“Don’t ask.”
Miles stood up, straightening his jacket in a way that said I am being the only reasonable person in an unreasonable situation.
“Look,” he said. “I knew it was a risk coming here.”
“What did you think you were risking, exactly? Because it seems to me like you had nothing to lose from this little visit whatsoever.”
Apparently he was going to blank that. “It’d mean a lot to JoJo if you came.”
“I don’t even know JoJo. Why does he give a shit? Why should I give a shit?”
“You were a big part of my life, so it seems right that you should —”
This was making sense. Bullshit sense. Selfish sense. Very, very Miles sense. “Oh, right, so it’s an absolution thing. You want me to be there so that you can put the shitty thing you did to me behind you and start a new shiny life with your new shiny husband and say to yourself, It’s okay, no need to feel bad, Luc’s fine with it, he came to my wedding and everything.”
“Think about it.” From inside his jacket, Miles retrieved a delicately printed piece of cream-coloured card and laid it on the desk beside me. “Moving on will be best for both of us.”
And that was the problem. I had moved on. I’d moved on really fucking well. “Just go.”
He just went, stopping in the door on the way out to give me an enigmatic “See you around.” Then I was left sitting at my desk staring at a wedding invitation, with swirly silver writing saying MR.
MILES EDWARD GREENE AND MR. JOHN JOSEPH RYAN
REQUEST THE PLEASURE OF YOUR COMPANY AS THEY
CELEBRATE THEIR UNION. RSVP.
IT WAS MY TURN TO cook. By which I mean it was the one night a month when my overwhelming sense of guilt at never cooking overrode both my and Oliver’s awareness that I was horrendously bad at it. Since Oliver had, after a long email exchange with Bronwyn, come to the conclusion that it was ethically unsupportable to be vegetarian but not vegan if you claimed to care about animal welfare and had therefore cut out animal products entirely, I’d decided to make a sweet potato, chard, and celeriac rainbow-layered pie. Which had seemed like a great idea when I’d Googled good vegan recipes a couple of days ago. Then seemed like quite a poor idea when I’d been wandering around Tesco’s wondering where the fuck they kept their celeriac. Then turned out to be an unbelievably poor idea once I’d started trying to make it.
For a start, store-bought pastry wasn’t vegan so I’d had to make it from scratch, and I quickly learned that whipping up your own pastry from coconut milk, flour, and almond oil was really, really hard.
Especially when, according to the recipe, you were supposed to do it in the twenty minutes your beetroot was roasting in the oven so everything would be nice and ready when the time came to combine it all.
An hour and ten minutes into the one-hour prep time that the recipe had promised, I was covered in flour to my elbows, juggling three different roasting tins that had to go into the oven at different times, trying to work out whether my pastry needed more coconut milk （I’d bought extra in case） or more flour （I’d bought extra in case） or less of one or the other （in which case how was I meant to take it out）， and fast returning to my monthly realisation that I should never, ever be allowed in a kitchen.
Eventually I got the pastry to a sort of play-dough consistency where I could just about squoodge it into a cake tin and start filling it with layers of chard leaves and semolina, which would apparently absorb the juices but which I was beginning to strongly suspect would not in fact absorb anything. I wrestled the whole mess into the oven, set the timer, and made a brief despairing effort to clean up before realising that I had no idea where to start.
Oliver arrived home just as the smoke alarm went off.
“Smells delicious,” he yelled from the hall before heading into the front room, grabbing a sheaf of documents he’d been working on, and waving them frantically under the smoke alarm.
“Thanks. It’s supposed to be a pie.”
“And what’s it actually going to be?”
“Honestly?” I came through from the kitchen, yoinked the papers gently out of his hand, and took over waving duty. “Probably a takeaway?”
The beeping stopped, and Oliver recovered his documents before giving me a belated honey-I’m-home kiss on the cheek. “I’m sure it’ll be fine.”
It was never fine. But over the course of our relationship I’d watched Oliver gamely chomp his way through roasted squash that was practically mulch, spinach soup that was practically jam, and more watery stews than I could keep track of.