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‘Your sister said of course that we couldn’t expect you to buy yours.’ Ada rolled this one around. Two years ago there was no question that Gabby would have meant this in its cruellest possible form. A reminder of Ada’s shiftlessness, as Gabby saw it. Pointing to the money Ada never seemed to have. Gabby hated her job as a … what, consultant? Whatever that was. But at least she had a job. That’s what she’d meant. That’s what Ada felt she’d meant.

But Gabby didn’t have a job now. She’d met her partner on a work trip to Chicago and after a week together they went back to their respective lives in Melbourne and New York. When that became unbearable, she’d quit her job and flown to stay with him and before she could find something new she’d got pregnant. They quickly moved to Florida, where Hank was from, into a house that was mysteriously available to them (a family home? Was Hank rich-rich or just consultant rich?).

So maybe that was her job now, growing a kid and living in Florida, but if it was, she could hardly shame Ada for a lack of drive, could she? Maybe the meaning had shifted along with her Instagram filters. ‘Your sister said of course that we couldn’t expect you to buy yours.’ Because it would be rude, at the last minute, to expect her younger sister to drop everything, all her many projects, her hectic life, to fly out to meet a baby. It would only be a reasonable thing to ask if the flight was a gift. Maybe that’s what she meant. Mel, Ada was sure, would say that that’s what she meant.

Ada copied Hank’s email address and pasted it into a new draft and then stopped. She and Gabby hadn’t spoken in months, since the last family Skype in which they both dutifully answered their parents’ questions and then waved and said ‘Love you’ before hanging up. Ada tried to remember the last time she and her sister were alone together and found she couldn’t grab hold of a specific memory. Gabby had moved to Melbourne when she was twenty-one and Ada was eighteen and then there had been Christmases with the cousins and their dad’s sixtieth. One funeral, an aunt, and Gabby left for her flight before the wake.

Ada remembered the fighting, though. Would Gabby want her there for this?

The tube stopped at Tooting Broadway and Ada locked her phone and stepped off. She rose out of the underground, thinking of Stuart because she’d left space in her thoughts again and he slipped back in. She wondered at his withholding from her, after the effort he’d put in for her attention. With anyone else she’d consider this a game, but she knew, really, that she’d hurt him.

The endless words of the past couple of weeks had made them intimate but there was so much he didn’t know about her. He knew she was precise with punctuation but not that she dotted her letter i’s with circles when she wrote the old-fashioned way. He knew the bands she had loved most in high school but not what it looked like when she danced. He knew her face but he didn’t know the patch of eczema that flared up on her neck in winter because it wasn’t there in Edinburgh and it wasn’t there in her profile picture and when she messaged him that picture was all he saw. He knew her and he didn’t and she wanted him to want more because she wanted more but mostly because she wanted more wanting.

Ada stood outside the station, pressed against a wall to avoid the frenetic tide and waited for Google Maps to load. As she did a message popped up from Ben. He hoped she got this before she got on the train but he had an audition, last-minute thing, so sorry, if she was on the train they probably passed each other in a tunnel, it’s in Soho, could they reschedule? She replied they could but she was busy all next week, maybe the week after? She waited a few minutes but evidently Ben was travelling or in his audition. She briefly considered admitting that she could do any day next week, any day at all, but a pretence at working seemed smarter. She closed the app then opened it again and typed, ‘Kick that audition in the dick hunny, I know you will xxxxx’ and no one in the world could say she didn’t mean it.

Ada opened her messages from Stuart. Scrolled to a random point and stopped.

•••

09/09/2017

Stuart Parkes

23:14

7? No offence to your parents but you should have known how to tie your shoes before you hit 7. Actually full offence to your parents.

•••

Ada Highfield

23:15

Wow that is not the way to get on the Christmas card list

•••

Ada Highfield