to go up and collect the award while she was still perfecting her happy-for-whoever-won face. She vaguely remembered the surge of triumph, but then the champagne had been popped and she had nervously drunk more and more as strangers came over to offer their congratulations. Amidst it all had been a phone call from Libby that had seen Dex and possibly Jessica herself, she couldn’t quite remember, shouting, ‘Italy! Of course! Why not? A celebratory holiday.’
Even while she’d sat next to Dex on the plane, his sedated charm offensive making the flight attendants giggle, Jessica was still perplexed that she had agreed to something quite so spontaneous. Part of her was wondering if Dex had filled in her inebriated memory gaps with his own Italy bound agenda.
Then a voice shouted, ‘You’re here!’ and Jessica was forced to stop trying to decode her current predicament as she looked up to see Libby running down the entrance steps to greet them. Dressed in a striped Breton top, black capri pants, and little red ballet pumps, and her glossy brown hair in a knot on top of her head, Libby looked perfect. Certainly not like someone whose husband had just left her, Jessica thought, as she was pulled into a hug that smelt of Pantene, Chanel, and lemons.
‘I’ve missed you,’ Libby whispered into Jessica’s ear. ‘I’ve missed you so much.’
Jessica, not one for hugely honest displays of affection, tried to pull away with a laugh but Libby didn’t let go, kept her captive in the hug, in the smells and scents of memories.
‘I’ve missed you, too,’ Jessica said in the end and was finally let go, as if she’d said the magic words. ‘Dex isn’t quite himself,’ she said, pointing to where Dex was trying to pose in his aviators against the suitcase, a dreamy smile on his face. ‘He’s flight medicated.’
‘Libby, my darling,’ he drawled, trying to stand up straight and stumbling. ‘Jake’s a god damn fool.’
Jessica winced.
But Libby just waved it away. ‘It’s fine. Completely fine. Far too much to do to think about it.’
‘Yes,’ Dex agreed. ‘We are here to work. At your service,’ he said with a woozy salute. ‘Though I may have to have a bit of a nap first.’
Libby laughed. ‘You can have a nap, Dex. Shall I show you to your room?’
‘Yes, please,’ he said. Then he held up a hand and added, ‘Just to let you know, the others will need rooms as well. I take it Eve’s not coming? Hasn’t left the deepest countryside since those kids were born.’
Libby frowned at Jessica. ‘What’s he talking about?’
Jessica shrugged. ‘I have no idea. I think he’s just rambling.’
‘Come on, Dex, let’s get you to your room.’
‘You have to wake me up when Jimmy and Miles arrive,’ he said, attempting to pick up his case.
Libby looked confused. ‘Jimmy and Miles aren’t coming, Dex.’
But Jessica knew that look on Dex’s face, had worked with him long enough to know when he was lying, and this wasn’t one of those times. She felt herself swallow down a sudden lump of worry.
‘They are.’ Dex nodded. ‘I invited them.’
Libby didn’t have anywhere to put Miles and Jimmy if they really did turn up. None of her rooms were ready. She’d struggled to pick the best two for Jessica and Dex. Maybe Jimmy could camp in the back garden. That was his kind of thing. Last Libby had heard he was sailing round the Venezuelan coast.
These were the thoughts going through her head as she went to pick Eve up from the airport, driving the winding roads that sliced through mountains and curled precariously around sheer vertical drops, where the sun made towering shadows from the looming cypress trees and the pale green leaves of the olive trees spread in groves as far as she could see.
Those thoughts stopped Libby from thinking about the fact that the only time she’d ever asked Eve for help—called her and asked her to come to Italy—Eve had said no. And now Eve was at the airport having changed her mind because she and Peter were suddenly on a break.
She’d half wanted to say, ‘No, you can’t come,’ when Eve had WhatsApped to ask if the invitation still stood.
Of all the girls in the group they had been the closest. From the first day of secondary school when they eyed each other with wary interest as they sat down at adjacent desks, to arriving in London together, post-university, ready to start their first proper jobs, ready to be cool, hip, twenty-somethings who drank cocktails after work and wore pencil skirts. They had been the ones to rent the flat in South London. It had been their adventure. They had advertised for tenants and ended up with quiet, awkward, but sardonically funny Jessica who arrived at the interview flame red curls all awry with just a rucksack of possessions and five hundred pounds cash and basically begged them to take her because she needed somewhere to sleep that night.
Little did they realise then that Jessica had spent a lifetime carving out a tiny personal niche for herself in a world suffocated by strict religious parents so fearful of the world around them they had built a shelter in the garden and stocked it with six months’ worth of survival supplies ready for Armageddon. At twenty-one, Jessica had finally broken free. And it was Libby and Eve who got to witness her humour, her verve, her personality as it was allowed to flourish unshackled. Watch her awesome highs as she would almost check to see if life was allowed to be this good, but then want to hide their eyes at her crashing lows as she experienced the turbulent relationship emotions that everyone else had been allowed to experience in their teens.
And then there was Dex, who pretty much told them he would be moving in because that was his way. He wouldn’t be there long, he’d said, he’d go when his cash was flowing again, but at that time his father had cut him off for hacking into his university’s computer system and changing his degree to a First—the result he needed to be gifted a Ferrari—and he’d been sent out to fend for himself over the summer. However, in some twisted logic, he’d been allowed to keep the Ferrari and whiled away most of time cruising the streets of Chelsea picking up rich, beautiful women and then having to apologise for the humble flat he was bringing them back to. Libby had spent many a morning having breakfast opposite a girl in some flash designer dress, It bag on her lap, tapping away on her phone while casting haughty sneers at Libby’s Primark pyjamas.
But Dex didn’t move out after that summer; in the end he stayed for as long as they all stayed. It transpired that his billionaire dad wasn’t as squeaky clean as his punishment of Dex implied when one morning every building he owned was raided at dawn by armed police, including their flat, simply because of the connection to Dex. Libby, Eve, and Jessica stood sobbing with terrified shock as Dex went mad, desperately trying to protect them, swearing to the police that he had no clue where his dad was, the phone going to voicemail, trying to hold back tears as a lifetime of hero worship was shattered in just under an hour.
The raids turned up nothing, as his dad, on the phone from southern Spain the next day, assured Dex that they would, but the damage was already done. Dex drove the Ferrari to a multi-storey carpark and never went back for it.
For three years Eve, Libby, Jessica, and Dex lived together in their second floor flat underneath medical students Jimmy and Jake and aspiring musician Miles. And over the course of those three years all their lives intertwined like vines. But it was the link between Libby and Eve that always remained the strongest. From the first day they’d met they had burrowed beneath the other’s surface. They had understood one another with a look, a laugh, an infinitesimal raise of an eyebrow.
Jake always said that Libby placed too high an expectation on their friendship. That she set the bar and waited for Eve to fall short so she could feel hard done by. But she wasn’t convinced. To her, a mark of a true friend was how far you would put yourself out to help the other. And Eve, as