Tess

And then, just like that, it all got wonderfully, happily easy. She was going to be with Oliver. Forever. Just. Like. That. Not a scintilla of doubt. Not a shiver of fear about it. It was done. The quiet, calm joy of it smothered most of her sadness about Iris, so that, almost within days, what she felt was a bruise, and not a wound, where the blow of her grandmother’s death had landed. The future won out convincingly over the past, and it lay ahead, a clear and wide and sparkling avenue to happiness. Unbelievably simple.

There were details to sort out. Where they’d live, and how. The baby. They didn’t matter, the details. She just knew it would all be okay.

If Donna minded that the first she really knew of Oliver was a fait accompli, she was too careful and protective of their new relationship to let it show. He came to the house and she cooked them a cauliflower curry and he enthused about her photography and drank a bottle of wine with her. Tess sat and watched them getting on, sipping a mint tea and vaguely experiencing heartburn alongside the heart swell. She was fantastically proud of him, and that was a new emotion for her. When he looked at her, or touched her hand, she really did feel all those Disney-type butterflies and violins and stomach flips, and if it sometimes felt absurd to her that she felt them all despite the now vast belly and slightly swollen ankles, he never once made her feel like it was. Everything about him screamed that he thought he was the luckiest man alive. He crackled with happiness.

Holly and Ben already loved him, it transpired. ‘Thank Christ for that,’ Holly exclaimed, when she told her. ‘About bloody time …’ Dulcie, exams and bullies behind her, begged to be a bridesmaid at their wedding, and Tess giggled, because, for the first time in her life, she knew there was going to be a wedding, and it hardly mattered at all.

But she was anxious about Gigi. She couldn’t imagine she’d be what Gigi wanted for Oliver. Oliver wanted them to tell her together, but she wouldn’t go with him. ‘I want her to be able to react the way she really wants to. She won’t be able to do that if I’m there.’

‘You’re being daft. I know what she thinks of you, Tess.’

Tess shook her head and kissed his cheek gently. ‘You think you know what she thinks of the girl she met in the nursing home, the one who was visiting her grandmother. That’s not the same thing at all.’