I Owe You One: A Novel(107)

“You can learn the coffee machine! Of course you can. You just don’t want to! You avoid everything, Nicole! Everything! Including your own husband!”

Shit. That popped out before I could stop it.

“What are you talking about?” Nicole’s hand flutters defensively to her mouth, and I feel my face flame. That was going too far. Or was it?

I swallow a few times, my mind working furiously. I could backtrack. Apologize. Close the conversation down. But I’m not in the mood for backtracking, or apologizing, or closing the conversation down. Maybe it’s time for us to be the kind of sisters Mum always wanted us to be. The kind who actually know something meaningful about each other’s lives.

“I know it’s none of my business,” I say, more calmly. “But you never talk to him on the phone. You don’t seem to care when he’s ill. And now you don’t want to go to Abu Dhabi to see him. Nicole … do you actually love Drew?”

There’s a massive silence. Nicole’s beautiful face is swiveled away from me, but I can see a tightness at the corner of her mouth. Her fingers are fiddling with her tassely belt and I notice her chewed-up nails. Then at last she turns her head, and to my shock, her eyes are full of tears.

“I don’t know,” she says in a whisper. “I don’t know. I don’t bloody know.”

“Right,” I say, trying to hide my shock. “Well … did you love him when you married him?”

“I don’t know.” Nicole looks desperate. “I thought I did. But I might have made a massive mistake. Don’t tell Mum,” she adds quickly, and she sounds so like she did when she was fifteen years old and I found her swigging from a bottle of vodka that I can’t help a snort of laughter.

“I thought you were dying from separation anxiety,” I say, and Nicole’s nostrils flare.

“I have been really stressed out, actually,” she says, returning to her haughty self. “My yoga teacher says she’s concerned about me.”

I roll my eyes. Nicole will never not take herself seriously. But at least she’s sounding a bit more real.

“So, what went wrong?” I can’t help asking. “You seemed so happy at the wedding.”

“The wedding was great.” Nicole’s eyes soften with the memory. “And the honeymoon was great. But then I was a bit, ‘Is this it?’ There wasn’t anything to plan for anymore, you know? All the excitement was gone. It was so, I dunno, flat.”

“Couldn’t you have gone to Abu Dhabi with Drew?” I suggest. “Couldn’t you have planned for that? Why didn’t you go, anyway? Don’t tell me there aren’t yoga courses out there.”

“I panicked,” admits Nicole after a pause. “We’d had a couple of rows, and I thought, Drew and me on our own in Abu Dhabi in some expat flat? What if it all goes pear-shaped? What if we have more rows? I thought it would be easier this way. You know. It’d be …” She trails off in her usual unfinished way.

“You thought it would be easier to completely avoid your husband than to have a few rows.” I stare at her. “Yup. That makes sense.”

“It was stressful!” says Nicole defensively. “I thought, I’ll sit it out in England and it’ll work out one way or another.”

“You don’t work out a relationship by burying your head in the sand!” I exclaim incredulously. “All relationships are stressful! All relationships have rows! Do you love him?”

There’s a long silence. Nicole is twisting her hair round her fingers, her face turned away.

“Sometimes I think yes,” she says finally. “But sometimes I look at him and I think …” She flinches expressively. “But I mean, I haven’t seen him for, like, so long …”

I wait for her to continue—then realize that she’s finished. Even by Nicole standards, it’s a pretty inconclusive answer.

“Nicole, you have to go to Abu Dhabi,” I say firmly. “And then maybe you’ll find out whether you love Drew or not.”

“Yeah,” says Nicole, looking uncertain. “I suppose.”

“You have to,” I impress on her. “You need to spend time together. You need to confront this. Otherwise you don’t even know if you want to be married or not.”

“Maybe. But what if I get out there and …” Nicole trails off in her irritating way—but for once I know what she means. She means, “What if I realize I don’t love Drew?” And she looks pretty freaked out.

I mean, fair enough. I’d be freaked out too.

“I guess you have to face up to that possibility,” I say, with a sympathy I’ve never felt for Nicole before. “I mean, what else were you planning to do? Did you have a plan?”

“I don’t know! I thought …” She hesitates, chewing her nails. “I thought maybe Drew would meet someone else out there and it would all be decided for me.” And this is so ridiculous that I burst into real, proper laughter.

At once Nicole frowns, as though not sure whether to get offended or not—but then her face cracks into a smile. And I grin back. I feel like for the first time in our life, the two of us have connected. We were always like some electric circuit which didn’t work and was about to be chucked away in the bin. But now the bulb is flickering. There’s hope.