Читать книгу Sex, Lies Declassified - Eva Mazza - Страница 4

Jen found an armchair in a corner of the Slow Lounge at Cape Town International Airport. She was too afraid to turn on her phone. Too afraid to deal with the messages she knew were pouring in. She wondered if Zinhle was coping, fielding the many phone calls. She hadn’t given her assistant much information, because she didn’t have much to give, except that she was landing at Charles De Gaulle Airport and would make her way to Monte Carlo in a week or two. She could do with the break. The way she felt right now, she wouldn’t mind the time to recharge, regroup and reflect.

Part of her healing this past year had been about forgiveness and, if she had to be honest, she had never forgiven Frankie. Maybe that’s why she felt so confused and so utterly guilty. After all, they had spent more time together as friends than they had estranged. But Frankie had hurt her badly and it was almost impossible for Jen to pretend she didn’t care.

She poured herself a glass of dry white – her second in a very short space of time – and took a long sip, savouring the crisp flavour, redolent of gooseberries. Her internal monologue continued, processing the enormity of what she’d just done and what she was about to do.

She could hear them all, especially her ex-book club friends. “Jen’s run away, again!”

“Left me when I needed her the most,” that would be Brigit, her daughter.

Her ex-husband, caught having the life sucked out of his dick just over a year ago, gloating that she wasn’t as together as she’d made out: “She’s just as fucked-up as I am!”

And Myron. She grimaced. He had been her ‘happy ending’.

Jen gulped the rest of her wine before making her way to the boarding gate. “Is there even such a thing as a happy ending?” she asked, too tipsy to care if anyone could hear.

“Why can’t anything just be fine?” Brigit had screamed at her when she told them she was leaving; that she had booked a flight to Paris.

“As if I haven’t wanted everything to be just fine,” she said aloud.

What she had learned in her fifty years, is that life offered you pockets of happiness; but not happy endings.

She had been so happy! At least for a while. She tried to pinpoint the precise moment her life had started to unravel again. Deep down she knew the day that WhatsApp message came through on her birthday, that’s when everything changed.