Page 48 of I Know How This Ends

“Jules!”

I continue to smash at her door as if I can in some way prevent what’s coming by the sheer strength of my fists.

“JULES! Are you in there? JULIA?”

There’s a small pause, then I see a shadow hesitate behind the frosted glass in their Cotham front door.

“Sim? Simran, it’s really important. Please, I need to see Jules.”

The door opens and Jules’s wife looks at me apprehensively: I imagine it looks like I’m about to do to my best friend’s face

what I just did to her property. I quickly unclench my fists and try to look a bit less desperate.

“I’m not angry anymore,” I say quickly. “I just need to see her.”

“Oh!” Sim coughs and glances warily down the garden path. “She’s... uh... out, I’m afraid. Doing... writing stuff,

I think.”

“‘Writing stuff’?” Jules says from behind her, appearing in the hallway in black, paint-splattered dungarees. “Seriously,

we have got to work on your lying skills, babe. Absolutely atrocious. The FBI will never come calling for you at this rate.”

I stare at Jules as my chest starts to feel tight and painful. This can’t be happening. It’s a miscalculation, that’s all.

She is too lovely, too funny, too smart, too young to just.

.. No. I’ll stop it somehow, whatever it takes.

Lock her in a room and prevent her going anywhere ever again.

She can curse at me as much as she wants, but I am now going to be her forever guard dog and there’s nothing she can do about it.

Jules gives Sim a quick kiss on the cheek and together they assess my intense expression and exchange confused glances.

“What’s going on?” Jules frowns at me. “Why are you being super weird? And what the holy hell are you wearing?”

“Do you want me to, uh...” Sim looks concerned at my outfit too “...stay for this?”

“No.” Jules grimaces. “You get back to the... thing.”

“Right.” A nod. “The thing.” Sim gives Jules a supportive little squeeze of the shoulder, then smiles faintly at me. “It’s

nice to see you, Maggie!”

But she sounds wooden, false, like a badly made MDF kitchen cabinet, and my stomach starts to hurt.

They both glance over my shoulder again and I’m starting to get the message now.

Fuck.

There is no time for arguing.

There is no time to do anything but love everyone as hard as I can, while I still can, and I shouldn’t have needed a vision

to tell me that.

“I’m sorry,” I say quickly as Sim turns and heads back to their sunny little kitchen. “I am so, so, so, so sorry. Please forgive

me. Please.”

Jules leans against the doorway and rests her beautiful head on the frame.

“OK, you’re starting to freak me out now. Talk.”

My throat is tight, my voice wobbly. But I can’t scare her—this is not something Jules ever needs to be told—so I do my best to gain some semblance of control.

“This fight,” I bleat pathetically, starting to cry.

What was in my pocket after the funeral?

Why couldn’t I see what was in my pocket?

“It’s nothing. I don’t care. I don’t care about Lily and Aaron.

I don’t care if you visit them, I don’t care if you helped them hide it, I don’t care if you bloody set them up on a blind date behind my back and gave them a bouquet of condoms. You’re my best friend, I love you more than anything on the planet, and I know you love me and nothing will ever change that. ”

Jules continues to regard me with wise, dark eyes.

“Seriously,” I sniff adamantly, wiping my nose with my hand, “I’ll stay right here and I’ll say sorry and sorry and sorry

and sorry and sorry—”

“A bouquet of condoms?” Jules’s nose twitches. “A bouquet of condoms . Is that a thing? Like, is that a thing straight people actually do?”

“Yeah.” I nod. “They put them all together like flowers and then they wrap it in tissue paper and sometimes they put sweets

in too, so that—it doesn’t matter . Can you just forgive me, please? Right now. Immediately. I cannot spend one more second with us not talking.”

Not one more second of whatever we have left.

“Why are you apologizing, though?” Jules scratches her nose. “What exactly are you saying sorry about?”

“I...” I think about it for a few seconds. “Yelling at you?”

“Right.” She nods dryly. “You’re normally so logical, Margot. What is wrong with you at the moment?”

“That is very much a topic for another day,” I say flatly. “I’m apologizing. So let’s just forget about all that and go back

to normal. Please.”

“No.” Jules frowns at me. “Absolutely not.”

A wave of horror: I am not giving up that easily.

“Right.” I sit down abruptly on the doormat, facing her. “Then you’re going to have to step over me to get out of the house,

and you’ll have to step over me to get back in, and I’ll read all your post before it gets delivered and I’ll ring the doorbell every few minutes while you’re asleep.”

At this, Jules laughs loudly. “How passive-aggressive of you.”

Then she sits down on the doorstep opposite me.

“Maggie,” she says, briefly leaning her forehead against mine. “You total rainbow-legginged numpty. I’m not letting you apologize because you did nothing wrong. I fucked up, and I need to explain what happened.”

A wash of relief: I don’t need an apology, couldn’t care less, but this means we’re one step closer to being put back together.

“OK. But I forgive you in advance. Just so you know.”

“Handy.” Jules smiles slightly and takes a deep breath. “So... I had suspicions about Lily and Aaron for a while, because

something felt... off. Every time I challenged her, she denied it. But I found out for sure a few hours before the rehearsal

dinner, when we all got to the venue. I caught a text from Aaron when it popped up on Lily’s phone. And I went absolutely

apeshit. Like... fully nuclear.”

I nod: that sounds like Jules. If I’m a bullet, she’s an atomic bomb.

Then: “Wait—you only knew a few hours before?”

“Yeah.” Jules winces and glances over my shoulder at the garden. “It’s not an excuse and it doesn’t make it better. I should

have told you what I suspected months before. But if I’d been wrong... Fuck, it didn’t even bear thinking about. I’d have

blown apart a friendship group. By the time I had evidence, we were at the bloody venue, you’d already lost your deposit,

everyone was arriving, you were so excited, and I was... stuck.”

I feel myself soften slightly: a few hours is very different to months.

“I was obviously never going to let you walk down that aisle, but Lily said she’d been trying to end it for ages and begged

me to let her tell you herself. Except... she didn’t. She was terrified, Mags. She’d made a huge, life-shattering mistake, she couldn’t take it back and

she knew she was going to lose you. Us. She was going to lose everything.”

I frown: but Lil didn’t lose Jules, hence this entire conversation.

“Then you found out in the worst possible way, and...” Jules’s voice hitches slightly.

“Fuck, Margot. You were so broken. All your walls came straight up, barriers as high as the sky, and there was a good chance that if I told you the truth, I’d be on the other side of them. I needed to stay with you.”

My stomach twists, because Jules is right. In my anger and pain, I suspect I’d have cast her out of my fortress too.

“But you didn’t,” I say in a small voice. “You didn’t stay on my side. You pretended to, but you kept seeing Lily in secret.

You kept lying to me.”

“I know.” Jules takes a deep breath. “For the first few months, I wasn’t lying. I cut her out too. I was so bloody angry with

her. But...”

She pauses, glances over my shoulder at the lawn.

“All Lil has ever wanted is to be loved, Maggie. Loved by everyone. By anyone . You know that, you know what her shitty parents were like. It’s why she started that bloody Instagram page in the first

place. There’s this gaping hole inside her that nothing ever seems to fill. And I think suddenly Aaron... did.”

“Because he made sure of it,” I say weakly, remembering all his intense conversations, his grand romantic statements, his

poetic gestures. Remembering the force of how hard he chased me, bombarded me, refused to take no for an answer.

I couldn’t resist it either: it was overpowering.

“ We’re going to stop, right? ” I suddenly believe what I didn’t believe before: that Lily had tried to get out. Many, many times, without success.

“Exactly.” Jules nods. “For a whole decade, I watched that man love-bomb you, control you, demean you, discard you, put you

down. I watched him grind you into pieces, and there was nothing I could do. He is a handsome bulldozer of a dickhead. And those Instagram posts—she didn’t sound like Lily anymore. I realized he was going to do it to her too,

if he hadn’t already. That’s who Aaron is .”

I stare at her, because that hadn’t occurred to me before.

Lily looked so happy in those posts, but I should know the difference between reality and a curated version of ourselves: I was jauntily chatting about waves and storms

while my entire world imploded.

“He’s not going to change,” I realize quietly. “And all she had left was him.”

“Lil made a terrible life decision, and she knows it. I should have told you, and I’m so sorry. But... the more I watched

you struggle to put yourself back together, the more I realized I couldn’t just leave Lil to the same fate. Despite what she

did. She’s still Lil.”

Jules glances up at the path again and I feel faintly irritated: can you please do the gardening in your head at another,

less crucial time, woman? We have my entire romantic history to dissect right now.

“I’m happier now than I have been in...” I pause in surprise. “Ever, actually.”

“I know.” Jules grins and puts her arm around me, kisses the top of my head. “You’re finally back to being Maggie.”

My eyes fill and there’s a lump in my throat.

I am. I’m back to being me.

All the emotion that has been simmering in my chest for nearly a year rises to the surface like oil on water, and I abruptly

realize it’s not just anger and betrayal. It’s also sadness for Lily, for where she’s ended up. I wouldn’t wish Aaron on my

worst enemy, let alone my best friend of three decades.

“I didn’t mean to pick a side,” Jules says softly. “But I did, by watching everything unfold without doing anything. And I

am so, so sorry. I will never be that weak again.”

I also spent most of this year watching other people. It wasn’t until the universe started showing me my own life, playing out like a film, that I was finally able to let go of them and see myself.

“You could have just told me all this,” I sigh, putting my head in my hands.

“Well I did try.” Jules grins. “Repeatedly. But somebody kept refusing to return my calls or read any of my laboriously long and eloquent essay-sized texts.”

“I may have muted you,” I admit sheepishly.

“I thought you might have.” Jules lifts her eyebrows. “Fucking numpty.”

We both laugh—she sounds like Jules again—and I feel the pieces of us click back into place, more beautiful for being broken.

Then my eyes abruptly fill with tears again.

I don’t know it’s Jules that my vision was about.

That was a knee-jerk reaction, born of guilt and sadness. It could be anyone else, maybe

someone I don’t even know yet.

Please, universe, let it not be Jules.

“You’re feeling OK?” I reach over and grab her chin so I can study her skin and her eyeballs and her lips. “Healthy?”

“What?” Jules whacks me away. “Yeah, I’m great.”

“And you’re not planning on, I don’t know... base jumping or motor racing or wild horse riding?”

“What, on a whim? No. Sim wants us to sand down the floorboards.”

“Don’t,” I say sharply: big machines, lots of dangerous dust.

“Alright, nutter.” Jules laughs and assesses me again. “Seriously, what are you wearing? Did Eve do this to you?”

I laugh. “Nope. It was Polly. For the TV job.”

“You got an audition! I knew you would. How did it go?”

“Amazing.” I nod and wipe my face, feeling another rush of pleasure. “I really loved it, I think it’s going to make me really,

really hap—”

Jules glances up at the garden again. “Shit.”

This time I properly lose my patience. “Julia, I love you, but this is a very emotional and pivotal moment for our relationship

and I would appreciate it if you could stop checking out the state of your bloody lawn for two—”

Something in her face makes me turn round.

“Shit,” I say.

“That’s what I just said,” Jules confirms, standing up. “Shit.”

Breath held, I watch Lily and Aaron come up the road, heading toward the house, Aaron three steps ahead—on his phone, as always—as

if the sheer masculine muscle of his long legs cannot bear to be contained by a more reasonable pace.

“Wait!” Lily hops delicately after him. “Aaron, can you just please wait for—”

They turn onto the path and both abruptly notice me at the same time, sitting on the doorstep like the world’s most awkward garden gnome.

“Shit,” Lily says, freezing.

We both look at Jules with a whole lot of questions, and she grimaces and holds out both of her hands like the shrug emoji.

“Surprise!”