‘Thank you, Mormor. I don’t know what I’d do without you.’
‘You’d do fine,’ she answered from somewhere below his chin. ‘And you will do, when I’m not here any more to look out for you. But I’d be a lot happier knowing that you had someone else who loves you and trusts you as much as I do.’
He smiled over the top of her head. ‘How do I do it? Any ideas?’
‘Oh, älskling,’ she said with a sigh. ‘You know her the best. What does she like? What’s important to her?’
Well, he knew the answer to that, of course. Her community, the friends and family she had made for herself, when she couldn’t rely on one of the people who should always have her back.
‘I follow her on Instagram, you know,’ Mormor said.
‘I had heard something along those lines.’
‘And she follows me back. So if there was something that you wanted to say, if there was a grand gesture you wanted to make, for instance...’
But he was already ahead of her, thinking about how quickly he could make it happen, how many people he would have to contact to make it work. He opened his app and checked Lara’s account. Okay. A lot. But he could do it, he was sure. He wasn’t giving up on her, or on himself. It was time to bring out the big guns.
He pulled up the software that he’d seen Lara use sometimes. Downloaded the picture of them with her engagement ring from the regatta and set to work.
An hour later his hands were hurting from the copying and pasting, and he had a complicated spreadsheet on the go, logging responses from everyone that Lara followed from her feed. If he was going to take it over completely, he needed buy-in from every single person that she followed. Anything other than perfect just wasn’t going to fly here. He’d colour-coded everyone’s responses, and as soon as he got to the bottom of the list he circled back to the top, making a note of time zones and response time to chase most effectively.
Finally he was doing something. He didn’t know if it would work. Even if it did, he couldn’t be sure that Lara would have him back, but he was finally ready to be brave and he just had to hope that it wasn’t going to be too late. He would find out soon enough. This was a one shot deal.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
LARA SAT AT her keyboard a week later, hoping for inspiration to strike. She’d just spent an hour on the phone with Jess, hoping that it would lift her out of this funk that was leaving her unable to think of a single word to say to the friends she had made online.
Jess was still determinedly in the honeymoon phase, and as much as she had sympathised with Lara over Jannes, there had been no way to keep the treacly sound of happiness out of her voice. And Lara knew precisely what, or who, had put it there. She could hardly begrudge Jess her happiness; it was everything she wanted for her friend and more. But she couldn’t help but think that she’d be able to enjoy it with her friend more if her own recent attempts at having a love life hadn’t turned out quite so dismally.
She turned back to her scheduling, tried moving some posts around to see if it helped inspiration strike. But since she’d stopped lying to her followers, and Jannes had disappeared from her feed, she found that she had little to say. Not when she couldn’t share her heartbreak with her followers. It was easier to concentrate on her studying, on her consulting clients, anything to take her mind off her own life.
They’d done their best to keep their breakup quiet, trying to avoid the publicity that had prompted the fake dating in the first place, and led to everything that had come after. But that was only viable for so long. It had been over a week now since she and Jannes had been in public together. And though she couldn’t bring herself to take off the ring they had picked out together, every time she saw it, it made her just a little sadder that they hadn’t been brave enough or bold enough to make this work.
When she closed her eyes she could smell the woodland glade where it had all gone wrong. Could feel the speckled sunlight on her closed eyelids, feel Jannes’s shirt beneath her hands and her mouth hard on his. And when she opened her eyes, and knew that it was all an impossibility, it hurt more every time. She’d thought that it would be getting better, that she would be learning to live with this hole in her chest. But it wasn’t.
And she knew better now than to think that those sort of emotional wounds just healed themselves. Which was why she’d finally agreed to a session of family therapy, just with her mum to start with. Perhaps she’d work with the rest of the family in future too, but she figured that her and her mum, and the spectre of her dad, had quite enough work to be going on with. The therapist had been really quite insistent that it wasn’t her fault that her father had left. Which, intellectually, Lara was sure that she already knew. It turned out it was harder to believe it than to know it. But she was working on that.
She turned to her feed, scrolling through, hoping to find some solace or inspiration in the posts of one of her followers. She’d so often drawn comfort from the community on here. But as she scrolled she frowned and drew back, because something was wrong. Every post was the same—and it was one of hers. The shot of her with Jannes in Harbourside, showing off her engagement ring for the first time. Had she done this somehow? She checked her profile, but no. It had been weeks since she’d posted that picture, and there were plenty of posts since. She clicked back onto the main feed and opened the caption.
Just a hashtag.
#Janneslovesyou
Okay, that was weird. She clicked the next post. The same hashtag. Oh, this had Mormor’s fingerprints all over it. It had to be her. She was up to something and she was the only person she knew who could wreak this sort of mischief. She searched for her profile and—surprise, surprise—she found the same post.
Her hands shaking, she clicked through to Jannes’s profile and found the same picture, but this one had a caption.
I love you, I need you, I want to marry you. Come to church with me tomorrow?
; She closed the laptop, drawing in a shaky breath. Her first guess had been that this was Mormor’s doing. Was this him...trying to win her back? For real, or just for some publicity thing? She couldn’t get her thoughts straight. Was that what she wanted? She had thrown herself at him twice now, and had had to recover from the fallout of him turning her down. Was she really going to put herself out there only to get knocked back again?
No. She couldn’t let herself think like that. Couldn’t let herself hope, because she was only going to end up disappointed.
But she had been doing the work, hadn’t she? She had been to therapy and heard that everything that she told herself about herself was flawed. That the people who had hurt her had made her scared, and she had spent her whole adult life letting that fear win. Well, she had a choice now, didn’t she? She could let fear win again, like Jannes had, she recognised, when he had pushed her away. Or she could accept that they were both imperfect and still learning, and still in love with each other, and see what happened when they were both brave at the same time.
She texted him, because the things that she had to say to him didn’t belong in church.