She sighs. ‘Right, well, don’t be too long. I still need your help with stuff.’
I bolt down the hallway, grabbing a jacket off the banister and heading straight for the front door. It feels like the walls are closing in around me. I can’t shake that image of my face in the photo, my mouth twisted painfully into a fake smile.
Once I’m outside in the freezing fresh air, I pull the iPhone 13 out of my pocket and scroll through the address book.
Before I can get to Harv, though, I find Daphne.
Chapter Forty-Two
It’s the same number.
I tap on the thumbnail-sized profile picture next to her name to enlarge it. My stomach drops when I realise it shows two people, arms wrapped around each other’s shoulders in front of a beach sunset. I recognise Daff instantly from her curly black hair, but the photo has been taken from so far away that I can’t make out the man’s face under his sun hat.
It is definitely a man, though.
She’s with someone new. She might even be married to him.
Heart thumping, I go into my messages and scroll down to see that my last contact with her was in June 2022 – a year and a half ago. I’d sent a long, slightly desperate-sounding text full of questions – How are you? How’s the job going? Hope your mum and dad are well? – and Daff had replied with one short, simple sentence: Yeah, all OK, thanks – hope you are too.
Scrolling further back, I can see that I’d fired off two similar messages four and five months before the last one. Daphne hadn’t even replied to those.
I stare out at the unfamiliar street in front of me. My life has turned upside down. I’m now hiding away messages from Daff, hoping that Alice won’t find them.
Not that there’s anything to hide: Daphne clearly has no desire to see me or hear from me. The realisation hits me with a dull thud. There’s no second chance: I have lost her. I try to hold on to Harv’s advice about my inner optimist, but the words seem meaningless now. I can’t imagine my life without her in it.
My thumb hovers over her profile picture. I’m desperate to speak to her, to find out what happened between us – when and how and why we broke up. But the blurry face of that man beside her stops me from making the call. Am I really going to be able to cope with the answers to these questions?
I hear the front door open behind me. ‘Ben? Seriously? I said I needed you!’
Over the next two hours, I shadow Alice around the flat like a robot butler, assisting her clumsily with the icing of cakes, chilling of cava and plumping of cushions. In a weird way, it’s actually nice to be bossed about – to not have to think for myself – as it stops my brain constantly spinning back to Daphne. That said, as half eleven approaches, a new kind of panic starts to creep in.
It’s the idea of not knowing what’s coming. It felt exciting yesterday – in 2020 – before Daff found those messages, but now it just fills me with a clammy sense of dread. I have no idea who is about to arrive at our place, how I might know them, what I should say to them …
‘Ben?’
Alice snaps me out of this thought by glaring pointedly at the cushion I’m gently pummelling. ‘You’ve already done that one. Twice.’
‘Sorry.’
Chores finally completed, we head back up to the bedroom, where Alice suggests – fairly firmly – that I opt for a blue-and-pink gingham shirt and cream chinos: a combination that makes me look like a Tory MP on holiday.
Once this David Cameron cosplay has been approved, Alice shoos me out again so she can select her own outfit. Without her monitoring my every move, I can finally do what I’ve been dying to do ever since I woke up – snoop through the entire flat and try to piece together the last three years of my life.
If I wasn’t so utterly freaked out, it might almost be exciting. I feel like an amnesiac in a film: sneaking through the apartment digging for clues, reassembling the jigsaw of my past. Like Guy Pearce in Memento. Or a less attractive Goldie Hawn in Overboard.
The first thing that strikes me as I take a proper look around is the almost total lack of Christmas decorations. Mum and Daphne both went nuts with the tinsel dissemination at this time of year, and as a result I’ve spent nearly every December of my life in a house bursting with festive colour. Here, though – just like in Alice’s Paris flat – the only acknowledgement to the time of year is a smallish Christmas tree in the corner of the living room, decorated sparsely with a length of thick white tinsel that could easily double as a feather boa, and a few grapefruit-sized gold and silver baubles. The tree’s general vibe is expensive, stylish and somehow vaguely aloof. If this tree was a human being, it would be Anna Wintour.
The rest of the room resembles a page torn from a glossy design magazine: a minimalist blend of chrome and glass. There are two shallow grey sofas that look like they’ve been lifted from a Mad Men set, and a sleek coffee table with a book full of Banksy murals lying open on it.
The whole place has the feel of a trendy Soho hotel: nice for a cocktail or a posh dinner, but not the sort of place you’d actually want to live.
And yet … here I am.
I creep back upstairs, past the bathroom, where I think I catch a glimpse of matching his-and-hers towelling robes – but I’m too traumatised to actually go in and check. At the very back of
