Praise for JENNY OLIVER

‘The Vintage Summer Wedding is such a lovely book. It’s relaxed laid-back feel with its lovely plot and impressive characters has you smiling and enjoying every single minute.’

The Book Geek in Pajamas

‘… ideal for a summer read.’

Catch a Single Thought on The Vintage Summer Wedding

‘ The Parisian Christmas Bake Off is a charming and warm read, one you will not be able to put down once you start reading.’

This Chick Reads

‘… a lovely book, with a beautiful ending’

Crooks on Books on The Vintage Summer Wedding

‘I thoroughly enjoyed this book it had a sprinkling of festivity, a touch of romance and a glorious amount of mouth-watering baking! I don’t think I have ever felt so hungry reading a fiction book before.’

Rea Book Review on The Parisian Christmas Bake Off

‘It was a beautiful read with the just right amount of festivities.’

Afternoon Bookery on The Little Christmas Kitchen

Praise for
JENNY
OLIVER

‘This was one of my first Christmas reads of 2014 and it was really good. Highly recommend this one!’

Book Addict Shaun on The Little Christmas Kitchen

‘With gorgeous descriptions of Paris, Christmas, copious amounts of delicious baking that’ll make your mouth water, and lots and lots of snow – what more could you ask for from a Christmas novel!’

Bookboodle on The Parisian Christmas Bake Off

‘… this book had me in tears by the end.’

Rachel Cotterill Book Reviews on The Vintage Summer Wedding

‘I really enjoyed this book and I loved how it was more focused on a family love, rather than the heroine seeking out a man to help her get over the infidelity of her husband. By the time I finished the book, I got this real “Frozen” vibe to it.’

Book Mood Reviews on The Little Christmas Kitchen

‘What’s not to like about Christmas, Paris and baking?!’

Sheli Reads on The Parisian Christmas Bake Off

‘Jenny Oliver writes contemporary women’s fiction which leaves you with a warm, fuzzy feeling inside.’

Books with Bunny on The Vintage Summer Wedding

JENNY OLIVER wrote her first book on holiday when she was ten years old. Illustrated with cut-out supermodels from her sister’s Vogue, it was an epic, sweeping love story not so loosely based on Dynasty.

Since then Jenny has gone on to get an English degree and a job in publishing that’s taught her what it takes to write a novel (without the help of the supermodels). Nowadays, her inspiration comes from her love of all things vintage, a fascination with other people’s relationships and an unwavering belief in happy ever after! Follow her on Twitter @JenOliverBooks or take a look at her blog jennyoliverbooks.com.

The
Sunshine and
Biscotti Club
Jenny Oliver

Copyright

HQ

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2016

Copyright © Jenny Oliver 2016

Jenny Oliver asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

E-book Edition © June 2016 ISBN: 9781474045223

Version date: 2018-07-23

For guaranteed sunshine all holiday long, pack your bags and escape to The Sunshine and Biscotti Club – Tuscany’s newest baking school!

Table of Contents

Cover

Praise for JENNY OLIVER

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

LIBBY

EVE

JESSICA

LIBBY

JESSICA

EVE

JESSICA

EVE

LIBBY

JESSICA

LIBBY

EVE

LIBBY

JESSICA

EVE

JESSICA

LIBBY

EVE

JESSICA

EVE

JESSICA

LIBBY

JESSICA

LIBBY

EVE

JESSICA

EVE

JESSICA

LIBBY

JESSICA

LIBBY

EVE

JESSICA

LIBBY

EVE

LIBBY

JESSICA

LIBBY

EVE

LIBBY

EVE

LIBBY

EVE

JESSICA

LIBBY

Extract

Endpages

About the Publisher

LIBBY

As the church clock struck midnight, Libby Price was attempting to haul a double mattress up a flight of stairs on her own.

Now halfway up, the decision to begin the process was beyond regretful. The night was sweltering. The stairs were narrow. She was exhausted. But she’d had to do something. Something that strained every part of her being, because otherwise she would have lain in her bed contemplating her afternoon.

Still she kept being plagued by visions of herself striding purposefully to the bottom of the endless garden. Seeing Jake lounging in one of the deckchairs. Legs up on the metal table, eyes half closed as they soaked up the sun, bottle of water in one hand, sweat trickling off his forehead.

He’d rolled his head in her direction when he’d heard her footsteps. And she knew he thought she was coming out to admire the new outhouse he’d just finished building. To admire all its sharp angles and big metal framed windows.

He hadn’t expected her to swipe his legs angrily off the table. A move which, admittedly, even Libby had been quite surprised by. He hadn’t expected the fury and the anger, the shouting, and the piece of paper that she’d thrust into his view.

‘It’s a website, Jake,’ she’d half shouted. ‘A website with the slogan: Marriage is dull, have an affair! And guess whose credit card and email address is linked to it? Don’t look all innocent, Jake. It’s been bloody hacked. One of my blog followers sent me the link. Do you know how that makes me feel? Do you?’ She’d actually stomped her foot just for some physical manifestation of how furious she was. ‘How could you do this to me? How dare you do this to me? God, I’m so angry.’

That bit she was quite proud of. It wasn’t like her at all. She had somehow summoned this fiery strength from the devastation and even Jake had seemed momentarily startled by the force of it.

The mattress teetered precariously as the memory made her concentration lapse. Her arms strained under the weight as she tried to heft it onto the next step so she could take a break. Sweat was pouring off her. She was boiling hot. The hotel felt stuffy. The scent of the lemon grove next door, usually exquisite, now made her feel like she was trapped at a perfume counter, the smell too sickly and heady. She tried to get her breath back but could feel her muscles screaming. She was so tired.

The mattress wobbled. Leaning it back against the wall, Libby squeezed herself alongside it, trying to keep it in place with her bodyweight, as she decided to try and shove it up from the bottom.

With her shoulder against the shiny new material she made a move to push but it didn’t budge. The top of the mattress now caught against the step.

Why had she started this? Had it been as much to stop the loop of memories as to test whether she could do all this on her own?

She put her hands over her face. The weight of the mattress was pressing against her body. There was so much that needed doing before the hotel was ready, and getting a mattress up the stairs seemed like one of the more minor items on the to do list. If she couldn’t shift that, what could she do? Perhaps this was a painfully stupid exercise that would prove, as she suspected, there was simply no way she could do it by herself.

Her body slumped.

The mattress slipped a step.

She shouted in annoyance.

A mosquito buzzed around her ear.

She thought about all the plans she and Jake had made for the renovations. All their hopes and ambitions scribbled in notebooks and on napkins. When they’d first turned up at the dilapidated hotel, he’d squeezed her hand and said, ‘Don’t worry, we’re in this together.’ That was how it was meant to be. Him squeezing her hand, her squeezing his.

How was it possible that could turn so suddenly to such anger and shame buzzing like the cicadas as she’d marched down the garden path?

She squeezed her eyes shut, pressing her face into the mattress, as she thought about the moment when, after her outburst, Jake had stood up, looked down at the lush grass then up to meet her eyes and said, ‘Libby.’ Taking a step towards her. ‘I think actually this might have needed to happen. I think actually it’s a good thing, you know. For me.’

She hadn’t really listened. Instead she’d replied, ‘When you were doing it, when you were shopping online for a mistress, did you think about me? Did you think about hurting me?’

He’d shaken his head. ‘No. Honestly, Libby, I was just thinking about me. And it seemed—I don’t know—separate from you. Libby, I feel like shit but I think it’s right that this has happened. This …’ he’d pointed to the beautiful new outhouse, the garden, the hotel, ‘is all too much. I thought I’d be OK with it, but I’m not. Living here—it’s too remote. I feel like I can’t breathe,’ he’d added with a huff.

‘You feel like shit?’ she’d said. ‘Jake, you’ve shattered me.’

He’d looked at her with pity in his eyes. ‘I miss my life, Libby. I miss life.’

‘But this is our life.’

‘No.’ He’d shaken his head. ‘No. I’m going to go away for bit I think. I’m sorry.’ That was when she had crumpled. When the air had been knocked out of her.

That was the reason why she was hauling a mattress up the stairs like a carthorse, arms stretched behind her as she tried once again to tug it to the top. So that she didn’t have to go to sleep, so that she didn’t have to close her eyes and see herself begging him to stay.

If only she hadn’t cried. If only she hadn’t held on to his arm and tried to pull him back.

She yanked the mattress.

Stupid, stupid Libby.

He’d paused and hugged her when she’d sobbed. Just for a couple of seconds. Enough time for her traitorous mind to think that this could all be forgotten, that they could just focus on the hotel, on the renovations and the imminent arrival of the guests.

But then he’d let her go and held her by the shoulders and said, ‘Will you be OK? Should I call someone?’ in a voice that suggested she was some weak Victorian maiden. With a surge of anger she had bashed his arms off her.

‘I’ll be fine,’ she’d hissed, and he’d had the nerve to look sympathetic. ‘Just go.’

She’d watched him jog up the steps to the terrace and thought, Come back.

Then she’d made herself remember the website, the affairs, the fact she’d found out through her own blog.

Go, you bastard.

No, stop. Come back.

Now as she stood on the staircase, the harsh halogen lights burning above her, she found herself smacking the mattress, thumping it with all her frustration, humiliation, and anger. It felt quite good until it slipped from its perch mid-step and, as she fumbled to catch it, careered down to the bottom like a sledge thumping hard on the floorboards, smashing into the side table and shattering a glass bowl filled with lemons.

‘Bollocks.’

Libby sat down on the step, chaos on the floor around her. She stared at the lemons rolling along the gaps in the floorboards like trains on a track, stopping when they hit a stack of old mirrors about to be relegated to the garage. She glanced up from the lemons to her own reflection. Tired, sad, angry. Who was this person, she wondered as she stared, if she was no longer one half him?

EVE

‘Do you think the kids are getting enough kale?’ Eve asked as Peter walked into the kitchen having just put their four-year-old twins to bed.

‘Yes. Because I don’t think anyone actually eats kale.’

‘But it’s a superfood. I don’t know if they’re getting enough superfoods. A woman today said that she gets up at five every morning to make superfood smoothies for her and her kids’ breakfasts and then meditates for half an hour before they wake up. I don’t have the energy to get up and meditate.’

Peter was flicking through the local paper open on the table and splattered with spaghetti Bolognese. ‘Is this Bolognese? Did the kids have Bolognese? Are we having Bolognese as well?’

Eve nodded.

‘Excellent.’

‘But what about the kale.’

‘Bugger the kale. I was brought up on frankfurters and chicken Kiev. I’m OK.’

Eve rolled her eyes and went back to the washing up. Then after a minute, after she’d heard Peter get a beer out the fridge and flip the cap, she said, ‘The thing is, sometimes I just want a proper chat about things like kale. I know it’s neurotic so don’t look at me like that, but sometimes I need to talk about it. It’s important to me.’

She saw him sigh. ‘Eve. I’ve had a really long day. I don’t need to talk about kale. You don’t need to talk about kale. You want to talk about kale because you don’t have anything else to think about at the moment because you’re refusing to think about work.’

‘I am not refusing to think about work.’

‘OK, well maybe if you put as much energy into thinking about work as you did about kale then you’d have come up with something new by now.’

She scoffed, indignant. ‘It is not that easy, Peter. I haven’t got any inspiration at the moment. Nothing. I can’t do it if I have nothing.’

He took a swig of beer to mask his slight shake of the head.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she asked, referring to the head shake.

‘Nothing.’

She raised a brow.

‘I just reckon it’s bullshit. Sit in your office, do some work. Just do it,’ he said, and then the phone rang before she could reply. Peter reached round to answer it and said, ‘It’s for you. Libby.’

Eve frowned. ‘From Italy?’

Peter shrugged, handed her the phone and walked out into the living room.

She watched him go, quite grateful for the excuse to end the discussion. There was something simmering underneath her and Peter’s relationship at the moment, had been for a while. Nothing noticeable in the everyday, but just a fraction less between them. Conversations reached sighing point quicker. Less tolerance maybe for the other’s nuances. Less kissing, less sex, less closeness as a couple, while still cemented as a family.

‘Hi, Libby? How’s it going?’

Peter was scrolling indecisively through options to watch on Netflix when Eve walked into the living room. It was by far her favourite room in the house, one she could happily cocoon herself in forever. It had taken her years to get it just right. The sideboard was her most cherished item, vintage wood laminate with a yellow Formica top that she’d got at a car boot sale in the village. She spent a lot of time artfully rearranging the little antique fair statues and old French café jugs she had lined up along it after the kids walloped into it or decided to use it for a dolls’ tea party.

Peter chucked the remote down on the coffee table without picking anything to watch and said, ‘What was that about?’

‘She wanted me to go to Italy. Jake’s gone apparently. She caught him on that affair website, you know the one on the news?’

Peter’s eyes widened. ‘Bloody hell,’ he said, then sat back into the big grey sofa and added, ‘Mind you, kind of thing he’d do, isn’t it?’

Eve frowned, refolding a blanket she had draped over the armrest. ‘That’s not very helpful.’

Peter rolled his eyes and picked up the remote again. ‘Are you going to go?’ he asked, staring at the Netflix options.

‘No,’ she said with a shake of her head, catching sight of some rogue Lego figures and bending down to get them out from under the table. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ she said, stretching her arm to reach the last one. ‘Jessica and Dex have said they’re going to go, so that’s OK,’ she said, chucking the Lego into the box in the corner of the room. ‘I don’t really want to leave the kids.’

There was a second too long a pause before Eve realised what she’d said and as she walked back to the sofa added as casually as she could, ‘And you.’

‘And me,’ Peter said with the raise of his brows.

‘Of course you, it goes without saying,’ she added with a laugh, checking to see if there were any other toys lying about the place.

‘It doesn’t, Eve.’ Peter shook his head.

‘Of course it does,’ she said, spotting a small plastic cow hiding behind one of her French café jugs and going over to pick it up.

‘No,’ Peter said, the rows and rows of Netflix options skimming past at unreadable speed.

Eve was just going over to stand the plastic cow up with the rest of the plastic animals on the toy farm when Peter said, ‘I need to talk to you about something.’

‘What?’

He leant forward so his elbows rested on his knees and his fingers steepled to a point in front of him.

Eve went and sat on the edge of the coffee table in front of him, the plastic cow still in her hand. ‘I didn’t mean to miss you off when I was talking about holidays. I really do just include you by default.’ A small frown appeared on her face—that had sounded better in her head.

He took a breath in. ‘Something’s gone wrong, Eve. With us.’

‘No, it’s fine.’ Eve shook her head. ‘Look at us—lovely house, lovely kids, lovely, lovely, lovely.’ She used the plastic cow to emphasise the point, trotting it in front of her like she might with the kids, and immediately regretted it.

She felt Peter waiting as she put the cow down next to her on the table. Then he said, ‘Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it’s unfixable, I just know it’s there.’ He sat up straight, running a hand through hair that really needed a cut. Eve found herself thinking that he could take their son, Noah, with him to the barber’s at the weekend. Noah would like that. ‘I nearly had an affair,’ he said.

‘What?’ Eve stopped thinking about the barber’s and almost laughed. ‘Are you joking? Is this because of Jake?’

Peter shook his head. ‘No. Maybe. I’ve wanted to tell you for ages. I didn’t do anything. One hundred per cent I didn’t. But I thought about it, Eve. I thought about it. And in the past I would never have even considered it.’ He sank against the sofa cushions.

Eve pulled her hair back from her face, holding it there as she said, ‘Jesus Christ, what’s wrong with you all? Why are you all having affairs?’

‘I didn’t! I didn’t have an affair. Don’t lump me in with Jake. But I feel like if I don’t tell you then I am like him,’ Peter said. ‘Eve, the only person I’ve wanted to talk to about this was you—and you’re the only person I couldn’t talk to about this.’

‘I feel sick,’ Eve said. Right deep inside herself sick. Like everything precious was slithering away.

She swept the little plastic cow off the table in annoyance and for a moment sat with her hand covering her face. ‘What does it mean?’ she asked.

Peter sat forward again. ‘I have no idea what it means. It just means that things can’t go on as they are. It feels like we’ve got a chink. Both of us on different roads. I don’t know,’ he said, rubbing his forehead, ‘I’m shit at explaining stuff like this. That’s what it feels like to me. Like we’re running parallel on different tracks.’

‘Who was it? Do I know her?’

‘That’s not the point.’

Eve bit her lip. ‘I just want to know. So I can see it, you know, in my head.’

He closed his eyes for a second. ‘A supply teacher.’

Eve frowned. ‘Not the little blonde one?’

Peter exhaled slowly. ‘This isn’t about the affair, Eve. There wasn’t an affair. Shit, I shouldn’t have said anything. Are you crying?’

‘No.’ Eve shook her head, desperately holding back any semblance of tears.

She bent down and picked the cow up, putting it on the table next to her again, feeling like she needed a mascot.

‘I think maybe we just need to take some time,’ Peter said. ‘What do they call it? Have a break?’ he said doing quote marks with his fingers. ‘Sorry, I don’t know why I just did that. I hate people who do quote marks. I’m nervous,’ he said.

The oven timer plinked to say the Bolognese was ready.

They both stayed where they were.

‘I think maybe you should go to Italy,’ Peter said in the end.

Eve nodded; needing to look away from him she glanced round the living room, the timer beeping incessantly in the background, the sense of being cocooned gone, everything no longer quite so secure.

JESSICA

The hotel was exactly as Jessica had imagined it would be.

Quaint, she thought, as she stepped out of the taxi, sunglasses on, hair smoothed back into a low ponytail. There were twee green shutters on every window, flowerboxes on every balcony railing filled with gnarled white geraniums, an archway into a ground floor bar with dark wooden chairs and terracotta half pots as light sconces, a mildewed green and white striped awning. And painted down the centre of the building was a sign saying Hotel Limoncello.

‘God, I can’t stand Limoncello,’ a voice drawled from the taxi, and she turned to see Dex, Valiumed up to the eyeballs post-flight, lying across the backseat and staring up at the same view.

‘Can you walk?’ she asked, glancing down at him.

‘Certainly,’ he said, sliding himself along the leather like a caterpillar and then stumbling out onto the warm pavement.

‘Christ, even the pavement’s hot. It’s too hot, Jessica. I’m too hot,’ he said, pulling himself up to standing.

She held in a smile as she paid the taxi driver who’d hauled the luggage round from the boot and was now looking dubiously at Dex as he tried to hold himself upright.

‘This bag is ridiculous,’ Dex said, leaning against Jessica’s massive case. She had packed, as usual, for every eventuality.

Next to hers, Dex’s bag was tiny. Hand luggage only. He had packed, he’d said, what he always packed for any holiday: three pairs of shorts, three t-shirts, underwear, one pair of flip-flops, a hat, and a book.

She could hardly believe he could remember, considering that neither of them had been on holiday for the past three years, instead chained to their desks building the recently award-winning Waverly Design Agency. Which was actually where she’d quite happily still be, she thought as she glanced back to the hotel and felt the heat already burning her hair and her skin. And where she would be if it wasn’t for that Design Agency of the Year award.

Jessica had foggy memories of the ceremony, of Dex nudging her out of her seat 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

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 always, was wrapped up tight in Eve world.

By the time Libby pulled up at the airport, in her mind Eve had become a giant monster, so it was a surprise when the car door yanked open and instead of the vivacious, effervescent, self-absorbed blonde she was expecting, there was Eve. Tall, willowy, tired-looking. Shaggy pale hair. T-shirt half off her shoulder. Bulging handbag.

‘God, I always think I’m going to get done at airports,’ Eve said, breathless, chucking her bag into the backseat. ‘It’s my parents’ fault. Do you know what they used to do? Bags of weed in my teddy bear. Of course you know. I must have told you? Have I told you that? Can you imagine doing it now? Can you imagine if I was like: Maisey, Noah, just so you know, there’s a couple of hundred quid’s worth of drugs in your teddy. God, now I get nervous if I forget to even turn my phone off. Shit, that reminds me, I need to turn it back on.’ She rifled through the contents of her bag at top speed. ‘I think I’ve lost my phone. No, here it is.’ She dropped it back into her bag and then sat back with a sigh, her eyes closed for a moment. ‘Sorry. Hi,’ she said, clicking her seatbelt and leaning back against the headrest. ‘Sorry. I get so nervous at airports.’ She breathed out. ‘How are you, are you OK?’

Libby felt suddenly a bit shy. Sitting next to her once best friend. Acting over-polite as a result. ‘Yeah, fine. Are you OK?’

Eve blew out a breath that flicked her fringe out of her eyes. ‘Fine. Apart from the on-a-break thing. We’re like a bloody sitcom, aren’t we? Although less funny.’

Libby couldn’t laugh along. It embarrassed her that they were both facing the same challenge in their relationships. It wasn’t meant to happen like this. Libby was always the together one and Eve the shambles.

Eve tied her hair up, half of it immediately falling out because it was too short for a ponytail. ‘God, I’m all over the place. I feel really weird without the kids. No one has dropped anything on me or whacked me in the face. You know, that’s what they don’t tell you about kids. How often you get unintentional injuries. They sit up and whoomph, their head has smashed you in the jaw.’ She toyed nervously with her phone as she spoke. ‘Sorry, I won’t talk about the kids. I know it’s really boring.’

As Libby pulled out of the maze of airport roads and onto the motorway she couldn’t resist a glance across at Eve’s profile. She was fascinated by how many lines she had round her eyes and the grey tint to her skin. Eve used to glow, that was her thing. Her skin shone like a mermaid’s. Her hair was the envy of everyone. She’d do those big messy plaits in her hair, all intricate and knotted, that would have taken Libby two days to achieve while Eve would do it watching Countdown. Now she had almost half a head of black roots and it looked as if she’d done the blunt chin-length cut herself.

Eve seemed to sense the scrutiny and redid her ponytail self-consciously. ‘It’s all a bit shit really,’ she said, and Libby turned back to the road ahead saying nothing.

JESSICA

While Jessica waited for Dex to wake up so they could finish a work project they were meant to have done before they left, she decided to go for a walk. First she explored the local town which took mere minutes as it consisted of a shop, a church, and a square, but then she found the lake—the main attraction. An epic expanse of blue that stretched like a mirage out towards the Tuscan mountains in the distance, their peaks jutting into the horizon like fat kings on thrones.

Jessica stood and watched the glassy water from a slatted boardwalk that seemed to run the circumference. The wood was warm beneath her bare feet, like walking on soft leather; the water lapped gently against the pebbles and shivered through the reed beds, and the shimmer of the sun made her shield her eyes.

She knew she should be thinking that this was paradise. It was paradise. But Jessica had never been particularly good at relaxing. She could feel her hair starting to curl annoyingly in the humidity, her skin smelt overpoweringly of coconut suntan lotion, and her mobile kept losing reception.

She knew she should enjoy the fact that she was unreachable. Even though she loved her job, thrived on it, she knew that just for a week she should wallow in being decision-less. But she liked the routine of work, the purpose it gave her. Every time she went away she would draw a blank at what exactly she was meant to do. In the back of her mind was always her mother’s voice as they arrived at the Isle of Wight caravan, never wearing anything less than skirt, tights, and blouse, refusing ever to be seen without her shoes on, sitting in a deckchair saying, ‘Well what’s the point? It takes a week to settle in and by that time I’m ready to go home.’

All that on top of the fact that Miles was or wasn’t about to appear made it almost impossible for her to relax into the moment. It made the view feel like a canvas rather than reality, like the screen at the front of her spinning class that was meant to make it feel like they were cycling a lush mountain road rather than pedalling in the sweaty old gym. It made her barely acknowledge the beautiful old white boathouse when it rose before her like a floating castle as she walked further along the boardwalk. It was only the stone-spitting skid of a motorbike drawing up at the front that made her stop short and take notice.

The building shone with fresh white paint, the windows gleamed with diamonds of stained glass like boiled sweets, and a huge, green wooden door was propped open with a beer barrel. From the soft chill out music wafting her way and the white cushioned couches she could glimpse, she deduced it was some sort of languid café bar full of people posing with martinis—not really her thing.

‘You are lost?’ the man on the motorbike said, lifting one leather-clad leg over his great red Yamaha. He was fractionally taller than her, cropped haired, receding slightly, week old stubble on his jaw, nose like a Roman soldier.

Jessica glanced surreptitiously behind her to check he was talking to her before saying, ‘No,’ and pulling her sunglasses off her head ready to slip them on and walk away. But she’d forgotten her hair had started to curl, had forgotten that sunglasses caught in curly hair. And as she tried to untangle them she fumbled her hold and they dropped to the ground. Taking a step back to pick them up from the gravel she lost a flip-flop and had to steady herself on the barrel propping the door open as she slipped it back on again. The fumes from the bike were making the sun somehow hotter and she had to fan herself as she finally stood up straight and pushed her sunglasses on.

There was a smirk on the guy’s lips as he watched the whole little routine while pulling one leather glove off, then the next, and tucking them under his arm. ‘You’re not looking for the bar?’ he said.

‘No,’ she said, retying her hair. ‘I’m just walking. This way.’ She pointed ahead about to walk away but she was caught by his expression; his eyes looking her up and down. Never before in her life had Jessica felt someone so clearly imagining having sex with her from just a look. She was momentarily stunned. Felt like she should tell him to stop looking. And then to her horror she found herself blushing.

‘You want to come in for a drink?’ he asked, his presence like a looming shadow beside her.

‘No,’ she said, annoyed with her blush, annoyed that he’d had any effect on her at all.

His mouth quirked as he watched her with his lazy gaze. ‘Do you ever say yes?’

‘Yes,’ she said and then turned away to carry on along the boardwalk.

She felt him still watching.

It was like being stalked by a tiger. He was somehow primal. The word made her snort as she strutted away.

Primal. It was a word her mother had used once about the new postman. She would refuse to open the door to him when he knocked. Jessica had never understood what she was on about.

‘Are you staying at the Limoncello?’ she heard him call after her but she didn’t reply.

She heard him laugh and kicked herself for not just saying yes.

She could hear her mother, ‘Say one thing to him and he’ll be in your bedroom window at night.’

Jessica hadn’t thought about her mother so much in years. But it stood to reason that as soon as she lost her sense of self the insidious voice would creep back in. All her good work ruined. She caught sight of one of the bright red curls that had come loose from her ponytail, remembered her mother pulling one like a spring when she was naughty and telling her it was the devil inside her. She pushed the curl back into the elastic band and blew out a breath.

It was holidays. She blamed holidays entirely. They made the mind run wild with too much free time. Really, she hadn’t allowed her mum into her head since she’d walked out of the door to the sound of her pleading, ‘You can’t leave, Jessica. You can’t leave us.’ Then, ‘You always were a bad girl. We tried. Leave and you won’t be coming back. You hear me? You won’t be welcome.’ To finally, ‘I’ll pray for you.’

Jessica shuddered. Then to make matters worse an image of Miles arriving popped into her head and was only dispelled by the guy shouting, ‘It was a pleasure to meet you. Hopefully I will see you around.’

Jessica turned and walked backwards a couple of steps on the boardwalk. ‘Not if I can help it,’ she shouted.

And he laughed, loud and booming, hard enough for her to see his shoulders shake.

EVE

Until she saw it again, Eve had forgotten how much she adored the Limoncello Hotel. If, at that moment, she had been asked to list her top five places in the world the Limoncello would fight for one of the top spots.

She remembered the summers she’d spent here with Libby, as she followed her up the steps to the entrance hall. She could picture the red and gold wallpaper, dark and imposing, the wooden chandeliers flickering with fake candle lightbulbs, the blackened oil paintings of shipwrecks. She remembered the wide-armed welcome from Libby’s eccentric, outspoken, lovely aunt Silvia who was desperate to know the gossip, to know who they were having sex with, what their ambitions were for the future—always probing, always pushing. Here they played at being adults. Straight out of school they sipped Campari on the terrace and pretended to like it.

Eve knew that for Libby it was a welcome escape from the chaos of her family, a chance for her to lie on her back in the lake and talk to no one, to spend evenings in the kitchen with her aunt as she worked—hissing up clams and squeezing lemons so the pan smoked—to make a spaghetti vongole that left diners lifting the bowls to their lips to drain the last of the sauce, or preparing tiny tortellini packed with sweet tomato ragu.

But, for Eve, it was a wonderland. A lesson in possibilities. They trawled antique markets together, lazed in the sun by the lake getting drunk, swam into the derelict boathouses—the water pitch black and the broken rafters filled with bats. Eve would stroll the corridors peering at the art on the walls and Silvia would appear by her shoulder saying, ‘I won that in Monte Carlo, idiot couldn’t pay his debt. Do you want it? Take it, I’ve looked at it for far too long.’ Eve would never dream of taking anything. It belonged there, at the Limoncello. But it wasn’t just the art, it was the smells; the scents of the place. Silvia would lead them into the lemon grove and make them smell the bark of the tree, the leaves, the fruit as it hung gnarled and pitted on the branches. She would give them neat lemon juice to drink that made their eyes water. She would wake them up in the middle of the night when it was raining and make them stand on the terrace to sniff the air. Everything was a sense: a taste, a smell, a mood. Silvia would waft down the corridors, the scent of warm wax polish and lemons heady in the air, the dust swirling in the sunlight and say, ‘If I could bottle this, girls, I’d be the happiest woman alive.’

Now, though, when Libby pushed open the big wooden front door and said proudly, ‘So here we are,’ Eve found herself rigid, frozen to the top step in horror.

What had they done?

‘Little bit different to how you remember it, I think,’ Libby said with an expectant smile.

Eve felt her hand go up to cover her mouth.

White walls, white tiles, no pictures.

‘It makes such a difference, doesn’t it? Opens the place up. Makes it look much bigger, don’t you think?’ Libby went on, seemingly talking until she got a reaction from Eve. ‘Just all clean lines. That’s what we were looking for. Why are you looking at it like that? Don’t you think it’s lovely? We really like it.’

We.

We. We.

Eve knew it wasn’t we. This was Jake. It was Jake all over. If Jake could whitewash the whole bloody world, he would. He hated mess. He hated clutter. He had to have everything just so.

‘Yes, it looks lovely,’ Eve said with as much enthusiasm as she could muster when all she really wanted to do was shout, What have you done? You’ve ruined it, you idiots!

Libby tipped her head, could clearly sense Eve’s reticence. ‘Eve, look at it. Come further in. It was so dated before. No one had touched it in years.’

‘I believe you, I know. I said, it looks lovely.’ Eve nodded and smiled. ‘Really lovely.’ She didn’t need to look at it. She knew what it looked like. Cold and white.

‘Honestly, Eve. It needed freshening up,’ Libby pushed. ‘People don’t want that kind of décor any more.’

Eve nodded but all she could hear were Jake’s opinions in Libby’s voice. ‘Libby,’ she said, ‘if you’re happy with it, that’s all that matters. You don’t need to persuade me. And I really like it, anyway,’ she added, an unconvincing afterthought.

Libby swallowed and turned away. ‘Well, yes. Yes, we like it,’ she said and started to walk forward, leading Eve to her room.

They walked up the stairs in silence, Eve staring at the walls willing the pattern of the wallpaper to come out from under the paint.

‘Where are the pictures?’ she said.

‘In the garage,’ Libby replied. ‘With the carpet.’

Eve could concede on the carpet. It was old and swirly and fairly hideous, but the rest of it … She looked up at the light fittings and winced when she saw long metal strips of halogen bulbs. The surfaces were bare, trinket free. The windows were curtainless, now just covered with simple white blinds.

‘I put you in your old room,’ Libby said as they reached the furthest room along the corridor. She put the key in and turned the door handle. ‘You’ll be happy—it hasn’t changed.’

Eve could remember it perfectly. Lying on the bed like a penniless monarch, her grandeur falling down around her. She’d left the plaster bare in her ramshackle conservatory at home and let the ivy grow in through the roof to conjure up the feeling of this room.

She glanced inside and breathed a sigh of relief at the sight of the huge wooden wardrobe, the damp patches on the peeling wallpaper, the big bed with the chipped gold paint, and the heavy brocade curtains. And then the wind rustled the trees and she smelt the lemons waft in through the open window.

‘Libby, I’m sorry if you think I’ve offended you somehow,’ she said. ‘I do really think it all looks nice.’

‘But …?’ Libby said, arms crossed.

‘But nothing,’ Eve replied. Then when Libby looked at her, almost willing her to carry on, she couldn’t stop herself adding, ‘Just remember that people don’t always know what they want, what they like, until it surprises them. I agree it all needs updating but this place always had character. Style. You know, just maybe you don’t need to get rid of it all.’

She walked over to the window when Libby didn’t reply and looked out to see the lemon grove, the familiar image of the waxy leaves winking in the sunlight. She wondered how it was that people could be so close at one point in their lives and then become so distant. Eve was as wide open as they came, but Libby, she took some chipping away to get beneath the polish. Especially now that she too had a great stamp across her saying, ‘Jake’.

Sometimes, when Eve had put the kids to bed, she would sit down with a glass of wine and read Libby’s blog. There was always some gorgeous looking lemon and basil drizzle cake to salivate over or a plate of something delicious that Libby said she’d thrown together because she was feeling peckish but would take any normal person hours.

Eve knew it was all gloss. All shine. But slowly she would feel herself prickle with jealousy, like pins and needles starting in her neck. She found herself jealous of the life made quirky and cool through the many filters of Instagram. Of the parties Libby catered, of the selfies with famous guests, of the Rainbows and Roast Beef Supper Clubs that she held at her flat with Jake there sipping red wine from a glass as big as a bowl.

Eve had lived in the flat below Jake for three years. She knew he was an arrogant pain in the arse half the time; she had eaten batches of Libby’s mistakes, she had been to the pillar-box tiled kitchen and seen the beautiful hand-thrown bowls the colour of oatmeal and the lovely little white enamelled saucepans and thought they were lovely, if a bit impractical, but, in the pictures, in the lifestyle, she coveted them like no other. Because they seemed to symbolise this other life—where everything went right.

And over the years it had made Eve start to stay away. Because somewhere along the line, her friend Libby had become lifestyle blogger Libby Price, while Eve was a scruffy, haphazard mother of two who struggled to run a business and fit into her countryside lifestyle and be an interested wife and not believe that everyone else was doing marvellously while she was just keeping her head above the surface.

So in the end there was no point seeing Libby because, while it was all aesthetically lovely when she did, they never had the time to get beneath the facade to make it worthwhile. It was all just too nice and polite to bother.

But what was so frustrating was that she knew the truth of Libby. Eve knew what was under there, had seen her drunkenly dancing in her bedroom at three in the morning, had seen her laughing so hard that she snorted lemonade out her nose, had seen her stuffing her mouth so full of chocolate that she couldn’t breathe, had seen her sobbing on the doorstep because she couldn’t take the pressure of all her brothers and sisters and her mum out of a job, but over time the walls had gone up and now it was just that bit too high to reach.

Peter had done this whole lesson at school on entropy. He used pictures of the crumbling disused ballrooms of Detroit to show that everything falls into disorder in the end. The walls always came down. It was just a case of how long it took. And how much one was willing to try.

‘OK well …’

Eve turned to see Libby backing out of the door.

‘Anything you need just let me know. I’m thinking drinks on the terrace at seven and we can work out a plan,’ Libby said, starting to pull the door closed behind her. ‘I’ll leave you to settle in.’

Eve turned so her back was against the view and watched Libby leave, nodding at the instructions.

JESSICA

Jessica arrived back at her room slightly sunburnt and annoyingly still replaying the meeting with the cocksure Italian at the bar. She had planned on having a shower and doing some work to rebalance, but when she opened the door she found Dex sitting at her dressing table working on his laptop.

‘What are you doing in here?’

‘Work,’ he said without turning round. ‘I thought we were working.’

‘We are, but why do we have to do it in my room?’

‘Because I’ve got no WiFi in mine. Yours is bad enough—it only works here,’ Dex said, pointing to the dressing table. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let’s get it done then we can be on holiday.’

Jessica frowned. She wasn’t used to sharing her personal space. She remembered the early days when Dex had shown her the plans for the new office—all inclusive and open plan—and she’d said, ‘No, this just won’t work. I need to be able to shut a door.’

He had prattled on about the merits of sitting together as a team, exchanging ideas, laughing together and building bonds.

‘My brain doesn’t work well as a collective force, Dex,’ she’d said. ‘It works well on its own. I am antisocial. I like to be on my own.’

Dex had stalked away with a shake of his head, rolling his eyes at the architect as they fudged a small office into the sleek design plans.

Now she wished she could portion off a section of her hotel room.

‘Come on, chop chop,’ said Dex, pulling over a spare chair so she could sit down next to him. ‘Get your laptop.’

‘OK, OK, hang on.’ Jessica took a minute, standing in the centre of the room, to get herself in the right mode. She went into the bathroom and splashed some water on her face—saw the extent to which her hair had frizzed and curled in the humidity and the pink tinge to her cheeks, and tried to channel First Day Holiday Jessica back into At Work Jessica.

She poured herself a glass of water then walked out of the bathroom, went over to her bag, pulled out her laptop, then set it up next to Dex.

‘You look very relaxed, by the way,’ said Dex as she booted up. ‘Very earthy.’

She glanced across at him with a raised brow.

‘What? That’s a good thing. It’s a good thing. I promise. Very …’ He looked her up and down.

‘Don’t go on.’

He laughed. ‘Very pretty.’

She shook her head. ‘No I don’t.’

‘You do, it’s a compliment. Take it as a compliment. You’re terrible at compliments.’

Jessica scoffed. ‘Because most of the time people say them to mask something else.’

Dex looked perplexed. ‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know.’ Jessica shook her head. ‘Like you think my hair looks bonkers but you can’t say that so you say something nice instead.’

Dex snorted a laugh. ‘You really are an idiot sometimes. Anyway, right, enough of this nonsense, there’s a sun out there just waiting for me.’

Jessica took a sip of her water and then started to work. Her laptop was taking longer than Dex’s to open the files.

Dex glanced over. ‘It’s so slow! Seriously, I’ve told you to get a new one.’

‘I don’t need a new one. This is fine.’

‘It can’t cope with the software update. It’s too old.’

‘It’s fine.’

He peered over. ‘Do you still have that bit of plastic film over the screen, Jessica?’ He turned to look at her, aghast. ‘You’re meant to take that off when you buy it.’

‘It keeps it protected.’

‘Oh my god.’ Dex smacked his forehead. ‘We need to get you out of that office. You are getting away with some ridiculous behaviour.’

She allowed herself a little laugh when she looked at the plastic film. ‘I just like to look after my things.’

‘Your laptop is ancient, Jessica. If you’re not going to buy a new one, I’ll buy you a new one, for the sake of the company.’

‘You aren’t buying me a new laptop.’

‘Well, you buy it then.’ He got his wallet out and handed her a platinum card. ‘Charge it to my dad.’

‘I didn’t think you used this any more?’ she said, taking the card and holding it tentatively between finger and thumb as though it might burn her.

‘I don’t. But you can.’

‘You should cut it up,’ she said.

He shook his head. ‘Then I’d want it.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Like ex-smokers. Better to have a pack to hand just in case.’ Dex shrugged. ‘Makes me want it less knowing it’s there.’

Jessica narrowed her eyes. ‘I think you should have more faith in yourself, Dex. You can’t carry it around forever. I can’t actually believe you still have it. You’ve kept that really quiet.’

‘Well, you shouldn’t spend so much time in your office, should you?’

She sighed. ‘You don’t need his money, you know that. You’ve totally made it on your own now. Cut the card up.’

Dex shook his head.

‘Dex! Cut it up.’

‘No.’ Dex stared at the card with a longing fondness. ‘I don’t think I can.’

Jessica widened her eyes at him. ‘Cut it up.’

Dex shook his head.

‘You cut it up and you can peel the protective film off my laptop.’

He raised a brow. ‘That sounds like some kind of kinky computer geek fetish.’

‘OK, you can’t do it any more.’

Dex laughed. ‘Oh please.’

‘No. You’ve made it too sexual.’ He snorted.

Jessica turned to her screen and started to do some work. Dex did the same, leaning over every now and then to see what she was doing.

The sun was streaming in the window. Dex kept yawning. Every time the WiFi dropped out he sat back on his stool and peered round the room.

‘What are you looking at?’ Jessica said in the end, unable to hold it in any longer.

‘Nothing. It’s just funny, that’s all.’

‘What’s funny.’

‘That we’ve been here mere hours and you’ve managed to make your room exactly the same as your office. Like, exactly the same. The books, the scarf, the make-up bag, that hand cream, the way the glass is on the coaster.’

Jessica looked around and realised he was right. It was pretty much the same as her bedroom at home as well. She hadn’t realised she needed such familiarity and structure around her to feel comfortable. It was as if she had become so self-sufficient it was to the point of robotic. Carrying her life around like a snail. She frowned. ‘Well, that can’t be good, can it?’

Dex shrugged. ‘I think it’s sweet. A bit anal, but sweet. But that’s what you’re like, isn’t it?’

Jessica made a face. ‘Don’t say it like it’s a given.’

Dex looked confused. ‘Well it is, isn’t it?’

‘No it’s not. Anal but sweet? That’s not how someone wants to be described.’

‘Why not? It’s what you are.’

‘It’s not a fact.’

Dex shrugged. ‘It kind of is.’

‘Well, I don’t want it to be.’

He half grinned. ‘Well do something about it then.’

Jessica shook her head and, ignoring the challenge in his eyes, went back to her computer.

They worked again in silence.

After a couple of minutes she said, ‘Oh, and what’s this about Miles coming? Is Miles coming? Have you invited Miles?’

Dex smirked, keeping his eyes on the screen. ‘Maybe.’

She saw the delight on his face reflected in his laptop screen and kicked herself for asking. She looked back at her own without saying anything more, refusing to give him the satisfaction of asking again.

After a couple more minutes Dex said, ‘It’s fun working next to you. I like it. We should do it more often.’

‘No we shouldn’t.’ She shook her head. ‘You breathe too loudly.’

He snorted a laugh. ‘I do not breathe loudly. I breathe. I have to stay alive.’

‘It’s distracting.’

‘Remember that whole anal but sweet thing?’ he said.

Jessica turned to look at him, one brow raised.

‘Perfect example.’

She scoffed.

‘I’m just telling it like it is,’ Dex said with a grin, then he leant forward and peeled the film straight off her laptop screen before she could stop him.

Jessica gasped. Dex laughed, waving the sheet of plastic triumphantly. So she reached over and, grabbing his dad’s credit card from the table next to him, she chopped it up with the scissors from her makeshift pen pot and chucked the four little bits into her waste bin.

Dex jumped up from his seat and stared down at the bin, his hand on his chest. ‘I can’t believe you just did that.’

‘You’re much better without it, Dex.’

He looked forlornly at the quarters of credit card.

Jessica patted him on the shoulder. ‘You’re much less vacuous without the money.’

He glanced up at her, then laughed. ‘It’s all coming out today, isn’t it?’

‘Let’s finish this work,’ she said.

When they’d wrapped it all up and sent it off, Jessica turned to Dex and said, ‘I don’t really think you’re vacuous. You used to be, but you’re not any more. You’re probably the most solid person I know. Like, inside,’ she said, ‘you’re good.’

He looked at her, surprised.

She shrugged. ‘I just, you know, thought I should say that.’

Dex nodded. ‘Thank you, Jessica.’

‘You’re welcome,’ she said, closing her laptop. ‘You’re now welcome to say that I’m not anal and sweet. If you wanted.’

Dex thought about it for a bit, studying her with narrowed eyes. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t need to say that.’

‘Oh for god’s sake,’ she huffed, bashing him on the arm. ‘Take it back.’

He laughed. ‘But then I’d be lying.’

‘That’s fine.’

‘OK, Jessica, you are not anal and sweet.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You’re welcome,’ he said, picking up his laptop and standing up. ‘Although really you absolutely are,’ he added, before jogging out of the door with a grin.

EVE

Alone in her old lemon scented room Eve checked her phone. A text from Peter saying ‘That’s good’ in response to her previous ‘Landed safely x’. He hadn’t put an x. But then Peter never put an x. He had whole dinner party discussions about the fact it was an x not a kiss and that it was completely unnecessary and ridiculous to include on a text message let alone an email. She often wondered if the script he was writing was full of rants about the misuse of letters in instant messaging. He’d asked her to read it once a couple of years ago and she’d been so sleep deprived and so stressed with the twins that it had taken her two weeks to get round to it by which time he’d changed his mind and gone into her email and deleted it from her inbox and then her deleted items.

She wanted to write something back; her fingers hovered over the keys of her phone, but she didn’t know what.

In the end she thought it best to leave her phone where it was, get changed into more weather appropriate attire, and get outside to stop herself from dwelling on it all.

Wearing a pair of skinny blue jeans cut off at the knee, a yellow vest top that was showing its age, and an equally dilapidated pair of espadrilles that her daughter Maisey said made her feet look like lumps of cheese, Eve made her way out of the hotel, across the terrace, and down through the lemon grove in the direction of the lake.

The scent of citrus intensified the closer she got, the huge waxy great lemons hanging heavy from the branches, all knobbly and pitted. She wanted to reach up and take a bite straight through the skin; feel her eyes water as she squeezed the juice into her mouth.

It made her think of the first perfume she’d ever made—from a bag of Limoncello lemons Silvia had sent as congratulations on having the twins. There was a note that said, ‘The beautiful thing about women is they can change as many times as they like. You’re already a wonderful mother. Who will you be next?’

Eve had stood staring at the lemons. These wonderful fat things that weren’t to do with feeding babies or trying to work out why they were crying, or why she was crying as she sat alone in the draughty, crumbling cottage they had bought after she’d got pregnant. After she had been seduced by a photo in a Homes and Gardens magazine in the doctor’s waiting room of a picturesque village where everyone had chickens and rose gardens and muddy wellington boots at the front door.

The lemons connected her back to the world. Not the pre-pregnancy one where she worked in marketing for a massive beauty company in the city. Where so many people wanted to talk to her every day she would sometimes put her Out of Office on and go and sit on the fire escape with her laptop just to get some work done. But the one before even her marriage, where she smelt the rain in the middle of the night and the bark of trees.

So she had sliced the lemons and she had squeezed them and she had gone outside and chopped all the heads off the roses in the rose garden, and then she had found the unused wedding-present pestle and mortar in the back of the cupboard and started to see if she could capture it all in a fragrance. She had got to work on who she would be next.

Now, as she popped out from the lemon groves and onto the lakeside shore, she was suddenly stopped short by a voice saying, ‘All right, Eve.’

She had to take a second to get her breath back from the shock.

He knew her name.

The guy got up from where he was sitting cross-legged on the pebbles. ‘Didn’t mean to scare you.’

Eve turned. The sun was in her eyes.

The voice made her expect dreadlocks, an arm almost covered in ink, and eyes that could spear a person from a hundred paces.

A wisp of cloud passed in front of the sun.

Holy shit. The dreads were gone. The eyes were still the same.

‘Hello, Jimmy,’ she said, her mind almost short-circuiting at the sight of him.

LIBBY

From her seat on the terrace, Libby watched Jimmy and Eve approach, the air between them like firecrackers popping in the sky.

Next to her, Dex and Jessica glanced up, saw Eve laugh at something Jimmy said, and then exchanged a look. Libby knew they were all thinking about the same thing. The casual flirting, the lazy hand-holding. How they’d roll in from some club together, Jimmy, with his arm slung casually round Eve’s shoulders, drunkenly rambling about getting free of the rat race, concocting starry-eyed visions of the two of them backpacking the globe, while Eve nodded along, fanning the flames of his dreams.

They were dangerous together; made more than the sum of their parts. Already Eve seemed to be burning brighter as she pulled up a chair, her hair glinting in the sun.

‘OK, so here’s the deal,’ said Libby when they were all seated. ‘I’m fully booked for the summer. I have just over a fortnight before the first customers arrive.’

Dex glanced around him and did a low whistle, his eyes taking in the lichen covered terrace, the rusted wrought iron tables, the chipped paintwork, the overgrown garden.

‘I know, it doesn’t look great,’ Libby went on. ‘And we certainly weren’t expecting it all to be perfect, but cash flow meant we had to open before we were ready. The main thing is that the outhouse is built. That’s where the courses are going to be.’

‘What courses?’ Jimmy asked, lounging back in his chair.

‘Cooking courses, for the moment,’ Libby said.

‘You should do yoga courses,’ he said.

Libby made a face to say that was the last thing she needed. ‘For the moment, Jimmy, I need to stick with what I know best and that’s baking. It’ll work as an extension of the blog and the supper clubs—you know, so you can come out here and have a slice of the life you read about. Soak up a bit of sun, learn to cook your favourite Italian foods, and go home relaxed and rejuvenated. It’s called the Sunshine and Biscotti Club.’

‘Very nice,’ said Jimmy, almost taken aback by the fact he was impressed.

Jessica nodded. ‘I came up with that. We’re in charge of design and marketing.’

‘Didn’t I come up with it?’ Dex said with a frown.

‘No.’ Jessica shook her head.

‘I really think I did,’ Dex said, leaning forward, elbows on the table.

‘You so didn’t.’ Jessica was aghast.

‘OK, OK, look, maybe you both came up with it. The important thing is that it’s going to happen in a couple of weeks,’ Libby said.

But Jessica wasn’t happy about letting the matter lie and was about to say more when an angry looking waitress appeared, arms crossed over her chest, and said, ‘Drinks?’

Jessica swung round in surprise.

‘Oh yes, that’d be lovely,’ said Libby, half standing in her chair. ‘Giulia, these are my friends, they’ll all be helping to get the place up and running over the next couple of days. Everyone, this is Giulia.’

Giulia stared at them all, her expression unchanged.

‘Giulia’s been here for years, worked for my aunt,’ Libby carried on brightly. ‘She’s a rock, I couldn’t do it without her.’

Giulia made a noise that could have been interpreted as a scoff of disdain. Libby could see the others glancing down at their laps or across to the lemon grove, as though the awkwardness in the air was something visible to look away from.

Libby kept smiling.

It had come as quite a shock when Libby and Jake had realised that, to all intents and purposes, Giulia had been inherited along with the hotel. There was no getting rid of her. She turned up every day at the crack of dawn to clean and polish, then at midday she opened up the bar. The idea that they might close the restaurant for any length of time had been actively laughed at by the residents of the village—all anyone wanted from the Limoncello was the food. Jake and Libby could mess about with their renovations all they liked as long as Thursday to Saturday the restaurant opened. Dino the chef trotted up in the afternoons to start prepping with or without Libby’s say so. Jake had been happy to let them get on with it as long as the money came in and he got a bowl of spicy tortellini soup or thick tomatoey fish stew at the end of the day.

To Giulia, the Sunshine and Biscotti Club was some ridiculous whim of Libby’s that she had absolutely no interest or belief in. Left to her, not an inch of the place would change.

‘Maybe a bottle of Prosecco, Giulia? So we can toast everyone’s arrival?’ Libby said, glancing round the eyes-averted table and then back up to Giulia who shrugged and stomped back inside.

‘She’s a keeper,’ said Dex with a raise of a brow.

‘Well, to be honest, I don’t actually know what I would do without her,’ Libby said. ‘I mean I don’t know how to run a bar or a restaurant.’

‘But you can learn though,’ said Jessica.

‘Yeah.’ Libby nodded emphatically, half in an attempt to convince herself.

‘And what about money?’ Dex asked, leaning forward, his elbows resting on the table as he looked at her. ‘Are you OK for money?’

‘I think so,’ Libby said.

Dex frowned. ‘Think so doesn’t sound that certain.’

Libby glanced away from any direct eye contact. ‘Shamefully, Jake’s looked after all the money. I just need to get a clear handle on things, that’s all.’

‘Do you need to borrow any money, Libby?’ Dex asked, looking concerned. ‘I can lend you money if you need it, just ask.’

‘No, no, no.’ Libby waved a hand, ‘Absolutely not, I can’t take your money. And I don’t think I need it, I just need to sit down and sort it all out.’ She paused and blew out a breath.

Dex sat back again, his expression unconvinced as he kept close watch on her. Libby caught Jessica’s eye who made a face of pity and next to her Eve looked down at the floor.

Don’t cry, she told herself.

‘So anyway …’ she said, with a little shake and a huge smile. ‘What I need from you guys is just help with the cosmetics. The house, some of the rooms, the garden, that sort of thing. Just to make it presentable.’

They all nodded.

Libby nodded too. Then she smiled again. ‘Fab. Great. I think it might be fun. And also, it would really help me if just once a day we did some baking.’

‘Baking?’ Dex frowned. ‘I’m not really into baking, Lib.’

‘Don’t worry, it won’t be hard. That’s the whole point. It’s for everyone.’

‘I reckon you could bake, Dex, if you put your mind to it,’ Jimmy said with a grin, his big muscly arms locked behind his head.

‘I’d like to see you bake,’ Dex scoffed.

‘I could bake,’ said Jimmy. ‘What is it? Just flour and sugar, that sort of stuff.’

Eve rolled her eyes, half obscured by messy blonde hair. ‘You are unbelievably arrogant.’

‘That’s why you love me,’ Jimmy said with a wink.

Eve smiled then sat back, running her fingers along her bottom lip as she watched him.

Giulia arrived with the bottle of Prosecco and a tray of glasses.

Libby wanted Eve to stop looking at Jimmy the way she was looking at him. She wanted her to stop creating distractions. She was still annoyed at her for her earlier implied comments about the décor, annoyed at the gnawing feeling of regret, guilt even, that it had conjured inside her as she imagined her aunt nodding along with Eve about the changes. It made her want to suck all the white paint from the walls. But instead she focused on the planning. ‘Perhaps we could portion out the jobs now. Just so we’ve all got it straight in our heads. Maybe, Jimmy, you could do the garden?’

‘Aye, aye.’ Jimmy nodded. ‘Plants love me.’

She rolled her eyes. ‘Dex, could you take the terrace? And the outside walls?’

‘If I must,’ said Dex, reaching forward to swipe the Prosecco from the ice bucket.

‘And, Jessica, perhaps you and I can make a start on the rooms?’

‘I can help with the rooms,’ said Eve.

‘No, I think it’s fine with Jessica and me. Is that OK, Jessica?’

‘Yep.’ Jessica looked up from reading an email on her phone and nodded. ‘Whatever you need.’

‘And, Eve, you could smarten up the area round the pool?’

‘There’s a pool?’ said Dex, glancing around trying to find it.

‘Behind those olive trees,’ Libby said, pointing to her right. ‘It’s tiny and really shabby. Is that OK, Eve?’

Eve shrugged a shoulder as if it had to be. ‘If that’s what you want, Libby,’ she said, her expression in the dim light of the terrace almost challenging.

Libby ignored it. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think that would work.’

Dex popped the Prosecco cork, splashed the frothing bubbles into the five glasses, and then raised his for a toast. ‘To Sunshine and Biscotti,’ he said with a grin.

As Libby chinked her glass she remembered Jake making exactly the same toast when they had arrived in the spring, and wished for a moment that he was there. That it could all just have carried on exactly as it had been. She didn’t care what website he’d been using, just wished that she hadn’t found out.

When she saw all the others smiling at her, she forced a big smile in return, refusing to acknowledge quite how lonely she felt. Taking a huge gulp of bubbles, she picked up her phone and made them all chink their glasses again so she could snap it for her Instagram.

‘Hold it there. Jimmy, just move your glass up a bit. Dex, out the way. Yes, perfect. Brilliant.’

Perfect summer night toasting the Sunshine and Biscotti Club, she titled it.

And as the evening wore on and the sun set around them, the moths starting to flutter around the outside lights, the Prosecco oiled the chat and the Instagram likes came rolling in, the perfect distraction from her worries.

JESSICA

‘So, what do you think? We paint this white or we keep the wallpaper?’ Libby was standing with her hands on her hips, staring at Jessica, the morning sun shining bright behind her.

Aesthetically Jessica was a minimalist. She had grown up dusting a house rammed with knickknacks—little ornaments, crucifixes, cross-stitches—and in retaliation kept her décor to the absolute minimum. Her artistic talent was in graphics and was predominantly computer based. She spent her spare time redesigning album covers to suit her own vision. Home furnishings were not her thing. ‘I don’t know really. I like white, but the wallpaper’s also quite nice. Quite authentic. Libby …’ Feeling herself starting to sweat in the searing morning heat, Jessica paused to undo the top half of the boilersuit overalls that Libby had lent her for decorating. ‘I’m not sure I’m the right person for this. I really think Eve might be better suited—’

‘No, you’re fine,’ Libby said, only half looking in Jessica’s direction as she struggled to tie an old scarf around her head. ‘We’ll paint it.’

‘How’s it going?’ Dex popped his head round the door and snorted a laugh when he got a glimpse of their outfits.

‘I was just saying that I think Eve would be better for this job,’ said Jessica.

Dex took one look around the room and said, ‘Oh yeah, definitely. Jessica’s crap at interior design. If she had her way we’d all just be in pods plugged into our laptops.’

Jessica shook her head at him pityingly. Dex winked at her.

‘Why don’t you get Eve to help?’ Dex said. ‘This is just her thing, isn’t it? She was always wafting about with rugs and scarves and things at the flat.’

‘No, it’s fine,’ Libby insisted.

Dex glanced down the corridor. ‘Hey, Eve! Come over here,’ he shouted.

‘Dex, what are you doing,’ Libby said, a little panicked.

‘What’s wrong?’ Eve asked, appearing in the doorway, one earphone in as she commented on some Lego construction one of her kids was showing her on FaceTime.

‘You have to swap with Jessica—she’s way out of her depth,’ said Dex, ushering her inside.

‘You’re so sweet together, you two,’ Eve said as she hung up the phone. ‘You’ve become like her big brother.’

Jessica snorted.

Dex puffed out his chest with pride. ‘I like to think I keep an eye out for her.’

‘You are unbelievable.’ Jessica sighed as she walked over and handed Eve her paintbrush.

Dex ruffled her hair.

‘Get off me,’ Jessica said, laughing, taking the opportunity to dart out of the room and down the stairs in case Libby somehow managed to get her way and summoned her back again.

The sun was burning bright as Jessica sauntered out onto the terrace. She breathed in the scent of the lemons, delighted to be working on her own in the seclusion of the pool area.

There was a bucket, soap, and a scrubbing brush ready and waiting by the gap in the olive tree wall that led to the pool area and she went over to pick it up. But, just as she was bending over, all her elation at having got away from the decorating was instantly dissolved by a voice saying, ‘Jessica?’

She paused where she was, her fingers gripping the handle of the bucket.

He was here.

She looked down at her outfit and thought, Why do I have to be wearing a boilersuit?

‘Miles!’ she said, standing tall, the water in the bucket sloshing slightly.

He looked exactly the same but completely different, standing there in a white linen shirt, top button undone, khakis, and navy espadrilles. His black hair was scruffy but in a way that suggested it wasn’t usually like that; as though he’d had a long journey and no mirror to check it in. His cheekbones were less visible, less sunken, like he probably ate better than he did but, from the fit of the shirt, he clearly worked out rather than lay on his bed for hours with his guitar scribbling down lyrics.

Her brain tried to superimpose the old Miles over this version. The black skinny jeans, the black t-shirt, the cigarettes, the dirty hair, and the sneer, but it was almost impossible.

‘You all right?’ he said, running a hand through his hair.

‘Yeah, fine. You?’ she said.

When Jessica had thought about seeing Miles again she had envisioned it for some reason at her office, where she was immaculate, groomed, sleek, successful, and emotionally untouchable.

Now she stood in a bright blue boilersuit, the arms tied around her waist, wearing a black vest, pale skin untouched by sun, hair curling of its own accord. And she found she had nothing to say. No casual chitchat. Just an overriding desire to back away.

Rescue came in the form of Jimmy, who loped up the garden, rake over his shoulder, and shouted, ‘Miles, mate! How are you? Christ I haven’t seen you since New York.’

‘Hey, Jimmy! Good to see you.’

Jessica watched them for a second, but the mention of New York left her wanting to escape even more, so, with a back step and a small wave of her hand, she walked quickly to the shelter of the pool.

She took the few steps down past the olive trees, and came out in a courtyard pool area that looked like it had been bottom of the list of priorities for some years. The crumbling patio floor was filthy, sticky with sap and lichen, with tiles missing like pieces of a jigsaw. The rusted table and chairs were strewn with olive leaves and spiders’ webs that looped from the metal to the olive tree branches like Christmas lights. The sailcloth shades that cast a triangle of relief from the sun were green at the edges from mould and mildew. And the tiny pool looked as if no one had swum in it for decades, probably preferring the wide expanse of lake just a stroll away.

Jessica stood for a moment, letting her heart rate get back to normal, her hand resting on the rusted table. She could feel the sun beating down on her bare arms, singeing the skin. She needed a hat but it was inside and she couldn’t go back while Miles was still talking to Jimmy on the terrace.

She crept over to the row of rangy, unkempt olive trees in an attempt to peer through the gaps to see what was going on.

She could see Miles’s khaki clad legs. They made her think of all the unsuccessful dates she’d had over the years, no candidate matching up to her vision of him.

She could hear Jimmy as she peered through the leaves, unable to get a very good look, the branches all overgrown. Then Miles’s deep laugh.

She reached up and moved an olive branch out the way as surreptitiously as she could. Then she caught Jimmy say something about Flo, and Miles saying, ‘Yeah, it’s better.’ And she immediately let go of the branch and stepped away.

Flo.

Flo Hamilton was a friend of a girl who’d been on Jimmy’s university course and had taken Jimmy’s room in the boys’ flat when he’d left. She’d bounded in, all white teeth and American confidence. Jessica had made the mistake of not taking much notice.

Jessica heard Dex come out onto the terrace, and the sound of more back-slapping and guffawing. Then obviously Miles must have been shown inside and it all fell silent.

She rubbed her face with her hand and stood for a second before retying her hair and taking a proper look at the pool area.

It was an unloved little hideaway, enclosed on every side by olive trees whose branches snaked out in search of one another. Taking her bucket, Jessica went and sat in a big wicker chair in the one shady corner and stared across at the pool. It was just about long enough for two strokes of front crawl and was tiled in pearlescent black stones that made the water green and dark. It would be like swimming in twilight as the sun blazed overhead. Olive leaves scattered the surface like little boats.

She wondered if she could hide there forever.

It was the dirt that made her get up in the end. The desire to make this little area shine to its full potential.

She got to work with the scrubbing brush, the hard bristles scratching over the lichen-coated tiles. And the more she scrubbed, the more she fell into the monotony of the noise. It made her think of her parents’ house where she’d lived with sweeping and scrubbing as a background noise for years. Polishing and hoovering. Constant tidying. The dull thumping sound of the living room doors as their glass panels were dusted; the smell of white vinegar on surfaces and the sight of cloths soaking in bleach.

It was almost impossible to believe it had once been her life. Every time she thought about growing up in that house, which was as little as possible, she’d be astonished by her younger self, by her resourcefulness. Shut up in her room, every second of her life was accounted for. She was confined by the overwhelming fear her parents had of the world and the people in it. The mistrust of society. Straight back from school, straight back from work. Jessica had waited years to squirrel away the cash to leave.

As the sun blistered down, the sound of her scrubbing was interrupted by a familiar voice saying, ‘Ah, you have been put to work.’

She stopped to look up and saw the guy from the bar standing with his arms crossed over his chest, dressed in leather motorbike trousers and a bright purple t-shirt, a smirk on his lips. ‘This outfit, it is very flattering,’ he said, pointing to her boilersuit.

Jessica raised her brows. ‘Are you stalking me?’

‘Ha, no.’ He shook his head, then took the couple of steps down to the patio. ‘I am looking for Ms Libby. I help her out a bit last week and I am free today so I thought …?’ He shrugged. ‘She might need more help. I am Bruno by the way.’

‘Libby’s inside,’ Jessica said, starting to scrub again.

He cocked his head, his eyes narrowing as he studied her. ‘You know in most cultures it is polite to return a greeting. A person might even say their name.’

She paused, wiped her brow, and then leant her hands on the edge of the bucket. ‘I’m sure they might,’ she said, one eyebrow arched. ‘But I think it would also depend on whether that person wanted the other person to know their name or not, wouldn’t it?’

Bruno held his hands up to object. ‘I don’t know what that person’s problem would be with just wanting to know someone’s name.’

‘Jessica?’ Miles’s voice called from the terrace and he jogged down the steps to see if she was still by the pool. ‘Jimmy said you had the bucket. Oh …’ He paused when he saw Bruno. ‘Sorry, I didn’t realise you were with someone. Hi.’ Miles held out a hand. ‘Miles.’

‘Bruno.’

Jessica stiffened and she could see Bruno notice.

‘You are all friends?’ Bruno said as he looked between them.

‘Kind of,’ said Jessica.

‘In a fashion,’ said Miles at the same time.

Bruno nodded.

The sun seemed like the fourth person in the conversation, beating down on them all, firing up the unescapable cicadas, a tinnitus hum in her ears.

‘Yes,’ said Miles. ‘Yes, we’re all friends.’

Bruno had his eyes still on Jessica, absorbing her reactions. She looked down at the dirty tiles.

‘Well, I erm …’ Miles pointed to the bucket. ‘I just came for that. I’m giving Jimmy a hand.’

‘I kind of need it,’ Jessica said. ‘Isn’t there another one?’

Miles frowned. ‘I don’t know. Jimmy just said there was a red bucket.’

‘OK, fine,’ she said. ‘You have it. I’ll find another one.’

Miles looked a bit hesitant.

‘Seriously, have it, I can do something else,’ she said, pushing the bucket his way.

Miles walked over and picked it up, the water sloshing over the sides in what seemed to be his haste to leave.

Bruno watched him go and then said, ‘I’ll go and find Ms Libby.’

At the top step he stopped and glanced back. ‘I’ve never met a Jessica before,’ he said.

‘Well, now you have,’ Jessica said, pushing herself up to standing, still distracted by the arrival and departure of Miles.

He nodded. ‘You look like a Jessica.’

She put her hands on her hips and sighed. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

Bruno shrugged. ‘An interesting challenge,’ he said with a smile, and sauntered off in search of Libby.

LIBBY

The sun was low in the sky, just brushing the line of trees as it tipped into late afternoon. Everyone was exhausted. The heat had sucked them dry of energy. Libby and Eve had done some fractious decorating, unable to agree on almost any of the renovation choices. In the end they had focused on ripping up the carpets with Bruno.

Jimmy and Miles had slashed half the garden. It looked like a first day haircut, no one quite sure whether it would settle into something good or bad. She was amazed Miles had flown all the way from the States to be there. He said he’d been due a holiday but she wondered if really he’d been craving something familiar. He hadn’t mentioned Flo so neither had Libby but in retrospect she wished she had. It was weird though, to know what to say to him, because he looked so unlike himself nowadays—all polished and smooth-edged.

She’d wondered what Jessica had thought when she’d seen him. But then she’d seen the sparkling poolside patio and, putting two and two together, Libby had presumed she’d been in need of hard-work distraction.

The terrace, on the other hand, was practically untouched, Dex having had a snooze in a lounge chair for most of the morning.

Now as Libby stood in front of them all in the outhouse she suddenly felt a bit stupid for cajoling them into a baking class. They were all there, standing reluctantly behind their benches like school children. Jessica had her phone on her table and was trying to surreptitiously scroll through her emails.

‘OK, so, what I’m thinking is that there will be scheduled baking times every day throughout the week. So, one day we’d make muffins and things for breakfast, another day bread for lunch, and then in the afternoon, like now, we’ll make a dessert or petit fours for after dinner with coffee. That’s how I planned it. It might change. That’s why you’re here. Guinea pigs. OK.’ Libby gave a small laugh and tied up her hair.

Miles tried to stifle a yawn behind his cup of coffee. ‘Sorry, jet lag,’ he said.

It was much easier when she did it to camera for her YouTube videos, with no one watching her.

Dex was leaning forward, chin cupped in his hands, elbows on the table, staring unblinking at her. The not-concentrating looks between Eve and Jimmy were equally distracting. All that as well as Jessica unsubtly tapping away on her phone. The worst, however, were the glares of complete disdain from Giulia at the back, who Libby had roped in to up the numbers and to try and win her round to the concept.

‘OK,’ Libby said again, then she felt her cheeks start to flush. She couldn’t work out how to start without clapping her hands together like a strict Home Economics teacher. These were her peers, not people she could teach. They were people she had lived with, laughed with, fled the pub with after Jimmy was caught cheating in the quiz, sat in the hospital with when Dex got run over on his bike, lazed on the roof with as Jake’s barbecue puffed with plumes of smoke, squirmed with as the boys tried to convince Jessica there was a ghost knocking on her window at night, sat in darkness with as Eve hid from a pestering one-night stand, exchanged sniggering glances with as Miles took the stage in some grimy club. How could she now tell them all what to do like a teacher?

She looked down at her workbench—at the little bowls of flour and sugar that she’d measured out and prepared like a TV chef. ‘Oh god, now I’m getting hot.’ She pressed her hands to her face.

‘It’s all right, Lib,’ said Dex. ‘It’s only us. Just do it however you like.’

Libby exhaled. ‘You’re making me more nervous than strangers,’ she said, then she laughed.

In her head, in all the planning sessions, Jake had been in the room, maybe leaning against the wooden mantelpiece, a cup of tea in his hand, a cocky smile on his face. He was the chatter. The one who made people feel instantly at ease.

Supper clubs had got much better when he’d stepped in to help. On her own they’d been a complete disaster. The first one she held, her fingers had shaken so much from the pressure that she’d barely been able to prepare anything. Smoke from the sizzling chorizo had set the smoke alarm off. The kitchen had gone from boiling hot to arctic cold when she’d had to throw all the windows open. Then the boys upstairs had thrown an impromptu party—Miles’s decks in situ right above her beautifully laid table, the thumping of feet on bare floorboards, the wine running out, her beef overcooking, her cream over-whipping, and the stem ginger ice cream refusing to set. It had been an all-round disaster. The three couples had sloped out before the coffee had bubbled up on the hob.

The door had closed on her overly effusive goodbyes, and, needing to take it out on someone, she had stormed up the stairs, thrown open the door of the boys’ flat, pulled the plug on the speakers, and shouted, ‘Well, thank you very much. You destroyed that for me. I hope you’re proud of yourselves.’ All the achingly cool party-goers had stared with disdain and she’d wished she hadn’t gone upstairs at all.

And of course Jake had come downstairs after her, because that’s the kind of thing he did. He took control of situations. He smoothed over cracks. He’d leaned in the doorway and said, ‘We’re sorry. We’re thoughtless, pig-headed arseholes.’

She knew he didn’t really mean a word of it but it had made her feel better. It had made her smile when he’d taken a seat and looked down at the plates in front of him with a frown—at the split cream; the burnt, cracked pavlova; the liquid, unset, failed ice cream—and said, with a quirk of his brow, ‘This all looks excellent.’

‘It’s been a disaster,’ she’d said.

‘Nah.’ He’d sat back in his chair, hands behind his head, a grin on his lips. ‘It’s just the beginning. Teething problems,’ he’d said, then he’d taken a swipe of the melted ice cream and popped it in his mouth. ‘Might look like shit but it tastes amazing.’

She’d frowned at the half-compliment. He’d sat forward and tucked her hair behind her ear in the kind of clichéd trademark move that Jake managed to pull off to perfection, and said, ‘You’re going to be amazing, Libby. Because it will never be worse than this,’ and she had felt for the first time that someone completely believed in her. In retrospect she realised it was probably just a line to get her into bed. But from that moment on, she had felt stronger when he was next to her.

And there had been more supper clubs. Hundreds more. They’d built a business out of it. And Jake had taken over as host—greeting the guests, entertaining them over canapés, topping up wines, tipping back in his chair and observing as she put the plates down in front of them, detailing the subtle touches that gave her mini venison wellingtons their hint of caramel, or explaining the origin of a bouillabaisse and how hers also included the often overlooked sea urchin and spider crab. He would subtly nudge her on the thigh if he thought she was going on too much and say something like, ‘We’re here for the food, darling, not the science bit.’ And the guests would chuckle as he winked at her or gave her a quick pat on the bum.

Libby was better when she could do things in her own time. When she could delete and edit. She wasn’t a spontaneous ice breaker or joke cracker.

‘Ready when you are, Libby,’ Jimmy said, snapping her into the present. ‘I can’t actually remember the last time I cooked anything.’

‘What do you eat?’ Jessica asked, glancing up, perplexed. ‘Do you gnaw on raw fish grabbed with your bare hands from the ocean?’

Jimmy did a self-assured chuckle. ‘I grab them, CeeCee cooks them.’

Jessica sighed. ‘Oh god, who the hell’s CeeCee?’

‘She lives with me on the boat.’

Eve reached forward and picked up the laminated recipe sheet Libby had laid out on every bench. She glanced casually over the type as if she wasn’t really listening but gave herself away by saying, ‘As in, she’s your girlfriend?’

Jessica glanced from Eve to Jimmy, a brow raised, a slight smile on her lips. She moved her recipe to the side so she could perch up on the bench.

Jimmy tilted his head to one side. ‘We have no need for formal ownership descriptions.’

Jessica snorted. ‘Oh, Jimmy, you’re not serious?’

‘I am!’ He grinned. ‘We have a boat, we live on it, both of us are free to come and go as we please.’

‘Who owns the boat?’ Dex asked.

Jimmy paused. ‘She owns the boat,’ he said with a shrug.

Jessica laughed. ‘I bet she does.’

Libby found herself anxious to stop the chat, unable to enjoy it because this was meant to be a class. She could see Giulia tapping her fingers on the surface at the back.

‘So if this CeeCee wasn’t there when you got back, you wouldn’t mind?’ Eve asked, putting her recipe sheet down on the bench, unable to hide her interest.

‘Well, technically he’d have to mind because the boat would be gone too,’ said Jessica.

Jimmy shrugged. ‘As I say, free to come and go as we please.’

‘No ties,’ Eve said.

Jimmy shook his head with a smile. ‘None. At the moment we are in each other’s lives. In six months maybe we won’t be. Come on,’ he said, holding his hands out wide, ‘you gotta admit that’s a more interesting way to live?’

Eve’s phone rang. She looked surprised by the interruption and then started to rummage through her bag on the floor. ‘Oh, that’s me. Where is it? God. Hi, Noah! Everything OK?’

As Eve admired another Lego dinosaur on FaceTime, Jessica took the opportunity to get her phone out again, saying, ‘I just need to reply to a couple of emails.’

Jimmy leant back on his stool and started saying something to Dex that made him laugh loudly. Miles turned to see what was being said.

‘Are we going to cook or not?’ snapped Giulia, and they all seemed to remember where they were.

‘Yes! Yes, we are, sorry,’ Libby said, cringing at what it all must seem like to Giulia. She imagined Jake watching, rolling his eyes. She was confident that he would have somehow effortlessly combined the cooking and the banter.

Eve whispered goodbye to Noah and hung up the phone. Jessica, never good at being told what to do, sucked in her cheeks as if she’d been reprimanded by the head teacher and gave Giulia a glare before putting her phone back in her pocket.

‘OK, something really simple today, nothing taxing at all. We’re going to start with the humble biscotti.’

‘Oh, I like that,’ said Jimmy. ‘Ties in nicely with the name. Good one.’

Libby nodded. ‘That’s what I was hoping. You know, people would arrive, maybe be a bit tired, and it’d be a nice introduction to the whole thing. Not daunting.’

Giulia sighed from the back row. ‘The baking. Yes. More baking, less talking. We get it done, I get back to work.’

Eve giggled under her breath.

‘Yes, sorry,’ said Libby. ‘Sorry, Giulia.’ She made a mental note to try not to include her in any of her future classes. ‘Right, so you’ve got a choice here. I’ve given you the basic ingredients but you can flavour your biscotti however you like. I like dried apricots but you can use chocolate, pistachio—traditionally it was aniseed and hazelnut—it’s completely up to you. Or just make it plain. The main thing to a biscotti, and actually the meaning behind its name, is that it’s twice baked.’

‘Do I like biscotti?’ asked Jimmy.

‘Yes,’ said Eve, without looking up from where she had started to break her eggs. Libby caught Jessica’s eye. Eve glanced up and caught them sharing a look. She raised a brow in silent question and both Libby and Jessica looked away.

‘Hang on, Eve’s started.’ Jimmy frowned. ‘How has Eve started? Are we meant to have started?’

‘Well, you can start, Jimmy, because there’s a recipe, but I’ll talk you through it.’

‘Jessica, have you started?’

‘No.’ Jessica was eating an apricot.

‘And I am almost finished,’ added Giulia from the back. ‘This is very easy. Too easy I think. Far too easy.’

‘It is?’ Jimmy looked confused.

‘OK, right, everyone, go with me on this. We’re mixing flour, baking powder and sugar. The measurements are on your recipes and the ingredients are under your benches.’

Jessica leant forward on the bench, resting on her elbows, and perused the recipe. Next to her Eve had already started mixing in the eggs. Jimmy was looking perplexed at the ingredients and, without consulting the recipe at all, ripped open a bag of flour so it mushroomed out like a cloud in front of his face.

‘Suits you,’ Dex said, nodding towards Jimmy’s white face.

Jimmy groaned and wiped the flour away with a tea towel. ‘Libby, it’s no good. I don’t think I’m cut out for this.’

‘You’ll be fine, honestly, I’ll come and help,’ Libby said, coming to stand next to him. Jimmy pulled up his stool and she realised, as she started to measure out his ingredients, that he had no intention of doing any more himself. ‘Jimmy, what flavour do you want?’

He shrugged. ‘Don’t know.’

She rolled her eyes. ‘Look, you have to help me.’

‘I’ll just mess it up,’ he said with a twinkling grin.

‘But the whole point is that you learn. Here, get your hands in and mix this into a dough,’ she said, sliding the bowl over to where he was sitting.

Jimmy made a face to suggest he was being hard done by.

In front of them Miles rubbed his eyes, stopped what he was doing, and said, ‘Libby, I’m sorry but I think I’m going to have to go and sit down. I feel rough.’

Libby nodded. ‘OK, that’s fine.’

Jimmy followed him out of the door with longing eyes.

‘I’m quite tired, actually,’ said Dex. ‘Can I go outside?’

Jessica scoffed. ‘Tired? You didn’t do anything today.’

Dex ignored her.

‘Look,’ Libby said, tearing off some baking parchment for Jimmy’s biscotti. ‘No one is forcing you to be here. If you don’t want to do it, you are more than welcome to go outside.’ She didn’t mean a word of it. She was hoping that they would stay just because they knew it meant something to her.

But Jimmy and Dex immediately abandoned their posts, ditched their aprons, and raced out of the door, throwing themselves onto the pink metal chairs next to Miles.

Libby took in a breath. It was fine. She scooped out Jimmy’s mixture and smoothed it onto the baking tray in little strips.

‘I actually have an email that I have to answer so if we’re not carrying on with this then I just need to go out and, you know, answer …’ Jessica said, untying her apron and leaving hesitantly, unsure if it was allowed or not.

Eve had gone back to her workstation and Libby could feel her watching. She did everything she could to hold in her disappointment. And, in an attempt to overcompensate, her voice came out far too sweet as she said, ‘Seriously, it’s fine. Go. No probs at all.’ Then she did a big wide smile as she slotted Jimmy’s biscotti into the oven.

Eve stayed where she was but her phone was buzzing on the table with another FaceTime.

‘Noah, I can’t talk right now,’ Libby heard her whisper. ‘Yes, it’s very nice. Very good. You’re very clever.’

Then there was a slam of an oven door and Giulia marched to the front, muttering, ‘I am finished with this. A complete waste of my time. There is no cooking being done. I have work to do. My biscotti are in the oven.’

Libby felt the same crushing disappointment of that first ever supper club. ‘OK, well, probably best to just end it there, don’t you think? Call it a day,’ she said, keeping her voice emotionless and breezy even though Eve was the only one left in the room to hear.

Then Libby pulled her phone out of her pocket and took a couple of snaps for Instagram. Of Jimmy’s biscotti in the oven. Of them all lounging outside soaking up the late afternoon sun: A well-earned break while the biscotti bake.

EVE

‘So what the hell’s Jake playing at?’ Eve asked. They were still sitting on the pink metal chairs in front of the outhouse. Dex had been to the bar and come back with a bottle of vodka, ice, and some glasses. The biscotti that Libby had made for Jimmy sat on a plate in the centre of the table. Libby wasn’t with them. She hadn’t come back from the main hotel since the class had been cancelled.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.