To My Best Friends. Sam Baker

to start, with either of them.

      Si was a good guy. A keeper, Nicci called him. The kind of guy who knew what to do on a long, empty Sunday. Hardworking, reliable and unfailingly kind. Still sexy at forty-five, twice-weekly swimming sessions ensuring his body was firm. Plus, he still had his own hair, and lots of it. She loved him, baggage and all.

      He knew there was something going on. ‘What’s wrong?’ he’d asked, a couple of nights ago after they’d made exhausted love, when the lights were out and she hoped he’d fallen asleep. She let him think it was work; that she was worried about what would happen to Capsule Wardrobe. That was true, as far as it went. All their savings were in the company: big money, by their standards. And no pension. Capsule Wardrobe was her pension. But that wasn’t all. Far from it. The IVF had gone on a backburner when Nicci became sick, but now she was dead there was no excuse not to get back on the wagon. Or not. Three strikes, they’d promised themselves. Three strikes and then they’d stop. But neither of them had expected it to come to that. Not really.

      And then there was the other madness. The Mona and David thing.

      What the hell had Nicci been thinking?

      In her darker moments, when Jo woke at three or four or five and couldn’t get back to sleep, she wondered whether Nicci had been thinking at all; whether the cancer and chemo . . . but no, that was too hideous to consider. And yet, even for Nicci – and Jo had a high tolerance for Nicci’s plots, seeing them as endearingly hare-brained rather than Machiavellian – this whole letter thing was extreme.

      The traffic lights changed and the Golf rolled forward. Beyond the lights a comparatively empty road beckoned. One more car and she was on her way.

      If she were honest, Jo was dreading this evening. Not just because she hadn’t seen David to talk to since the funeral, but also because the idea of sorting through Nicci’s clothes felt wrong. The mere thought of it made Jo feel like an intruder. It was so . . . final. If Nicci was letting them touch her clothes there was no escaping it. She was gone.

      The first time she’d read Nicci’s letter Jo hadn’t noticed the P.S. tacked on the end. The enormity of the rest of the letter had overshadowed it. But then David called and asked her when she wanted to start dealing with Nicci’s clothes, and it dawned on her – not that if he knew about the clothes, he might know about everything else too – but that every item, and there were thousands, had to be sorted into one of three lots.

      CHUCK: Far from being junk, these were the valuable but dispensable pieces – and there were plenty – that should be sold to raise money for the girls’ futures.

      CHERISH: The pieces with sentimental value to be kept for the girls as a kind of wearable memory box.

      CHARITY: Where the rest went. Nicci, being Nicci, had specified charities: Oxfam, the NSPCC, Macmillan Cancer Support, Refuge, Safe Shelter; those specialising in children and cancer, mainly. Although Jo had been surprised by the inclusion of Refuge, and had never even heard of the last.

      Well, now that task was upon her and there was nothing for it but to gather her strength and face it.

      Chapter Six

      ‘Not early, am I?’ Lizzie asked. The confusion on David’s face when he opened the front door made her wonder if she had the wrong time, or even the wrong day. Instinctively, she glanced at her watch: ten past seven. That was Lizzie, always early or late. Try as she might, she could never just be on time.

      Usually she would have thrown her arms around him, hugged him hello. But since letter-gate it felt wrong. Instead, she stood on tiptoe to peck his cheek and stepped back when he took a second too long to respond.

      ‘No,’ David said, eventually. ‘You’re not.’

      He looked, if anything, worse than the last time she had seen him. His usually pink skin was sallow, the bags under his eyes tinged with grey. ‘It’s just . . . I was expecting Jo first.’

      ‘She isn’t here yet?’

      Before he could answer, a shriek came from the far end of the house, followed by a crash and a wail.

      David glanced over his shoulder. ‘I better go and see . . . Come in.’

      Before Lizzie had a chance to ask how he was coping, David had vanished into the kitchen. Not that she needed to ask. One look told her he wasn’t.

      ‘Why don’t I take over?’ she offered when she reached the kitchen, and the full chaos Harrie and Charlie had wrought on their bedtime milk and cookies became clear. Crumbs and puddles splattered the oak table. The solid wood worktops were thick with dirty dishes, open cereal packets and the debris of an earlier meal – or two. And the toddlers were hardly to blame for that.

      Lizzie headed purposefully towards the sink. ‘I’ll start on this while I wait for Jo,’ she said. Anything was better than this awkward hovering.

      David made to protest but Lizzie waved him away. ‘I thought you were going out,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you get off and let me sort this?’

      David hesitated. ‘I was . . . am . . . it’s just . . .’

      Still he loitered. Surely he wasn’t planning to stay home after all?

      ‘Off you go then,’ Lizzie said, channelling her mother in the days when her mother could still strike the fear of God into cold callers, and hoping he couldn’t hear the panic in her voice. This evening was going to be hard enough without David here. ‘The reinforcements have arrived.’

      At least one-third of the reinforcements was lurking around the corner, sheltering from the rain.

      ‘Hurry up,’ Mona muttered, adjusting her inadequate umbrella so the drips stopped soaking her back and spattered her boots and jeans instead. It was only five minutes since she’d seen Lizzie park and go inside. But, thanks to the cold and the wet, it felt far longer.

      Through the downpour she stared at the solid Victorian end terrace and felt a familiar sense of isolation. Nicci and David had bought the house as part of a probate deal eight years earlier, soon after Mona returned from Australia. ‘In need of modernisation,’ the estate agent had said. Understatement of the year. ‘Buy it while it’s still standing,’ Mona had muttered the first time the proud new owners showed their friends around. That was before the builders and plumbers and electricians had transformed it into the twenty-first-century family home of Nicci’s dreams.

      Mona had spent endless Sundays and bank holidays there in the intervening years, but still she felt like an outsider. It was entirely her own fault, she knew. Nicci, Lizzie and Jo had been such a tight-knit group when she’d answered their ad for a fourth person to share their student house that she’d never felt totally part of it. She hadn’t helped herself, of course, by heading off to satisfy her wanderlust as soon as graduation forced everyone to decide how they were going to live their lives. It was in Australia, as far away from home as possible, she hoped to find the person she wanted to be.

      Instead she found heartbreak. Although it hadn’t looked that way at first.

      Temping by day, Mona learnt yoga by night, which was where she met Callie, the instructor. And through Callie, her brother, Greg. Tall, blond, oozing confidence. As unreconstructed as it was possible to be. One look and, for the first time, Mona fell in love and lust so hard she barely caught her breath. Pregnancy and marriage, in that order, took her by surprise, followed, almost as rapidly, by rumours of Greg’s ‘hook-ups’. At first, she refused to believe the man she loved would do that to her; at second, she turned a blind eye for the sake of their baby boy.

      Until he left her.

      He. Left. Her. For a blonde waitress called Justine. Just one of many things she omitted to tell Nicci and Jo and Lizzie. Instead, she returned to London, aged twenty-eight, and with nothing to show for her travels but a newfound passion for yoga and a wide-eyed five-year-old boy with a Star Wars rucksack, who looked nothing like her and everything like the man the memory of whom she was running away from.

      Glancing