Page 45 of A Copenhagen Snowmance

“If I had my way, we’d never see each other again,” she says through gritted teeth.

Their waitress is back, just in time to hear Anna say this, and the air becomes even more awkward.

“Er,” the young woman begins, “an afternoon tea for two has been pre-paid for you, I just need to know what tea you’d like.” She senses she’s on shaky ground and the question comes out more like “Are you staying?”

Anna wonders whether she can ask for hers “to go”.

Maiken flicks a quick look at the card and asks for a White Temple tea.

Then she looks at Anna and raises her eyebrows just a fraction, which feels like a challenge.

Anna hasn’t had a cup of Green Cherry Blossom tea for ages and had already planned to buy a large bagful on the way home.

That’s what she asks for now, not even looking at the card, like she drinks here daily and knows the menu by heart.

She’s grasping at the small wins. The waitress practically sprints away, leaving Anna to suspect the vibe is “spiky”.

“I saw you in the paper,” Maiken says, “and across most of the Danish internet. I would have recognised the hat anywhere, though maybe not the pose. That’s not the quiet Anna I remember.”

Yes, well, it hadn’t sat too comfortably with her at the time, nor in the days after, but right at this minute Anna feels a small thrill that she’s the woman in the oh-so romantic viral photos.

She tries a nonchalant shrug, as if she’s spent the last eighteen months being snogged across London in front of iconic sites.

“Why is it, do you think, that your Jamie has set this up?”

Maiken is being the investigative journalist with her. She’ll keep asking questions until she has the information she wants. She’s seen as quite the Rottweiler in the Danish news world, a guise she’s very proud of.

“No idea, but he’ll be getting a kick in the arse for it when I get home.”

Maiken quirks an eyebrow at her.

“It obviously wasn’t my intention to see you, Maiken. If I’d wanted to see you, I would have called.” Sounding tough here is what she wants, but inside she’s jelly. This whole scenario is making her toes curl.

The tea arrives and they sit in silence, the animosity bristling between them.

The waitress has called in reinforcements and their three tiers of scones, finger sandwiches and cakes arrive just behind.

Anna wonders whether this was part of Jamie’s dastardly plan, that they’d be forced to share the food from the one cake stand.

She’ll be giving him an extra kick for his poxy symbolism.

She is so mad at him, she can almost feel steam wisping from her ears ahead of the eruption there will be when she sees him.

But she has more immediate fish to fry, and so she backburners that for now.

She looks long and hard at the woman who knew everything about her, who she would have trusted with anything and everything, and there is only one thing she wants to know. It’s on the tip of her tongue, even though she’s insisted to Jamie she doesn’t care.

“Go on,” says Maiken, sensing it, reading her like she would an interviewee. “Ask me.” It’s a challenge and it’s also the last straw Anna needs to tip her over the precipice.

“What did I do that made you hate me that much?”

Maiken looks out of the window, and Anna sees her shoulders slide lower. When she turns back it’s with a sigh.

“I didn’t hate you. I didn’t ever hate you.”

“So why would you do that to me?” It bursts out of Anna louder than she’s intended and the couple of women two tables over turn to stare at her. She resolutely ignores them.

“You were my best friend,” she hisses, in case Maiken had missed it.

Maiken gives a deflating sigh, which Anna decides to read as shame. “I dare say I wasn’t really thinking about you at all at the time. When it happened the first time, I felt incredibly guilty. I hadn’t expected it, or intended anything, but it just happened.”

Anna is itching to ask for the details, every single little thing so she can pick over them later, but her heart pitches up now and nixes that plan. There is obviously only so much it can take. Topline is enough.

“But after that I began to see the cracks in your relationship, the way you treated him and at the same time the way I felt about him changed to something more.”

Anna’s jaw hits the floor. What cracks in the relationship?

She’s outraged.

“Our relationship was sound. It was good.” To seal this, she grabs the first of her two scones from the top tier, slices it in half and piles whipped cream onto it followed by the jam.

There’s lemon curd on offer, too, but it doesn’t interest her, though she does lament Brexit having banjaxed clotted-cream deliveries to the country. Such a loss.

Maiken waits for her to sink her teeth into the scone and let out the light moan that is its due.

“Come on, Anna. You know that’s not true. If you two were solid, Carl would never have looked at me, and I would never have gone near him.”

Anna’s mouth is full, but she can shake her head, as this is so preposterous to her.

“I get that this isn’t what you want to hear, but if you look at it honestly, you took him for granted, Anna.”

Anna really doesn’t get this. They were a couple, they’d been together for years. They lived together. Solid.

“You wouldn’t marry him,” Maiken states. “How many times did you tell me he’d asked you again, with a little laugh. Like it was a joke.” Maiken picks a ham-and-cheese finger sandwich and polishes it off in a matter of seconds, before sipping her tea.

“It was a joke!” Anna says. “It was a running gag. He would ask and I would say no. He knew my stance on marriage. I didn’t need it or want it. We lived together.”

“Well clearly you missed the signs. He wasn’t joking anymore, and he was asking, and you kept refusing him. And in the end, he took you at your word and the relationship was no longer the shiny thing you still seem to think it was.” There is a distinct feel of admonishment here.

“Bullshit,” Anna says, but her tone isn’t as staunch as it might be.

“I don’t think you want to hear it. Anyone could see it.”

She’s bewildered by this. If it’s true – and she has very large doubts about Maiken’s reliability – then she had no idea.

Carl had known from the start she didn’t want to get married.

She never wanted to be tied to someone to that extent.

Living with Carl was because she chose to and because she loved him, not because she had to, or was tied to him by some paperwork.

She’d taken heart in the fact he was there by choice and love, too.

Or so she’d thought. If he was unhappy enough to jump on her best friend, then surely, he would have said something.

Carl could be verbose enough when it suited him.

“This might be how you choose to let yourself off the hook for being a shit friend, Maiken, but it’s bullshit. And if Carl told you we had problems, then it was to get your sympathy, and you fell for it.”

Maiken chooses to ignore her in favour of perusing the cakes, opting for a confection with berry mousse and thin sponge. Anna was about to take the same but holds back. She doesn’t want to be seen as mirroring.

“Tell yourself what you like.” Maiken eats half of it in one swoop. She takes her sweet time chewing and then swallows, which she follows with a long sip of her tea. “But ask yourself this,” she says, “if what you had was so strong and so right, then why didn’t you stay and fight for him?”

Anna cannot for the life of her think of something to say. But that’s fine, as Maiken isn’t done.

“You ran away. You showed him you didn’t think he was worth it.”

Now Anna explodes. “And I was right. He had an affair with my best friend, and you had an affair with my partner. Neither of you were worth it. You betrayed me.”

Maiken’s face turns a little pink at that.

The occupants of several tables are looking at them now.

“I might regret how it came about,” she says, her voice lower, which forces Anna to lean in, “but I don’t regret where we are now, Carl and I.

He’s far more assured in the relationship with me than he was with you.

” She stops for a second and then spills out, “We’re getting married in the spring.

You may as well know. We told his family over Christmas. ”

Anna should feel devastated, just as she should probably get up now and walk out, but she doesn’t, because the overriding feeling she has to this news, is numbness. And also, there’s a second scone with her name on it and short of stuffing it in her pocket, she’s not going anywhere without it.

They have a stalemate then, because Maiken has dropped her bombshell, and if Anna isn’t offering congratulations, which she absolutely isn’t about to do, what do you say to news like that?

Instead, Anna fills her plate with her half of the remaining food.

It gives her something to focus on, while she ignores Maiken.

“Nothing to say?” Maiken asks.

Anna simply shakes her head, as she studiously slices, creams and jams her second scone.

“I suppose you have Jamie now, so it doesn’t matter.”

Which is true, she supposes. If it were true, but Anna decides she isn’t going to let truth get in the way right now. It serves her better, protects her better, for Maiken and Carl to believe Jamie and she are for real.

“You’re right,” she says, looking up. “Carl doesn’t matter to me.

He showed his true colours and you’ll never be one-hundred-per-cent sure he won’t do the same to you, when he becomes bored.

As for you, you picked him over me, so you weren’t the sister I thought you were.

You threw me under the bus. I don’t know how you look at yourself in the mirror each day.

But perhaps every time you do, you’ll remember you’re the kind of woman who stabs other women in the back. ”

A flit of something crosses Maiken’s face, and if Anna were to put money on it, she’d say Maiken has most definitely had this thought about Carl.

How will she ever really trust him? Something about that pleases Anna and she feels it’s a suitable punishment, never-ending as long as they both shall live.

A feeling of discomfort hits her. Is she really someone who delights in the insecurity of others?

Yes, apparently, she is, but she recognises it isn’t a great attribute.

Maybe she’ll do some self-reflection when she’s safely back in London, unlikely ever to lay eyes on Maiken again.

Because right now, her wounds have unscabbed themselves, and she feels raw.

Does she want Carl back? Nope. She really doesn’t, not least because she’s seen new things with Jamie.

But that pain she experienced all those months ago, the shock, the anguish and loss of self-esteem, has bubbled to the surface, despite her doing everything to disguise it.

She needs to leave. She scopes what is left on the plate. She can live without the cucumber sandwich, but the eclair is a shoo-in. In the spiky silence, she horses the little-finger-sized eclair in one, then drains her tea and folds the cream-and-jammed scone into a napkin.

“I’d say it’s been great to see you, but it hasn’t.”

Maiken, having watched her pack up, gives her a thin smile as Anna stands.

“I’ll see you around.”

“Unlikely. I’m leaving soon.” She doesn’t say to where, but it doesn’t matter. It’s piqued Maiken’s interest.

“Oh, Jamie leaving with you?”

This makes Anna stumble. She knows Maiken, she’ll check if the notion takes her.

“We’re doing the long-distance thing.” She doesn’t sound as assured as she’d like, and Maiken senses it.

“Doesn’t sound like you.”

“You don’t know me anymore.”

“You think? Everything I’ve seen today has been typical Anna. And I don’t believe you’d do long-distance. You’re too like Ida. No ties.”

Anna can feel her face heating up and giving her away.

Maiken taps her finger to her chin. “Perhaps I could do a story on the Snowmance couple. Show people who you really are, and where you are now, that kind of thing.” This is her revenge for Anna delighting in her insecurity.

Anna knew it was bad to think like that and here’s karma biting her in the bum, within ten minutes.

She will definitely be doing some self-reflection.

But more important is the threat this would bring to Jamie.

Things are too fragile still with Lajla for their ruse to be overlooked. But she won’t be blackmailed by Maiken.

“Leave it alone, Maiken. You already messed with one relationship of mine.”

Finally, Maiken shows her teeth. “Give me back my locket and we’ll call it quits.” There. That’s what she stayed for, nothing more. Anna could have told Jamie that.

Anna digs into her pocket and drops the locket on the table. “You saved me a trip.”

“I knew you had it,” Maiken snarks. “Thief.”

“Pot, kettle. And I didn’t have it. I found it in the garden ten days ago.

” The tarnish of the metal gives this more credence.

“Perhaps you lost it when you were undressing in my house, with my partner.” So, yes, she does up the volume of her voice for that bit, enough for the ladies two tables over to be in no doubt regarding what’s gone down.

Maiken’s hand covers the locket and Anna slams hers on top.

“A deal’s a deal. You’ll leave Jamie and I alone.”

And then Anna leaves, her head held high, sort of, with her scone clenched in her hand. She’ll need the calories, as she has a sound kicking to administer.