The Sight of You by Holly Miller

The Sight of You by Holly Miller

Author:Holly Miller [Miller, Holly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-06-09T00:00:00+00:00


45.

Callie

A couple of weeks into the new year, I go to Cambridge for a hen do. Alana’s an old colleague of mine from the paint-tin company, though she was one of those transient types with ambition, which explains how she’s now several corporate ladders away from where we started out.

A financial-services head hunter, she must have forgotten I no longer work at the factory, because twice she presses her business card into my palm and insists she can hook me up. The first time she did it I thought she meant drugs and was almost too nervous to unfold my hand.

The hen’s one of those events where I can’t work out if everyone secretly despises each other. There are six bridesmaids, but they’re phone-checking more than they’re mingling, and the maid of honor booked cocktail punting—which would have been fine if it wasn’t mid-January and Alana wasn’t terrified of water. So we call it off and find a bar instead, where the maid of honor heads straight to the loos to flip out, forcing the rest of the bridal party into protracted negotiations to appease her.

I organized Grace’s hen do, off-road buggy driving near Brighton, an attempt to re-create—at least in part—her fabled Dubai dune-buggy experience. Afterward there was curry, then pints in a proper pub, the two things Grace said she always missed most when she was traveling. And, to top off the day, it rained—and it was the right sort of rain, British rain. Cold, unforgiving, Four Weddings rain was Grace’s preferred precipitation type.

She leaned over to me halfway through a pint of John Smith’s. Her mascara was running by then because we’d been laughing so hard. I remember making a mental note to buy her some of the waterproof stuff so she didn’t end up looking like a Halloween bride at her own wedding. “I want you to get married, Cal.”

“What?”

“I so want you to get married.”

“Why?”

She looked around the pub. “So I can do all this for you.”

Putting a fingertip to the apple of her cheek, I wiped away some of the black. “When I meet the man I want to marry, you’ll be the first to know.”

I hadn’t even met Piers back then, not that marriage would ever be in the cards between us. And before that I’d really had only flings, a few dates that had progressed before going invariably nowhere.

It still makes me sad to think of it now, that Grace never will get to meet the man I want to marry.



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.