‘But it’s not,’ Lara said gently, stepping into the kitchen for the first time, and coming to stand beside Jannes. ‘We’ve talked about it, because you’re right. We are very fond of each other. But not about the rest of it. I appreciate that you’re trying to help, but we don’t want this. We’re friends, and that’s all it’s ever going to be.’
Mormor compressed her mouth into a thin line, but didn’t argue. ‘You’ll see I’m right,’ she said eventually. ‘The appointment with the vicar isn’t for a month. I’m not cancelling it.’
Jannes shook his head. ‘We won’t be needing it.’
‘We’ll see, won’t we?’
‘I should be going,’ Lara said, looking between them, her heart aching slightly at the way Mormor looked at Jannes, as if he were still a little boy, crying after his parents had left him alone at school.
‘I’ll let you say goodbye,’ Mormor said with a meaningful look before sweeping out of the kitchen.
‘So that went...’
‘Pretty much as expected,’ Jannes finished. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll speak to the vicar. Tell her that Mormor was jumping the gun and we want to wait a bit longer.’
Lara nodded. Then couldn’t resist. ‘Interesting that Mormor brought up your parents, after what we were talking about in the car.’
‘Lara, can we not?’ Jannes snapped, and she took a step back, surprised by his tone. ‘I’m sorry. But just...not now, okay?’
She wrapped her arms around herself and moved towards the front door.
‘Okay, I guess I’ll see you next time you’re in London then,’ she said. ‘It’s the twins’ christening in two weeks. Are you still...?’
‘I’ll be there.’
‘Fine. Great. So I’ll see you then.’
She slipped through the front door and leaned against the wall in the corridor, the cool paint soothing against her flushed cheeks. She hadn’t imagined that things could fall apart so quickly. She’d never felt closer to another human being than she had to Jannes last night. And now—now she was running away from him because she didn’t know how to talk to him any more.
* * *
Back in her apartment later that day, she pulled out her planner and looked at her schedule for the week. She was going to have to move things around now that she had an engagement to announce out of nowhere. There were a couple of posts she’d worked on with partner brands that she couldn’t move. A post later in the week she’d already bumped twice. If she didn’t run it soon she’d end up having to scrap it completely. Which meant that the only good slot for the picture of her engagement ring was...tonight.
She sighed and rested her head on her hand as she scribbled notes to herself. She really wasn’t in the mood to come up with a caption that would make sense of her and Jannes’s whirlwind romance and sudden engagement. Not least because her online following was based on her authenticity and honesty. When she’d joined Instagram, her shots of London’s quiet backstreets, her vintage fashion finds and adventures in upcycling to furnish her flat had only been to entertain her friends.
With her friend Jess as her partner in crime, she’d upped her photography game and spilled her guts in her captions, constitutionally unable to stop herself oversharing. But for some reason it had struck a chord and her followers had gone from the hundreds to the thousands to the hundreds of thousands. Until she’d had enough clout that she’d been able to partner with brands that she loved and turned her hobby into a business.
The thought of lying to her followers turned her stomach. So she started writing, trying to focus on hers and Jannes’s friendship and put her feelings for him into words in a way that was truthful.
He was a dear friend. She cared for him deeply. Their relationship had changed recently, though not necessarily in the way that people might assume. These were all things that she could say truthfully. As for the ‘engagement’...well, she didn’t have to say anything, did she. She could just post the picture of the ring and let people make their own conclusions.
It wasn’t honest, but it wasn’t an outright lie either. And she supposed that was the best that she could hope for. She tagged Jannes in the photo—her stomach lurching as she caught sight of his profile picture, that same shot of him they had used at the awards ceremony, a magazine shoot for a menswear brand, with Jannes hanging half off a yacht in a shirt that had once been white but had been rendered transparent by virtue of being dripping wet. She really shouldn’t be driven to biting her lip over someone who she was meant to think of as just a friend. She’d been suppressing these thoughts and these feelings for Jannes since the day that she had met him—you’d think that she’d be better at it by now. But her trip to Harbourside, the fireworks, had changed all that, and she wasn’t sure how they were meant to get back to normal. Not while they were meant to be engaged.
She hit post, and almost instantly the comments started flooding in, full of love hearts and bride emojis and the occasional aubergine.
She shut down her laptop—normally she interacted as much as she could in the comments, but she couldn’t for this post. Even accepting the congratulations would make her stomach twist with guilt. Would make her melancholy for what she couldn’t have.
She had never thought that she could lie about something so important. She had spent half her life wondering how that bastard of a father had come home to her and her mother every night—or every night he wasn’t with his other family—and now she had some insight. All it needed was high enough emotional stakes, and intense enough feelings, and you found yourself making choices that you couldn’t have imagined making just a few weeks before. Was this how it had been for her dad? One choice leading to another to another, until the lies got away from you and you had no choice but to stick to your story or see your life fall apart.
The big difference, of course, was that no one else’s feelings were at stake. Everyone who was emotionally invested knew the truth. But Lara’s online community was just that—a community. Full of people who she had never met in person but nonetheless considered to be friends. Was she hurting them, by bending the truth about her and Jannes’s relationship? Or was it their business and nobody else’s what was going on behind closed doors? She didn’t even know that she understood what was going on. Okay, they had no intention of getting married, that much was clear. But what about the kisses that they’d shared? The night that she’d spent wishing that she was in Jannes’s bed instead of her own? That wasn’t exactly platonic, was it?
What they were doing in public was acting out what would have been happening in private if it weren’t for the scars they were both carrying that made a romance between them impossible. It was an alternate version of her future playing out before her, and her and Jannes were the only ones who knew that she wouldn’t be able to keep it.
Her phone rang, and she hesitated when she saw Jannes’s name on the screen. She really didn’t want to speak to him just now, when h
er feelings were so jumbled from having written that caption, and then looked at that picture on his profile. But the longer they went without speaking, the more awkward it was going to get. She hit answer and tried for an easy breezy, ‘Hey.’
‘Hey. My notifications just blew up. Do I take it we’re official?’