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Kofi stares at Chioma for a few seconds before shaking his head. ‘Nah. No, I don’t. No offence, but she once said she found polyamory an “unnecessary energetic depletion”.’

Chioma shrugs. ‘OK, well, some would say that it’s just having an abundance of love—’

‘Chi Chi, I have to say,’ Shanti says, inevitably about to say something that she absolutely does not have to say, ‘I think all of this is actually evidence of your intimacy issues. I think you’re an avoidant—’

‘I think,’ I say, cutting in before we veer too far from the subject at hand, ‘Aminah was talking about travelling.’

‘I checked for her passport. It’s still in her room,’ Shanti says, swerving back to topic, worry shadowing her face.

‘Where could she even have gone? It’s not like she knows this place,’ Ty asks as he picks up a cupcake from the counter in the open-plan kitchen. ‘Sorry, I eat when I’m stressed.’

I stare at thefourth(seriously fourth? A man can stop being a rugby player, but the rugby player never leaves him) cupcake Ty is chewing and something occurs to me. ‘I think I know somewhere we can check. Kofi, let’s go in your guys’ rental car—’

‘I’ll drive,’ Malakai offers, and I nod at him in gratitude.

‘Shanti, Chioma, could you please stay here in case she comes back? Ty, tell the boys to keep watch in your villa.’ The crew affirm and take their positions whilst Kofi, Malakai and I rush out to the car, and I try to slow the rapid beating of my heart. Aminah is OK. She has to be OK because shecan’tnot be OK, and I shouldn’t have shouted at her on her bachelorette and what kind of friend am I anyway?

Malakai squeezes my hand on the way to the car on the driveway, letting Kofi overtake us slightly, whispering, ‘She’ll be all right, Scotch. It’s not your fault.’ And I desperately try to believe that’s true.

Chapter 20

Sisterhood and Closures

‘She’ll be fine, right? Kiki, she is fine,’ Kofi says from the front seat, talking to himself as much as me.

I reach in front to squeeze his shoulder, trying to keep my own anxiety at bay. ‘Come on. It’s Aminah. Of course she will be. She loves herself too much to not be fine right now. Even if she’s not fine she’s fine, you know what I mean?’

Malakai nods, his eyes straight on the road. ‘Exactly. She’s one of the toughest people I know.’

‘I just,’ Kofi says, ‘I love her so much. Like fuck all this marriage shit if she doesn’t want to do it. I just want to live my life with her. Not waste any more time. I’m never notmearound her–I just wish she could have talked to me—’

‘Hey,’ Malakai says, ‘her not talking to you isn’t about you, man, I promise. She’s probably in her head about something and doesn’t want you to stress. One thing I know for sure is that woman loves you. It isn’t about how she feels about you. I can almost guarantee that.’ He catches my eyes in the rear-view mirror for the briefest of moments before his gaze returns to the road. ‘Sometimes it ain’t about love– it’s someone just trying to figure out their head.’

I nod. ‘Right. We want to believe we can fix everything someone we love is going through, but sometimes it’s. . .beyond us. And we have to give them the space to figure it out. And it can be really. . .really hard, but we kind of have to let go a little. You fall in love and you live your lives together and parts will merge and you’re on a journey together, but, you know, we still have our own paths to figure out. That doesn’t mean she’ll leave—’

Kofi shakes his head, and he’s barely holding it together when he speaks. ‘Guys. . .I dunno what I would do without her. Like, I know they say you can have loads of people be your soulmates or whatever, and maybe that’s true, but, the thing is, what’s the point of that when you meet one person and you can’t even imagine another person being right for you? You being right for another person? Like, I’ve known from the moment I met that girl. And I know I was supposed to date around and play the field, and look at me–it was def poss– and I get why that works for other people, but it ain’t me. I’ve never seen the point of that shit. The soulmate thing is almost irrelevant because the point is that Aminah is everything I could want. I just wanna be able to help her continue to do her. Whatever that takes. And she does the same for me. She makes me better at doing me.’

My heart cracks, breaks and soars and, not for the first time, I’m so happy that Aminah and Kofi found each other, that I can look to them and know for certain that world-shaping, galvanising love can exist for people our age, can survive.

‘For what it’s worth, Kof, she said the same thing to me about you,’ I say, through a tight throat. Malakai lifts a hand off the steering wheel to hold Kofi’s shoulder, and I look in the mirror to see that his eyes, trained on the road, are hard and shiny.

‘Just here, on the left,’ I say, pointing to a bakery as we pull up to the street I found when I googled. I look through the window of the front of the bakery, Lesedi’s, my heart bundled up in my throat in fear, and I immediately see the side profile of a Black woman with a sleek top bun. She’s wearing a white sun dress, sipping what looks like an iced coffee with a small plate containing a cupcake. She sits outside, on a little circular table on the pavement, under the veranda, shades on, looking like the cover of a travel guide.

‘Oh thank God.’ Kofi’s voice is laden with a physical relief. ‘Thank God.’

It floods through me too, and I almost cry from it. It’s heady and I don’t realise how severe my fear that I was wrong was until I realise that I’m not.

‘Malakai and I will find somewhere to park and you go in,’ I say.

Kofi shakes his head. ‘You go first. I want to give her space. Maybe she can tell you what she can’t tell me.’

‘You sure?’

Kofi nods. ‘Yeah, Keeks. You’re the only other person who knows her as well as I do. And if it’s a me thing, I just want her to feel safe to open up.’

This makes me want to cry again. ‘Of course.’

#Aminah is sat mindlessly scrolling through The Outnet, her comfort site (‘so many beautiful things at a discount!’– while Aminah loves luxury, she also loves a good bargain), when I walk in front of her. ‘Hi. Is there space for an extremely apologetic best friend to sit down?’