounds ridiculous, it is.
But this has been a ridiculous few months and I have clung to all that I have been able to cling to and slowly, slowly, it has crept up on me: Asha, Emma and Cora were my closest friends.
‘Robert cheats on me all the time,’ she says now, not a sliver of emotion in her voice. ‘And I’ve become numb to it. The way you do to anything that happens constantly. He comes in at 4 a.m., showers, and I pretend to be asleep. I have my life; he has his.’
She slumps further back.
I listen to this new Emma, like I have listened so many times to Old Emma, and I will her to transition back.
‘I thought I could change him,’ she says and maybe there is something softer in there now. ‘And like every smart friend has ever told me – including you actually, once or twice – of course I couldn’t.’
‘But what was he like when you met him?’ I ask because I am genuinely curious. ‘Did he settle down then?’
Emma laughs but it’s angry, and I think it’s angry with me.
‘No,’ she snaps. ‘Of course not.’
I stay silent, scared I might throw our precarious balance off if I speak.
There’s a gap then.
‘I got pregnant quickly,’ she says eventually. ‘We were only casually dating. Partying a lot. I think he thought it was the ultimate rebellion. What’s the craziest thing you can do when you’re this party-boy DJ? His friends thought it was wild. Move to the country! Have a kid!’
‘Get married,’ I fill in.
Emma looks up, surprised.
‘We aren’t married,’ she says. ‘Didn’t you know that?’
Of course I didn’t. We’ve established: I know nothing. I look at her wedding finger. There’s a thin band of gold around it. She glances at it too. Shrugs.
‘Just fits that finger best,’ she says. ‘And I’ve always felt like we might as well be married. No difference, once Seth came along.’
I assumed, of course. I skipped the steps of actual conversation like I did with her job as we focused solely on the babies.
If I was irritated by my friends at first for not asking me questions about the real me, then I have done the same, I realise. Not been interested, inquisitive, curious.
Just used, for what I needed. Hours filled, advice given.
It wasn’t Robert, it was me.
I look at her, this stranger.
‘So what happened?’ I ask as I see her eyes lose focus; her lids droop.
She is, I think, she is on something.
Emma has been pushed so far that she has got drunk at home and taken some sort of drugs.
A shrug.
‘I still wanted him to stay,’ she says. ‘I know it sounds pathetic but I always hoped he’d grow out of it. I wanted our family together. That was my only focus. For Seth.’
I nod, empathy surging.
I reach for her hand but she pulls it away.
‘A few weeks ago we had a row, a particularly bad one,’ she says. ‘And I told him that I knew about him sleeping with you. That this was worse than all the others, that you were my friend. He didn’t know that. Didn’t realise I knew you, of course.’
Her body crumples like a newspaper on our fire as mine stiffens.
‘I wanted him to know I could act too,’ she says. ‘That I wasn’t passive all the time. So I told him what I had done to you too. Posting the video. Sending it to everyone. I suppose I was kind of … proud of myself. But he was furious. Told me how upset you’d been by the video when he met you that day, what a disgusting thing it was to do. Said you were a nice person, and that back in the day you’d had a hard time of life. Told me some other things while he was at it. About just how low things had got for you. It was supposed to make me feel bad, I think.’
She raises an eyebrow.
I go cold. Freeze. Of course.
‘You sent those messages too,’ I say. ‘About the other thing.’
The penthouse. The fancy gin. Emma knows it all, the grimiest corners of my past.
She grimaces.
‘Say what you mean,’ she mutters. ‘We don’t need to call it “the other thing”. We can call it you having sex for money but only as long as the men had fancy pads, right? That about the size of it?’
My cheeks sting.
And even now, I’m ashamed.
‘It wasn’t sex,’ I whisper, and I can’t believe this secret, so long buried, is living and breathing in my living room. Tears of release pour down my face. ‘It was escort work before I met Ollie when I was all over the place and had no job and was desperate for cash. I didn’t even have a home, Emma. I had to stay on friends’ sofas. Once even on a bench. I knew I was getting my inheritance from my mum when I was twenty-five and it made me lazy. I got into a lot of debt and panicked.’
She raises an eyebrow. ‘It wasn’t sex? Ever?’
I stay silent.
She scoffs.
The dam opens and shame floods me, drowns me, way
