“She thinks Tom’s cheating on her,” I blurted.
“Oh,” he said again. For someone who talked for a living, Oliver could be very monosyllabic sometimes.
“Yeah.”
He was silent a little longer. “And does she… Is he?”
I wished I had an answer to that. “She’s got a picture? Of him with another woman. And…honestly it doesn’t look good, but this is me talking and I’m not exactly the poster boy for healthy trust-based relationships.”
“Thank you for that vote of confidence, Lucien.”
“Fuck. No, I didn’t mean that. I mean, like, I have, you know, issues because of history shit.”
“Sorry. Yes. I do understand. I just—” The breath Oliver took next was so deep it became almost crackly over the phone line. “It doesn’t matter. You should go and be with Bridget.”
I winced. No wonder I hadn’t wanted to do this. “I will. I’m really sorry.”
“It’s fine.” He didn’t, if I was being completely honest with myself, sound all that fine. “I’m sure I can get our tickets moved to another night.”
“We could go see that grown-up play you wanted to see instead?”
“Oh, no”—I loved that he was making an effort to be cool with this, even if he wasn’t entirely succeeding—“I’m very keen to see a musical based on a popular movie from the 1990s. My only regret is that it’s going to have original songs instead of thinly repurposing popular music from the era.”
That struck me as a very specific concern, and one that was a lot easier to talk about than me ditching him on our first date in ages to hold someone else’s hand through something that was almost certainly a storm in a teacup. “Is this because I made you watch Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again?”
“Actually, I enjoyed that more than I expected to. Which I will admit was a low bar.” For some reason, Oliver trying to make me feel better was making me feel significantly worse. “And while I appreciate your willingness to sacrifice yourself on the altar of Arthur Miller, I’d rather rebook our tickets for Pretty Woman. It turns out I am, to my mild surprise, disappointed we aren’t seeing it this evening.”
“Really?” I asked. “Really really?”
“Oh, yes. Big disappointment. Big. Huge.”
“I see what you did there.” It was my sardonic voice. But I had seen what he did there. And that made standing him up even harder.
“You could take someone else?” I offered, trying to get in on the self-sacrifice gig.
“Ah, yes,” said Oliver, in a manner that suggested this had been my worst idea since the vegan pie. So my worst idea since very, very recently. “I could call up one of my many married friends and say, ‘Hello, would you like to abandon your spouse for an evening in order to see a moderately well-reviewed musical in place of the man I love?’”
“I mean, Ben or Sophie’d love a chance to stick the other one with the kids.”
“Perhaps, but the stickee would hate me forever and the important part of that sentence was ‘the man I love’ not ‘my married friends.’”
I wrestled with a weird mix of happy-sad cringe. “I’ll make it up to you? I promise?”
He gave a soft, not entirely sincere laugh. “I shall hold you to that, Lucien. Now go help Bridget. I don’t… I’d rather… It’s absolutely the right thing to do.”
“And I love you too,” I added slightly too late.
“Well recovered.”
We hung up. Then I grabbed my coat, shouted a quick goodbye to Alex, who was still stuck in the photocopier, and made a dash for the door. Because I was a good friend. And a good maid of honour.
Which I suppose meant that the joke was on me because, despite all that, I felt like a prick.
I WAS JUST DOING AN emergency Tesco’s run to get sorry-you’re-sad food when my phone buzzed again.
Thankfully, it wasn’t a picture of ambiguous infidelity this time. It was a black-and-white illustration of a man in a tricorn hat jumping a stiffly drawn horse over a fence. Underneath it, Oliver had sent: thinking of you.
Dick Turpin? I texted back.
Yes. I’m amazed we hadn’t got around to using him yet, but I checked and we definitely haven’t.
I paused in front of the freezers with one eye on my phone and one on the ice cream. Choosing the right emotional-support ice cream was important, but some questions demanded answers. What do you mean, you checked? Do you keep a list?