Friends Don’t Lie by Nell Pattison

Author:Nell Pattison [Pattison, Nell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2022-07-08T17:00:00+00:00

Chapter 23

Time seems to drag so slowly until Tuesday. I occupy myself with rereading all of the articles I can find about Beckley’s death, in case there’s some minute detail that I missed, yet is somehow vitally important. But there’s nothing and I just become more frustrated.

I message Bella a couple of times, but don’t hear anything back, even when I ask her if she fancies meeting up for lunch. This lack of communication isn’t like her, and I’m worried. Have I done something to upset her? If she’d found out about any of the things I’ve done, surely she would have said something? But she keeps so much close to her chest. There are a lot of things to do with her past that she never talks about, and shuts me down if I try to ask, so if she was mad at me, she might just ghost me. Maybe she suspects what I’ve been up to, and she’s waiting to find out more? A little shiver runs through me at the thought. I need to speak to her, check everything is okay.

I’ve already sent two texts that have gone unanswered, so I don’t want to send another and come across as completely needy. I’ll have to think up a way to bump into her. Or, being the new and confident person I am now, I could simply go round to her house, knock on the door and ask her. That idea makes me shrink into myself with horror, just thinking of all the ways it could go wrong, but I might need to consider doing something like that. Contrived meetings aren’t my style any more, not since I met Bella and became my new self.

While I’m thinking over different ideas, my phone rings, and I perk up in the hope that it’s her. I glance at the screen and my heart sinks. It’s Tony.

‘Hi,’ I say, trying to inject some cheerfulness into my voice.

‘Hey. How are you?’

‘Not bad,’ I tell him. We have a few minutes of small talk, and I can hear some noise in the background. I wonder how public his conversations with me are. Is someone listening in? Quite possibly. I haven’t told him anything about Bella – of course, I can’t tell him about my new identity, this new double life I seem to be leading, but I might ordinarily have told him about making a new friend. I know he never liked my old friends. It would probably cheer him up to know I’ve got someone new to spend time with now, even if she’s different from me in so many ways. Right now, though, I don’t want to run the risk of his phone calls being recorded. Nobody can know about my friendship with Bella, just in case.

‘How are you getting on?’ he asks, and I know what he’s talking about. He’s been asking me for months to help him find this doctor, but try as I might I can’t track him down.

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