Two Streets Away

Luca parked two streets from Thea’s house, close enough that Hattie could walk it in under a minute, far enough that nobody looking out of a window would see a car they might recognise idling at the kerb.

“You don’t have to wait,” Hattie said, hand already on the door. “You could go back to Corvo. I’ll get the tube.”

“I’m not going back to Corvo.” He kept his voice level, though nothing else about the last ten minutes had managed to stay that way. “I’m going to sit in this car and think about food I’m not cooking until you come back and tell me how it went. That’s the whole of my plan. It’s not a good plan, but it’s mine.”

She looked at him for a moment, the particular stillness she gave a decision before she trusted it, and then leaned across and kissed him once, brief and steady, nothing nervous in it at all.

“Wish me luck,” she said.

“You don’t need luck. You need her to see what I already see, and I don’t think that’s ever been in question.” He caught her hand before she opened the door fully. “Whatever she says in there, it doesn’t change what I think of you for going.”

She went, coat pulled close against a June morning that hadn’t decided yet whether it wanted to be warm, and Luca watched her cross the road and turn the corner out of sight, and then sat in a parked car outside a street he’d never been to, thinking, despite every effort not to, about a different morning two years ago, in a different part of London, when a version of this same fear had lived in his chest for an entirely different reason.

He had not seen Thea in person since the launch party. He had spoken to her once since, a stiff, necessary phone call about a joint account that needed closing, eleven minutes long, both of them professionally kind and privately relieved when it ended. He had built, in the two years since, an entire careful architecture around never being in a room she was also in, and he understood, sitting in the car, that the architecture had just been handed to somebody else to walk through on his behalf, and that he had absolutely no control over what happened on the other side of that door.

He thought about the toast in his flat above the restaurant, folded the same way it had been folded for two years, and understood that it had nothing to do with what was happening two streets away, and thought about it anyway, because some habits took longer than a wine dinner to unlearn.

He did not check his phone until it buzzed on its own, twice in quick succession, and found Enzo had already heard, which meant Rae had told Kemi or Kemi had told Rae, because that was how anything true seemed to travel through this particular group of people lately, faster than any tabloid managed it.

How’s the waiting going, the first message said. Badly, Luca typed back, and meant it. The second arrived before he’d put the phone down.

You’ve spent two years managing every room in London. Sitting in a parked car doing nothing is apparently the one skill nobody taught you. Breathe. She’ll be fine. Thea always struck me as someone who reads a document twice before deciding what she thinks of the person who wrote it, if the description you’ve given me is anything to go by.

Luca read that twice himself, and found, despite everything sitting in his chest, that it made him laugh once, short and involuntary, in an empty car on a street he’d never been to before today.

When did you get so wise about people, he typed.

I set fire to a bin once. Ask anyone. A pause, then one more: Whatever happens in there, you did the actual hard part three days ago, in a car park, with a coffee going cold. This bit’s just waiting to find out if it counted. It counted.

He put the phone face-down on the passenger seat and watched a woman walk a dog the wrong way down a one-way street, twice, and a delivery van reverse badly into a space too small for it, and a cat consider and reject three different windowsills, and none of it fully settled the particular restlessness of a man who had spent two years controlling every room he was ever in and had, for the first time, no room left to control at all.

· · ·Scene break

She was gone forty minutes, which felt, in the small enclosed weather of the car, considerably longer than forty minutes usually felt.

He saw her before she saw him, coming round the corner at a pace that told him nothing conclusive — not the walk of someone who’d been thrown out, not quite the walk of someone who’d been forgiven either, something steadier than either of those, a woman who’d said a hard thing and was still standing afterwards — and he had the door open before she’d reached the car.

“Tell me,” he said, the same two words she’d used on him in a loading bay a week ago, because he’d learned by now which sentences worked best when there wasn’t room left for anything softer.

She got in, closed the door, and sat for a second with her hands in her lap before she started.

“I told her everything. The contract, the clauses, the corridor, the wine dinner. I told her before I found out Oli’s surname, and I told her I’d have taken her wedding regardless, and I told her about the reporter, and the forty-eight hours, and that I’d chosen to tell her myself rather than let a Saturday supplement do it for me.” Hattie’s voice was steady, but her hands, Luca noticed, were not quite. “She let me finish. She didn’t interrupt once, which I think cost her more than it looked like it cost her.”

“What did she say.”

“She said thank you.” Hattie looked at him properly then, something disbelieving still sitting underneath the words, as though she’d said them once already inside the house and still hadn’t fully trusted them the second time. “Not immediately. She sat with it for a while first, the way she sits with everything, and then she said thank you for telling her herself, in a room, before it became a headline, and that she’d spent two years assuming the worst version of the story about how her engagement ended, and that nothing I’d just told her made her think worse of either of us. If anything, she said, it was the first version of the whole thing that actually sounded like people, rather than a story.”

“She’s keeping you on the wedding.”

“She’s keeping me on the wedding.” Hattie’s voice caught slightly on that, the first crack in the whole account. “She said — and I’m not going to get this word for word, because I was somewhat overwhelmed at the time — that she’d rather have a speechwriter who understood the actual weight of what she was writing than one who didn’t, and that if anything, everything I’ve just told her explains why the vows have been better than anything she thought she was going to get.”

Luca sat with that for a moment, a client’s forgiveness landing somewhere he hadn’t fully braced for.

“She asked one thing,” Hattie said. “One favour, before I left.”

“What.”

“She wants you at the wedding.” Hattie turned in the seat to look at him directly. “Not as the show’s good sport. Not as a headline the finale gets to use. She said — and this part I remember clearly, because I’ve been turning it over the whole walk back — she said, tell him to come as himself. Not the version everyone decided about him after Ansa. Just him.”

Luca sat very still, hands on a steering wheel he had no intention of using for another minute, and felt something arrive in his chest that had nothing to do with relief, or not only relief, something closer to the particular vertigo of being handed back a thing he’d assumed was permanently lost.

“She doesn’t owe me that,” he said finally.

“No,” Hattie agreed. “She doesn’t. She’s giving it to you anyway, because apparently that’s who she actually is, underneath two years of tabloids deciding otherwise for both of you.” Hattie reached over and took his hand off the wheel, holding it properly, the way she’d held it in a kitchen three nights ago. “I think you should let her. I think two years of being ‘the chef from the video’ is long enough, and I think showing up as yourself, at her wedding, might be the closest either of you gets to actually closing it properly.”

“Come as myself.” He said it slowly, testing the shape of the phrase the way she tested a line before trusting it. “I’m not sure I remember what that costs, compared to the managed version. I’ve had two years of practice at the other one.”

“You’ve had four months of practice at this one too,” Hattie said. “Southbank. The wine dinner. A car park after you walked out of a meeting that would have cost you a great deal less if you’d stayed. I think you know what it costs by now. I think you’ve just never had anyone hand you an invitation to do it on purpose, at an occasion that used to be the worst night of your life.”

He turned that over, the engine still off, the street outside going about its ordinary Tuesday without any idea what had just been decided inside one parked car on it.

“Then I’ll come as myself,” he said. “Whatever that turns out to look like on the day. No good sport. No headline. Just a man at a wedding, who used to know the bride, and doesn’t need managing to be there.”

“That’s the whole of it,” Hattie said, and there was something in her voice that hadn’t been there in months — not quite relief, something steadier, a woman who’d walked into a hard room and come out the other side with the thing she’d gone in fearing to lose still, somehow, intact.

He started the car, finally, and pulled out into the ordinary Tuesday traffic, and thought, driving them both back towards Clerkenwell, that he had spent two years believing the wedding that didn’t happen was the single worst thing London hospitality had ever handed him, and had just been offered, by the woman who should have had every reason to want him nowhere near hers, the chance to walk into a different one and be there.

He did not know yet what that would feel like, standing in a glasshouse in Kew in two weeks’ time, watching another man marry the woman he’d once planned to. He knew, pulling up outside Corvo with Hattie’s hand still in his, that he was no longer afraid to find out.

“Can I ask you something,” he said, once he’d cut the engine, neither of them yet making a move to get out. “Did she say anything about Oli? Whether he knows any of it.”

“She said she’d tell him tonight, in her own words, and that she didn’t need my help writing that part.” Hattie almost smiled. “Apparently some conversations don’t want a professional in the room. I told her I understood that better than most people would.”

“Do you think he’ll mind? Me being there.”

“I think a man who married himself into Thea Whitlock’s good opinion knows better than to mind something she’s already decided is fine.” Hattie unclipped her seatbelt, finally, the car ticking as it cooled. “I think, if anything, he’s going to be relieved not to spend his own wedding day wondering if you’re the unexploded thing in the corner of the room. This way there’s nothing left to wonder about. Just a man who used to know the bride, standing at the back, meaning it.”

“Then I suppose I’ll just stand there,” Luca said, “and mean it, without anyone having to ask.”

“That’s rather the whole point of the invitation,” Hattie said.

They sat a moment longer in the quiet of the parked car, the ordinary Clerkenwell evening going on outside it without any idea what had just been settled inside, and Luca thought that he had spent two years bracing for the day he’d have to stand in a room with Thea Whitlock again, and had just been handed, instead, something considerably closer to permission.