After 9 PM

The room allocation issue should, realistically, have been manageable.

Instead, it becomes the beginning of several months of mutual avoidance,
emotional repression, and increasingly obvious feelings.

Chapter 1: Residential Meeting

Chapter Text

The hall was unbearable, too hot despite the rain hammering against the high, grime-streaked windows, and it smelled faintly of damp coats, floor wax, and the metallic, sickly tang of burnt toast, while the fluorescent strip lighting overhead buzzed with a rhythmic, dying stutter that sounded like the building itself was contemplating giving up on life entirely.

At the front, Mr. Cartwright was hunched beside the projector, muttering under his breath like a man performing a desperate exorcism, while Kevin hovered nearby, attempting to help in the least useful way possible by constantly hovering in the projector's line of sight and offering unsolicited technical advice that nobody had asked for, making the entire situation feel like a slow-motion car crash of suburban incompetence.

“You’ve got to press Source, mate,” Kevin said, his voice straining for a level of authority he clearly didn't possess.

“I have pressed Source, Kevin, I have pressed it four times,” Mr. Cartwright groaned, his face pressed against the plastic casing as if he were trying to communicate with the hardware through sheer willpower.

Near the refreshments table, Meg was busily reorganising the packets of budget biscuits into nutritional categories while talking down to Julia, who looked as though she were mentally rehearsing her own escape from the planet, or at the very least, wondering if she could fake a medical emergency just to get out of the room before the residential trip itinerary was read aloud in its entirety.

“I just think,” Meg said, her tone briskly corporate and completely detached from the reality of the situation, “if they’re doing serious hill walking, the school really should have specified a minimum sock thickness, because moisture-wicking wool is non-negotiable when you’re dealing with that kind of terrain.”

Julia stared at her, her eyes wide and bloodshot, her grip on her lukewarm carton of tea tightening until her knuckles turned a stark, jagged white. “Meg. Sincerely. What the actual fuck are you talking about?”

“It matters! If their feet get wet, they’re susceptible to blisters, and if they’re miles from the lodge and can’t walk, it’s a logistical nightmare.”

“They are ten, not Sherpas crossing the Andes, Meg, for the love of God, just let them be children.”

The heavy fire doors creaked open, and Amanda walked in, wearing a floor-length cream coat that cost more than Liz’s car, oversized sunglasses that she didn't bother to remove in the dimly lit hall, and the sharp, pained expression of a woman who had arrived unexpectedly at a crime scene. Several conversations died instantly, not loudly, but with the subtle, shifting silence of a group that realized their carefully curated social hierarchy had just walked into the room, and even the air seemed to grow colder as she stood by the door, scanning the hall with a look of profound, aristocratic disdain.

“Oh, fucking hell,” she muttered, a sentiment Liz felt in her very bones as she watched Amanda navigate the room, her heels clicking against the linoleum like gunfire while the other parents studiously looked at anything, a cracked ceiling tile, a dusty notice board, the inside of their own eyelids, rather than acknowledge her arrival.

Amanda spotted her immediately and marched over, and as she slid into the seat beside Liz, she placed her designer handbag on the empty chair between them with the surgical precision of someone marking their territory, effectively creating a physical barrier that screamed ‘don’t even think about sitting here.’

“You didn’t say it was in the hall,” Amanda said, her voice a sharp, cutting whisper that didn't bother trying to be quiet. “It smells like damp in here, not just regular, charmingly rustic damp, but Victorian-orphanage-tuberculosis damp, which is really just the icing on the cake for a Thursday evening.”

“It’s a primary school, Amanda,” Liz replied, not looking up from her pasta. “It’s built on swamp land and dreams and whatever the janitor decides not to mop up, so you’re really just going to have to lower your standards for the next hour.”

Anne offered a tentative, fragile smile that looked like it might shatter if someone breathed on it too hard. “Hi, Amanda.”

“Anne,” Amanda acknowledged, already turning away to inspect the room as if it were a particularly offensive exhibit in a museum, her eyes landing on Kevin. “Why is Kevin dressed like he’s about to inspect a caravan park? Is he auditioning for a role as a middle-management scout for a failing holiday resort, or is he just genuinely confused about what century we’re living in?”

“He likes layering,” Liz said, her voice flat.

“No, but emotionally,” Amanda hissed, her eyes narrowing as Kevin adjusted his gilet with the self-importance of a man who thought he was running the entire operation. “He’s so desperately, aggressively there, it’s exhausting to look at.”

Liz snorted, spraying a tiny bit of lukewarm pasta water, and Amanda looked smug for a fraction of a second before taking a sip of her coffee and grimacing as if she’d been poisoned, her entire face crumpling into a mask of pure, unadulterated regret. “This is fucking vile, how do they even make coffee taste like wet cardboard and despair?”

“You bought it, Amanda, that’s on you.”

“I needed caffeine, and apparently, self-respect wasn't on the menu at the local Tesco, so I had to settle for this liquid catastrophe.”

At the front, the projector flickered to life, vomiting a stretched, pixelated photograph of smiling children in high-vis jackets onto the whiteboard, and Mr. Cartwright stood up, his voice echoing painfully off the bare brick walls. “Right! Lovely to see so many of you here tonight.”

“He says, visibly devastated,” Amanda muttered to Liz, her eyes not moving from the screen, her posture rigid with the effort of not actually walking out.

“The Year Five residential trip to Foxhill Activity Centre will be a fantastic opportunity for pupils to build confidence, resilience, and teamwork skills-”

“Oh, they love resilience now,” Amanda whispered, her voice laced with a weary, biting cynicism. “Every minor, pathetic inconvenience is suddenly a character-building epiphany, as if we’re training them for a future in the trenches rather than a middle-school camping trip where they’ll just lose their socks and cry because there’s no Wi-Fi.”

Anne glanced at her, her eyes darting around to see if anyone else had heard, but Amanda just shrugged, completely unbothered. “When we were children, people just developed anxiety naturally; we didn't need a weekend of mandatory, forced-fun canoeing to achieve it.”

Julia barked out a laugh from across the aisle, a sharp, ragged sound that drew a stern look from Mr. Cartwright, who was now clicking to the next slide, which showed a group of terrified-looking kids in orange helmets huddled in canoes, looking for all the world like they were preparing for an execution.

Amanda physically recoiled, pressing her back into the hard plastic chair as if she were trying to fuse herself into the structure of the building. “No. I am not canoeing, I’m not doing it, I’m not putting a helmet on my head that has been sweat in by at least four different children today.”

“You won’t have to, you’re a volunteer, you just stand on the shore and look vaguely supportive,” Liz said, trying to keep a straight face.

“They always force the parents, Liz, they have this predatory instinct where they sniff out the person who hates the outdoors the most and immediately strap them into a harness, like last year when I got trapped on a zip-wire because some PE teacher called me a ‘good sport’ and I panicked and spent twenty minutes hanging over a ditch waiting for death while everyone filmed it on their phones.”

“You posted photos of that, Amanda, you literally changed your profile picture to you dangling in mid-air.”

“I looked incredible in the harness, and that is all that matters,” Amanda said, her voice brook-no-argument, and Liz couldn't tell if she was joking or if she actually believed that her vanity could override the physical laws of gravity.

Chapter 2: In Coach

Summary:

Amanda discovers that a y5 residential trip is, in fact, one of the lower circles of hell.

Unfortunately, Liz is enjoying this far too much.

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Saturday morning arrived with that specific, grey British drizzle that doesn't quite commit to being rain but makes everything feel damp and miserable. The school car park had already descended into a full-blown logistical disaster zone where parents stood in small, shivering clumps clutching overpriced travel mugs.

At the same time, Year Five children sprinted around at completely unsafe speeds, fuelled entirely by a mix of early-morning sugar crashes and the complete absence of any routine.

Someone’s wheelie bag had tipped over into a deep, muddy puddle. It was slowly soaking up the rainwater, and a child was sobbing uncontrollably because he’d left his stuffed rabbit on the kitchen table.

Another child was sobbing even harder because he hadn't forgotten his, but was now suddenly terrified that he was too old to be seen with it in public.

Liz parked her car crookedly across the white lines and decided she genuinely didn't have the emotional capacity to care, so she climbed out wearing leggings and an oversized coat, looking like a woman who had been awake since half past five against her absolute will, and she watched as her son immediately sprinted toward the coach without bothering to look back or offer a goodbye.

“Right,” Liz muttered to herself, pulling her collar up against the wind. “Lovely start to the day.”

The coach sat idling near the main gates, the engine rumbling with a low, ominous sound that made it feel like the whole trip was cursed, while Mr. Cartwright stood by the open door checking names off a clipboard with the thousand-yard stare of a man who was already tallying up the years of his life he was about to lose over the next forty-eight hours.

Anne was hovering nearby clutching a canvas bag that was practically bulging at the seams with emergency snacks and multiple bottles of Calpol, Meg was busy standing in the middle of the pavement inspecting a fluorescent yellow waterproof clipboard with a level of seriousness usually reserved for air traffic control, and Julia arrived looking like she’d been dragged through a hedge backward while aggressively inhaling from an e-cigarette beside the bins.

“Morning,” Liz called out, trying to sound more awake than she felt.

Julia turned her head slowly, looking at Liz with dead, unblinking eyes. “That is entirely debatable. I got up at six to have a forty-minute negotiation with my daughter about why thermals aren't a form of state-sponsored oppression.”

Liz nodded, offering a sympathetic grimace. “Yeah, that’ll do it, I’m pretty sure I heard screaming from three streets away.”

Julia pointed her e-cigarette toward the back of the coach. “There are already children singing, Liz, they’ve been on the bus for five minutes and they’ve already started, it’s just too early for this level of collective joy.”

Amanda arrived exactly eight minutes later, pulling into the lot in a black Range Rover that stopped halfway across two different parking spaces, and she stepped out wearing enormous designer sunglasses that seemed to be doing most of the heavy lifting for her face, a pair of expensive trainers that were clearly going to be destroyed by the mud within the first hour, and an expression that suggested she believed the entire morning was a personal attack on her lifestyle.

She stood still for a second, looking around the car park at the screaming children, the frantic parents, the rain that was finally starting to fall properly now, and Kevin, who was busy trying to load heavy suitcases into the hold of the coach with a level of unearned enthusiasm that was genuinely difficult to watch.

Amanda closed her eyes for a moment, let out a long, ragged breath, and whispered, “Oh fuck off,” directly into the damp morning air, and Liz laughed before she could stop herself, which made Amanda’s head snap around until she locked eyes with her and said, “There you are,” with a tone of relief that sounded far too familiar.

Amanda started walking toward her, dragging a tiny, expensive-looking leather weekend bag that looked like it couldn't hold anything more than a change of socks, and Liz frowned, pointing at it and saying, “That cannot be everything you packed, you’re going away for two nights, not just a lunch break.”

“It’s two nights, Liz, not an Arctic expedition, I don't need to bring my entire wardrobe just because we’re going to a damp lodge in Derbyshire,” Amanda said, looking offended when Liz pointed out that she was supposed to be hiking in suede trainers that were clearly beige and absolutely not waterproof.

Nearby, Meg leaned over with a look of genuine concern on her face and started to explain how suede absorbs moisture within seconds of making contact with wet grass, but Julia just held up a hand and told her, “Meg, sometimes you need to let people fail,” while Amanda continued to scan the car park with a look of increasing horror as she watched a boy standing a few feet away squeeze a yoghurt tube directly into his mouth while staring blankly into the middle distance.

“That feels dystopian,” Amanda whispered, looking genuinely unnerved, but before they could talk about it, Kevin appeared out of nowhere holding a stack of polystyrene cups that looked like they contained industrial waste and shouted, “Morning, ladies, you all set?”

Amanda flinched as if he’d physically touched her and said, “No,” immediately, but Kevin ignored her and started talking about his road trip playlist, mentioning Queen and Neil Diamond and the high probability of a group singalong to Sweet Caroline, which made Amanda turn to Liz and whisper, “If that song starts before nine, I’m opening the emergency exit while we’re moving,” and Liz just told her she couldn't threaten terrorism at a school function, to which Amanda replied that she was just keeping her options open.

Mr. Cartwright clapped his hands together near the coach doors and shouted for everyone to load up, triggering an immediate surge of children who were screaming at a volume that felt like it might be causing permanent hearing damage, and while Anne automatically moved into crisis-management mode redirecting kids onto the bus and Meg frantically cross-referenced names, Amanda stood there staring at the coach as if it were a physical insult.

“You’re sitting with me,” Amanda said, and it wasn't a question, it was a demand, and when Liz raised an eyebrow, Amanda looked genuinely startled that Liz would even consider sitting anywhere else, looking suspicious for a split second before she softened and smiled that familiar, automatic smile that she only ever seemed to show Liz, the one where she looked like she was finally letting her guard down, if only for a moment.

They climbed onto the coach and found a seat in the back row, and Amanda complained about the lack of legroom while Julia put her headphones on and Meg started handing out travel sickness bands, but then Amanda leaned over and asked if Liz had brought any snacks because she was hungry, and when Liz handed her a seed-heavy cereal bar, Amanda took it without any of the performative politeness she usually used to keep people at arm's length.

Amanda took a bite, frowned at the seeds, and complained that it was healthy, but she didn't stop eating it, and Liz watched her, noticing that tiny, instinctive look again, the way Amanda checked to see if Liz was laughing, the way she seemed to need Liz’s silent approval to be okay with the situation, and as the coach finally pulled out into the rain and the children started to lose their minds, Amanda closed her eyes and muttered, “I’m going to die in Derbyshire,” and for the first time all day, Liz thought she might actually mean it.

Notes:

v specific with weather cos it's cold af in au rn im sick of it

Chapter 3: The Arrival

Summary:

Amanda immediately hates the activity centre, the children are already out of control, and Liz starts noticing that Amanda refuses to do basically anything unless Liz is there too.

Chapter Text

The activity centre looked like it had been specifically designed by someone who hated children, with its bleak rows of brown brick buildings sitting miserably between wet, shivering hills and pine trees that looked like they hadn't seen the sun in a decade, while gravel paths cut aggressively across patches of muddy grass that had already been destroyed by the frantic running of thirty kids who had no idea where they were going.

Laminated signs were stapled to wooden posts pointing toward things like ARCHERY RANGE and TEAM BUILDING FIELD, and the relentless, chirpy optimism of the font made Amanda feel actively insulted, because she knew from deep, bitter experience that absolutely nothing good had ever happened in a place that called itself a Team Building Field.

The coach doors folded open with a loud, mechanical hiss, and thirty children immediately spilled out into the grey afternoon like they were being released from a prison transport, all of them screaming at the top of their lungs while Amanda sat perfectly still in her seat, trying to convince herself that the wave of nausea she was feeling was just a reaction to the road, but she stayed glued to the upholstery even after everyone else had stood up.

“No,” she said, the word coming out as a quiet, panicked finality that didn't leave any room for negotiation.

Liz, who was currently wrestling a backpack out from under the seat in front of her, looked over and couldn't help but let out a dry, short laugh at the sight of Amanda sitting there with her coat buttoned all the way to her chin as if she were waiting for the bus to take her back to her own life.

“Mate, you do eventually have to leave the coach; we aren't paying for you to live in the back row,” Liz said.

Amanda didn't even turn her head; she just kept staring out the window at a boy who was sprinting past the bus wearing only one glove and shovelling a handful of dry Cheerios directly from a plastic sandwich bag into his mouth with the blank, traumatised stare of a man who had seen too much and was currently fighting his own private war.

“Whose child is that?” Amanda whispered, looking at him with a look of genuine, unfiltered judgment. “And why does he look like he’s lived through three winters of famine?”

“At this point? God knows,” Liz said, shrugging. “Probably nobody’s. He’s just a spirit of the woods now.”

They climbed down into the cold, damp air that settled immediately into their bones, and the whole place felt isolated and quiet in a way that Amanda hated because she liked London, she liked the anonymity of being in a city where nobody expected you to do anything other than exist, where you could disappear into a crowded restaurant or a traffic jam or a line for overpriced coffee without anyone ever suggesting you climb a wall or sit in a circle and talk about your feelings while huddled around a campfire.

Inside, the lodge smelled overwhelmingly of industrial-strength bleach and wet wool and radiators that had been cranked up way too high, and children were thundering through the corridors like a herd of panicked cattle while teachers shouted half-hearted instructions that nobody listened to because they clearly didn't believe in them either.

A boy skidded around the corner in his socks and nearly wiped out. Mr. Cartwright shouted, “NO RUNNING,” with the wet, pathetic energy of a man who knew he had already lost the war.

Amanda had to step quickly aside as two girls raced past carrying pillows like weapons. “This,” she said quietly to Liz, “is why Victorian women spent all their time drinking sherry.”

“You say that about most things.”

“Because most things are unbearable.”

Liz laughed softly, and Amanda glanced sideways at the sound, that same instinctive look she always gave after she made Liz laugh, the one where she waited for a reaction before she even knew she was doing it.

Anne appeared a few seconds later, carrying a mountain of folded bedding with her usual look of exhausted competence. “Oh, good, you’re here,” she said warmly. “The rooms are just being sorted.”

Amanda’s expression changed instantly. “The rooms.”

“Yes?”

“Tell me there are proper beds.”

“There are beds.”

“A reassuring amount of beds?”

Anne hesitated slightly, and Amanda closed her eyes. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

Near the reception desk, Mr. Cartwright was trying to organise room assignments while chaos swirled around him, with Meg kneeling on the floor trying to find a missing stuffed penguin for a crying kid and Julia leaning against the wall drinking a Red Bull with the kind of dead-eyed, terrifying calm that usually precedes a major breakdown, while Amanda just drifted back toward Liz every time the crowd shifted, moving closer without even thinking about it because she had decided, on a level she wasn't even admitting to herself, that Liz was the only person in this building who wasn't going to try and force her to be someone she wasn't.

Mr. Cartwright finally clapped loudly enough to get everyone’s attention. “Right! Parent volunteers.”

Amanda straightened immediately. “Please say single rooms.”

“Anne and Meg, Birch Room Two.”

“Oh, lovely,” Anne said brightly.

“Kevin, Oak Room Four.”

Then Mr. Cartwright frowned down at his clipboard.

Amanda narrowed her eyes immediately. “What’s happened?”

“There’s been a slight issue with the bookings.”

“No.”

“We had another school added unexpectedly, which means one of the twin rooms has become a double.”

Silence. Then Julia looked up sharply. “Oh, my God.”

Amanda stared at Mr. Cartwright without blinking, not angry yet, just still, which was worse, and when he checked the sheet nervously and muttered, “So Amanda and Liz will be in Pine Room Three,” Amanda went completely silent.

Liz bit the inside of her cheek hard to stop herself from grinning.

Kevin attempted sympathy. “Well. Could be worse.”

Amanda turned slowly toward him. “How?”

Nobody answered. Mr. Cartwright handed Liz a brass room key. “Bathrooms are down the corridor. Dinner’s at six.”

Amanda took the key immediately. “I need alcohol.”

“It’s the afternoon,” Liz pointed out.

“And yet.”

The corridor upstairs was loud with children running between rooms and slamming doors, and when a pillow flew past Amanda’s face, she flinched violently. “Oh, my God.”

“You’re dramatic.”

“That nearly hit me.”

“It was a pillow.”

“A hard pillow.”

They reached Pine Room Three at the very end of the corridor, and for a second, neither of them moved while rain tapped softly against the windows nearby and children shouted somewhere downstairs, but then Liz took the key gently from Amanda’s hand and unlocked the door.

The room was small, with one wardrobe, one sink, one bedside table, and one double bed, and Amanda stared at it in silence while Liz walked in slowly and dropped her bag by the wall.

“Well.”

Amanda still hadn’t moved. “There is one bed.”

“Yes.”

“One.”

“I can see it too.”

Amanda finally stepped inside, looking genuinely unsettled now. “At our age.”

Liz laughed despite herself.

“No, honestly,” Amanda continued, dropping her bag onto the chair. “What if you touch me in the night?”

The silence arrived immediately, and Amanda froze, but she recovered quickly. “Accidentally, obviously. Like elbows.”

“You think I fight people in my sleep?”

“I don’t know what you do unconscious.”

Liz sat carefully on the edge of the mattress, and the bed creaked loudly beneath her.

Amanda looked horrified. “Oh, that’s bleak.”

Liz laughed again, and Amanda looked at her automatically. This time, neither of them looked away immediately, and the room suddenly felt smaller and warmer, so Amanda cleared her throat first and looked away.

“Well,” she muttered tightly, unpacking her wash bag onto the bedside table closest to Liz’s side without seeming to notice she’d done it, “this is going to be a fucking disaster.”

Chapter 4: Pine Room Three

Summary:

everything is fine.

Chapter Text

The room felt like it was shrinking the second they stepped inside, not because of the actual square footage, although it was undeniably small and cramped, but because the air suddenly felt thick and heavy with the kind of forced intimacy that neither of them had any idea how to navigate, especially with the constant, grinding noise of children tearing up and down the corridor outside, doors slamming every five seconds, and some kid yelling about stolen Pokémon cards like a desperate hostage negotiator who knew the end was near.

Amanda stood in the absolute dead centre of the room, still clutching the room key like it was a lifeline, staring at the bed with a look of pure, unadulterated loathing as if she were hoping that if she just looked angry enough, the universe might feel guilty and manifest a second one, but when Liz just dumped her bag by the wardrobe and snorted, Amanda turned to her with a flat, tired expression.

“You do know glaring at it won’t actually help, it’s not going to grow a second frame just to keep you happy,” Liz said, tossing her jacket onto the single chair.

Amanda didn't move. “I’m hoping the entire building collapses into a pile of rubble before bedtime.”

“You’re so dramatic,” Liz laughed, kicking off her boots.

“I’m not dramatic, Liz, I just believe that once you pass the age of forty, you should legally be guaranteed a minimum amount of personal space, it’s in the Magna Carta somewhere, I’m sure of it.”

Liz sat down on the edge of the mattress to untie her trainers, and the springs underneath gave a long, pathetic, metallic creak that sounded like someone screaming in a horror movie, which made Amanda freeze in place and point at the bed with a horrified expression.

“What on earth was that?”

“It’s just a bed, Amanda.”

“No, that wasn't a bed noise, that was a ‘someone died in this mattress during the Thatcher years’ kind of noise, and frankly, I’m not sure I’m comfortable being an accomplice to its final collapse.”

Liz started laughing until she was gasping for air, and Amanda just stood there, looking completely unimpressed. “You laugh now, but at two in the morning when one of us rolls over, and the whole thing sounds like haunted furniture, don’t come crying to me.”

The room was a bleak, depressing masterclass in 90s institutional neglect, with one horrible, scratchy floral duvet, one tiny sink that had been shoved into the corner beside a mirror that made both of them look like they were suffering from severe dehydration, and one radiator that was blasting out enough heat to dry a horse, while Amanda started unpacking her skincare products onto the bedside table as if she were setting up a mobile field hospital in the middle of a war zone.

Liz watched her for a second, noticing how Amanda lined up every single tiny, expensive glass bottle in a perfectly straight, obsessive row, and when Liz pointed out that she had packed more toiletries than clothes for a two-night trip to Derbyshire, Amanda didn't even look up.

“I have standards, Liz.”

“You’re in Derbyshire for a week, not rebuilding your life.”

“Yes, well, Derbyshire’s very hard-water-heavy, and my skin is currently screaming for mercy, so if you don't mind, I’d like to keep it attached to my face for the duration of the weekend.”

“That’s not even a real sentence.”

“It’s an emergency protocol,” Amanda countered, not missing a beat.

They were just settling in, with Amanda busy organising her moisturisers while muttering to herself and Liz sitting cross-legged on the bed eating stale Mini Cheddars she’d found crushed in the bottom of her bag, when the corridor outside erupted into absolute, unhinged chaos, with someone shouting that a boy had thrown a kiwi and Mr. Cartwright screaming about why anybody would even have kiwis in the first place, which made Amanda close her eyes.

“I genuinely believe these children would survive a prison riot,” Amanda whispered, her voice tight.

Liz grinned. “You hate every child that isn’t yours.”

“That’s not true, I hate plenty of mine as well, usually on a Thursday evening after they’ve spent three hours trying to convince me that they need a smartphone to survive the third grade.”

Liz barked out a laugh that was so loud it echoed against the thin walls, and she noticed again the way Amanda looked at her automatically, that quick, sharp little check to see if Liz had enjoyed the joke, the way she was constantly monitoring Liz’s reactions like she was looking for a sign that she was actually allowed to be there.

Amanda yanked open the bedside drawer, recoiled like she’d been bitten by a snake, and complained about finding hair in the drawer, which led to Liz teasing her about becoming feral since the divorce, and Amanda snapped back that after sixteen years of watching her husband clip his toenails in bed, she felt like she had finally earned the right to a complete personality disorder, which made Liz stop teasing her because she knew it was true and it was actually a fair point.

Before Liz could say anything else, there was a quick, awkward knock at the door, and Kevin appeared halfway inside, looking like he’d been caught in a monsoon and carrying an armful of completely random things, including a torch, a multipack of Pom-Bears, and somebody else’s inhaler.

“Hi, sorry, just checking everyone’s settled,” Kevin said, his voice straining for cheer.

Amanda blinked at him. “Why are you holding an inhaler like it’s a religious relic, Kevin?”

Kevin looked down at it with the blank, confused expression of a man who had completely lost track of his own life. “Oh. Right. Yeah. One of the boys left it downstairs, and then somebody else was sick near it, so I washed it, and now I think I’m just carrying it around until I find the original child.”

Liz snorted, Kevin tried to recover by saying it was a fun first evening, and when Amanda stared at him with such intense, cold disbelief that he physically shrank back against the doorframe, he adjusted the pile of wet towels under his arm.

“Anyway! Spirits are high. One of the Year Six girls says this place is haunted, though, so that’s become a whole thing.”

“Excellent,” Amanda muttered.

Kevin finally looked at the bed, froze, and started stuttering about how it was very practical for adults to share doubles on trips, and when Amanda told him in no uncertain terms that they weren't a couple, Kevin looked like he was about to pass out.

“No! God, no, I didn’t mean, not that you couldn’t, obviously you’re both attractive women, I just meant logistically-”

Liz started laughing immediately.

Kevin looked distressed. “I’ve made this weird.”

“You really have,” Amanda replied, her tone icy.

“Well. Shout if you need anything.”

“You can’t help us, Kevin,” Amanda said honestly.

Kevin looked wounded, smiled that sad, strained smile again, and retreated into the sound of kids screaming down the hall about licked pillows.

Liz pulled off her socks and winced, her feet absolutely ruined from the trek, and when she started to complain about it, Amanda glanced over automatically and told her to show them, but when Liz hesitated, Amanda just rolled her eyes and told her to grow up, but then Julia burst into the room without even bothering to knock, holding a can of Red Bull and a tiny bottle of wine.

“Oh, this is unbelievable,” Julia said, looking from the bed to the two of them.

“Go away, Julia,” Amanda snapped.

Julia ignored her and flopped onto the end of the bed, making the springs scream again. “If you two accidentally shag on this thing, the whole building’ll hear it, so please, for the love of God, keep the noise down.”

“You are genuinely deranged,” Amanda said, looking ready to commit manslaughter.

“I’m just practical,” Julia cackled, holding up her wine. “Meg’s already drunk in the other room calling this place Fyre Festival for mums, so you’re in good company.”

When Julia finally left, Amanda rubbed her face with both hands and said she hated Julia, even though Liz knew she didn't, and then they went through the awkward routine of Amanda showering in a bathroom that smelled like chlorine and Lynx Africa while Liz lay on the bed reading the increasingly chaotic messages in the parents’ WhatsApp group.

When Amanda finally walked out of the bathroom in her pyjama shorts and an oversized t-shirt with her hair damp and no makeup on, Liz looked up and paused, noticing how she looked different, just normal, and when Amanda asked if that was a bad thing, Liz felt a weird, heavy tug in her chest and told her she looked normal, which made Amanda look suspicious but also weirdly softened.

“I always look normal,” Amanda muttered, though she didn't look like she believed it.

“No, you don’t, you usually look like you’re about to fire someone, even when you’re just standing in the queue for the post office.”

Amanda snorted despite herself and climbed into bed carefully, like she still didn't trust it structurally, and Liz climbed in beside her, the mattress dipping dramatically beneath them both.

“You take up loads of room,” Amanda said immediately, shifting toward the edge.

“We’ve been in bed six seconds, Amanda.”

“I can feel your presence, Liz, it’s very large and very distracting.”

“It’s called having a body, you should try it sometime.”

Outside, children were still yelling somewhere down the corridor, and somebody had started crying loudly about friendship bracelets, and then Anne’s voice drifted through the wall again, de-escalating another crisis.

Amanda pulled the duvet up higher. “You alright there?”

“Yeah.”

“You look smug. I don't like it.”

“I’m just enjoying the fact that this is clearly your personal hell.”

Amanda stared at her for a second, tired enough now that the sharpness had mostly dropped away. “Honestly,” she admitted quietly, “it would be worse with literally anyone else.”

Liz looked at her, and Amanda realised she’d said it out loud almost immediately, but before she could retract it, they heard Mr. Cartwright screaming from somewhere outside about ham being hidden in the DVD player, and Amanda just groaned and dropped backward onto the mattress, covering her face with both hands and begging for someone to sedate her, and Liz knew, even though they were stuck in a haunted, damp lodge, that they were going to make it through the night.

Chapter 5: Campfire

Summary:

cutesy campfire with the gang

Chapter Text

Everybody was exhausted. The adults had spent twelve straight hours pretending to enjoy organised activities while children slowly lost all connection to normal behaviour. The activity centre corridors smelled like wet coats, wet socks, and chlorine from the swimming block down the hill, and every parent volunteering on the trip now looked slightly haunted. Teachers had completely given up attempting authority hours ago and had instead settled into the sort of tired bargaining usually seen during hostage negotiations.

Liz honestly felt grim. Her back hurt from standing around muddy fields all afternoon, and one of the Year Fives had somehow wiped yoghurt on her sleeve without either of them noticing until nearly an hour later. Amanda, meanwhile, had spent most of the afternoon reacting to every activity with increasing personal offence, openly accusing the climbing instructor of enjoying children too much and referring to orienteering as “middle-class military training”.

Now everybody was being herded toward the campfire area at the edge of the woods while cold drizzle floated through the trees and children sprinted ahead waving glowsticks around like tiny drunk ravers.

“This is how people disappear,” Amanda said beside Liz while carefully avoiding puddles. “This exact setting. Somebody always vanishes near a forest toilet block, and then suddenly there’s a Netflix documentary.”

Liz adjusted the blanket tucked under her arm and kept walking.

“You think everything’s a documentary.”

“No, but look around,” Amanda replied, gesturing toward the woods where several children were already screaming in total darkness for no obvious reason. “This place has deeply bad energy.”

Ahead of them, Kevin was carrying an enormous plastic tub filled with hot chocolate sachets while simultaneously trying to stop two boys from hitting each other with sticks.

“Guys,” he called desperately, “we talked about weaponising nature.”

Julia trudged behind him, looking exhausted enough to physically collapse.

“If one more child asks me where their torch is,” she muttered, “I’m going to start lying and saying they died.”

Meg looked fantastic even though they’d all been outdoors for nearly the entire day. She had somehow maintained perfect eyeliner through light rain, emotional stress, and several hours of child supervision, which honestly felt impressive. She walked beside Anne, drinking from a thermal flask that definitely contained wine.

“You’ve got to surrender to the experience,” Meg announced. “That’s the secret with these things.”

“You cried earlier because the coffee machine was instant,” Julia reminded her.

“That was a low point for all of us.”

Anne appeared carrying approximately four abandoned scarves and somebody’s fleece.

“Does anybody know who Oliver belongs to?” she asked vaguely.

Nobody answered.

“That’s alright,” Anne said brightly. “He’ll turn up eventually.”

The campfire itself was already going when they arrived, although “going” was generous because most of it seemed to be producing smoke thick enough to damage vision while several damp logs hissed aggressively underneath. Children immediately started launching themselves onto benches and screaming over one another while teachers wandered around looking close to retirement.

Amanda stopped walking the second she noticed a man with a guitar standing beside the fire.

“Oh absolutely fucking not.”

Liz looked over.

“What now?”

“There’s a guitar.”

“So?”

“So nobody voluntarily brings a guitar somewhere unless they’re planning to ruin everybody’s evening.”

The man started strumming loudly while several children cheered.

Amanda looked physically exhausted already.

“If he starts Wonderwall, I’m setting something on fire.”

Kevin spotted them from across the benches and waved enthusiastically while balancing paper cups under one arm.

“I saved you two seats!”

Amanda immediately looked offended.

“We don’t need assigned seating, Kevin.”

Kevin froze slightly.

“Oh. Right. Sorry. I just thought because you’ve sort of been together all day.”

Silence landed immediately.

Kevin panicked almost instantly.

“Not together together obviously. Just nearby together. Logistically.”

Liz bit down hard on the inside of her cheek to stop herself laughing.

Amanda stared at him.

“Kevin,” she said flatly, “go distribute carbohydrates somewhere else.”

“Right. Yep. Absolutely.”

But despite Amanda acting horrified, both of them still sat exactly where Kevin had saved them seats anyway, shoulder-to-shoulder on a narrow wooden bench while children sprinted around throwing marshmallows at each other in the background.

The second Amanda sat down, she stole half of Liz’s blanket without asking.

“You brought an actual coat,” Liz pointed out.

“Yes, but this blanket’s warmer.”

“It’s my blanket.”

“And yet here we are.”

Amanda wrapped it tighter around herself and edged slightly closer beside her while still pretending she wasn’t doing it. Liz noticed immediately because Amanda had started doing this constantly now, drifting toward her automatically in crowded rooms or sitting beside her before even properly looking where she was going. It wasn’t even subtle anymore, honestly. Earlier, during archery, Amanda had shouted “Liz” before a teacher when one of the children fell over, which Julia had noticed straight away because Julia noticed everything awful instantly.

The smoke from the fire suddenly blew directly into Amanda’s face.

“Oh fuck off.”

“Told you,” Liz replied. “Smoke follows miserable people.”

“That’s not science.”

“Well, something’s causing Kevin.”

Nearby, Kevin was trying to hand out hot chocolates while also mediating an argument about whether badgers supported Manchester United.

“I just think,” Kevin said patiently to two furious boys, “animals probably don’t follow football.”

“That’s exactly what a Liverpool fan would say,” Julia muttered.

Meg was already slightly drunk now, comfortably wine-flushed and loud in the way she always got after two drinks, where she stopped filtering thoughts entirely and became dangerously observant.

She narrowed her eyes slightly from across the fire while watching Amanda tuck more of the blanket around herself and Liz without seeming to realise she was doing it.

“Oh my God,” Meg said suddenly.

Amanda looked up immediately.

“What?”

“You two are getting weird.”

Amanda stared at her blankly.

“We’re sitting down.”

“No, but it’s a couple of weird now,” Meg continued, pointing vaguely between them with her cup. “Like…domestic.”

Liz laughed instantly while Amanda looked genuinely affronted.

“That’s revolting.”

“It’s true, though,” Julia added from beside the fire.

“What does that even mean?” Amanda demanded.

“It means you move around like you’ve been married for twelve years and own a Labrador called Keith.”

“That is the least erotic sentence I’ve ever heard.”

“But accurate,” Meg replied smugly.

Amanda rolled her eyes aggressively and reached for Liz’s hot chocolate without asking first.

Liz looked down at the empty cup in her hand.

“You just took mine.”

“You weren’t drinking it.”

“I literally was.”

Amanda ignored her completely and took a sip before grimacing.

“This is horrific.”

“You stole it.”

“It tastes sweet.”

“You still drank it.”

Across the fire, Julia was watching them with open delight now.

“You know what’s bad?” she said. “Neither of you even notices anymore.”

Amanda frowned.

“Notices what?”

“The weird little old-married-couple shit.”

“We do not-”

“You do,” Julia interrupted immediately. “You bicker constantly, but you also keep sorting each other out. It’s deeply upsetting.”

Amanda looked ready to argue again, but stopped because Liz was already pulling Amanda’s sleeve away from the fire, where it had drifted dangerously close to the flames without her noticing.

There was a pause.

Meg burst out laughing first.

“Oh my God, there it is again.”

“For fuck’s sake,” Amanda muttered.

Kevin wandered over, carrying another tray of drinks, looking absolutely shattered underneath all the forced enthusiasm.

“Anybody want tea?” he asked hopefully.

Nobody answered.

Kevin still held the tray out politely.

“I think one of the children has eaten a crayon,” he admitted after a second. “I’m trying not to make that my personality for the evening.”

“That feels wise,” Liz replied.

Kevin looked strangely grateful just to have somebody respond normally to him.

Then he glanced down at Amanda and Liz sharing the blanket.

“Oh, good,” he said absentmindedly. “At least you two have each other.”

Amanda nearly choked on hot chocolate.

“We’re at a fucking campfire, Kevin, not the Somme.”

“Right. Sorry. Poor phrasing.”

He wandered away again, looking mildly traumatised.

The guitar man had now started trying to get everybody to sing Sweet Caroline while several children threw marshmallows directly into the fire just to watch them explode. Anne was calmly helping a crying child untangle glowsticks from his coat zip while Meg openly heckled the man with the guitar.

Amanda leaned closer toward Liz slightly to avoid another burst of smoke and muttered under her breath:

“I genuinely think this is my personal hell.”

Liz looked sideways at her.

“And yet you volunteered.”

Amanda groaned immediately.

“Don’t remind me. I had a lapse in judgment, and now I’m freezing in a forest listening to acoustic Neil Diamond.”

Liz laughed quietly again, and Amanda looked at her automatically, tired now, softer around the edges than usual because she’d clearly run out of energy to properly perform being difficult.

And truthfully, that was probably the thing Liz kept noticing most lately. Amanda still complained constantly and insulted everybody on sight, but around Liz, she stopped holding herself together quite so tightly. She slumped more. Said exactly what she thought without editing it first. Stole drinks, blankets, and space like she already expected Liz wouldn’t care.

Then, from somewhere near the fire came Mr. Cartwright yelling:

“WHY IS THERE A SHOE IN THE MARSHMALLOWS?”

Amanda dropped her forehead briefly against Liz’s shoulder in exhausted disbelief before realising what she’d done and immediately sitting upright again.

Neither of them mentioned it.

Which somehow made it worse.

Chapter 6: Canoeing

Summary:

first fight

Chapter Text

Rain hammered against the lodge windows from stupidly early in the morning, and somehow every single child in the building still had enough energy to scream through the corridors like they’d all done cocaine before breakfast. Liz woke up at half six to the sound of somebody crying because another kid had hidden a trainer in a toilet cubicle, and beside her, Amanda was already awake, lying stiffly on her back, staring at the ceiling.

“This mattress has collapsed further overnight,” Amanda said quietly without moving. “I can actually feel my spine rearranging itself.”

Liz snorted tiredly into the pillow.

“You survived.”

“Barely. Also, somebody outside kept shouting Pokémon stats in their sleep.”

“That might’ve been Kevin.”

“That’s somehow worse.”

The room smelled faintly of damp towels and Amanda’s expensive moisturiser, and the radiator was still blasting out tropical levels of heat even though the windows rattled constantly with rain outside. Amanda sat up eventually and immediately reached for her phone, frowning harder the longer she looked at it.

“No signal,” she muttered. “What sort of medieval bullshit is this?”

“You’re in the countryside.”

“Yes, and it’s disgusting.”

Liz watched her for a second while pulling her hoodie on properly. Amanda looked genuinely annoyed by everything this morning as she hadn’t slept properly and had lost control of her surroundings for too long. Her hair was tied messily on top of her head, she had yesterday’s mascara faintly smudged underneath her eyes, and despite all that, she still somehow looked intimidating enough that most adults would probably apologise automatically if she looked directly at them.

Amanda caught her staring.

“What?”

“You look rough.”

Amanda looked deeply offended.

“I absolutely do not.”

“You do a bit.”

“That’s just poor lighting.”

“You’ve got concealer under one eye and not the other.”

Amanda froze for half a second before immediately grabbing the tiny mirror beside the sink.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

Liz started laughing quietly while Amanda aggressively blended makeup with one finger like she was personally angry at her own face for betraying her.

Breakfast downstairs was chaos already. One child was crying over cereal. Another had somehow poured apple juice directly into scrambled eggs. Mr. Cartwright looked visibly ill. Kevin was carrying three trays at once while trying to remember who had a dairy allergy and who was simply “off yoghurt this week”.

“Morning!” Kevin said brightly as Liz and Amanda walked in together.

Amanda narrowed her eyes immediately.

“Why are you sweating?”

Kevin looked startled.

“I’ve been up since five.”

“Why?”

“One of the boys thought he’d swallowed Lego.”

Amanda stared at him.

“Had he?”

“No, but we did spend forty minutes discussing it.”

Julia sat at the end of the table, drinking coffee black enough to strip paint, while Meg scrolled through emails beside her, looking annoyingly glamorous considering they were all trapped in rural hell.

Meg looked up first.

“Oh God,” she said immediately. “You two slept in the same bed and somehow look divorced already.”

Amanda sat down carefully and stole half of Liz’s toast without asking.

“We weren’t sleeping together, Meg.”

Julia looked over her coffee cup.

“You’re very snappy this morning.”

Amanda ignored her completely.

Mr. Cartwright clapped loudly near the serving hatch with the desperate energy of a man losing authority in real time.

“Right, everyone, quick breakfast because Group B is starting water activities in forty minutes.”

Amanda stopped chewing.

Slowly lowered the toast.

Then,

“What water activities?”

There was silence around the table.

Anne looked sympathetic immediately, which honestly made it worse.

“Oh, Amanda.”

“No.”

Julia burst out laughing.

“You forgot about the canoeing.”

“I did not forget,” Amanda snapped. “I assumed they’d cancelled it due to weather or basic human decency.”

Meg looked delighted.

“You’re actually going canoeing in the rain. This is extraordinary.”

Amanda looked around the table like she’d been personally set up.

“I just want everybody to understand that I paid council tax for years specifically so I would never have to do things like this.”

“You volunteered,” Liz reminded her.

“Yes, well, apparently I was having some sort of breakdown at the time.”

The walk down to the lake was genuinely horrific. Rain drifted sideways through the trees while thirty children sprinted ahead in waterproof trousers, making high-pitched screaming noises for absolutely no reason. Mud coated everybody’s shoes almost immediately, and every adult volunteer walked with exhaustion and accepted their likely death.

Amanda marched beside Liz, holding her coat tightly closed with one hand and carrying a coffee she refused to abandon despite the weather actively trying to remove it from her grip.

“This place feels incredibly state-funded,” she muttered while glaring at the path. “Everything’s damp and vaguely educational.”

“You hate everything here.”

“Yes, because none of it should exist.”

Ahead of them, Kevin slipped violently in mud while trying to carry life jackets and somehow still didn’t spill the hot chocolates balanced under his arm.

“Nearly went then,” he laughed shakily.

Amanda watched him carefully.

“You know, at some point, relentless positivity becomes medically concerning.”

Kevin smiled weakly, as if he genuinely didn’t know whether that was criticism.

The lake appeared through the trees a few minutes later and honestly looked bleak enough to end marriages. Grey water stretched across the hills under thick mist, while canoes sat beside the dock, looking deeply unsafe despite probably being completely fine.

Amanda stopped walking immediately.

“No.”

Liz kept moving.

“You’re not backing out now.”

Amanda looked genuinely appalled.

“Why are they that colour?”

“The canoes?”

“No, the life jackets. Why are they nuclear orange?”

“For safety.”

“It’s humiliating.”

The instructor running the activity was one of those aggressively outdoorsy men who looked permanently damp and spoke like every activity was life-changing.

“Morning, everybody!” he shouted over the rain.

Amanda visibly recoiled.

“No adult should have that much energy before ten.”

Children immediately started fighting over paddles while teachers attempted crowd control with increasingly fake authority.

“Single file, please,” Mr. Cartwright shouted weakly.

Nobody listened.

Amanda was handed a life jacket and stared at it in silence.

“This has Velcro,” she said finally.

“Yeah?”

“I’m an adult.”

Liz laughed hard enough that she had to grab the dock railing.

Amanda glared at her instantly.

“You think this is funny because you’ve accepted physical decline.”

“You’re literally putting on a jacket.”

“It smells communal.”

The children assigned to their canoe had already started arguing before they even got near the water.

“She cheats,” one girl informed them immediately.

“I DON’T.”

“You splashed me on purpose yesterday.”

Amanda closed her eyes briefly.

“I’m begging for death.”

Julia walked past carrying a paddle.

“You look like a divorced coastguard.”

“Fuck off.”

Getting Amanda into the canoe became an event in itself because she stepped into it with the level of caution usually reserved for unexploded bombs and immediately grabbed Liz’s arm hard enough to leave fingerprints.

“Oh, my God.”

“You’re fine.”

“No, I’m not. This water looks poor.”

“It’s a lake.”

“Yes, and it’s grey.”

The canoe rocked slightly as Liz sat down opposite her.

Amanda inhaled sharply.

“No sudden movements.”

“You realise children do this.”

“Yes, and children also eat glue.”

Across the dock, Kevin somehow ended up supervising too many kids again while trying to sound upbeat through obvious panic.

“Okay, guys, remember, paddles stay INSIDE the boat-- no, Tyler, inside means not threatening Oscar with it.”

Meg, meanwhile, had turned canoeing into a competitive corporate retreat immediately and was shouting things like “WE NEED MOMENTUM” at Anne, who was mostly apologising every time she accidentally splashed somebody.

The rain kept falling steadily while the lake water slapped quietly against the sides of the boats, and after twenty minutes, everybody looked miserable enough that morale completely collapsed.

Amanda hated every second of it.

Not just because she was cold or wet, but because she looked ridiculous and knew she looked ridiculous, which for Amanda was genuinely worse than physical discomfort. Her hair had started frizzing from the rain, her expensive trainers were muddy, and every few minutes the canoe tipped slightly, and she’d grab the sides hard enough to make the children nervous.

“You’re paddling too aggressively,” she snapped at Liz after nearly drifting sideways.

“I’m literally just rowing.”

“Well, stop splashing.”

“You’re in a fucking canoe, Amanda.”

“Yes, and already deeply against my will.”

One of the children suddenly dipped their paddle too hard and sprayed lake water directly across Amanda’s sleeve.

Everything stopped.

Amanda stared at the wet patch in complete silence.

Then very quietly,

“That’s a lake.”

The child looked frightened immediately.

“Sorry.”

Amanda looked out across the water with the hollow expression of somebody reconsidering every decision they’d ever made.

“I need a shower.”

“You’re already wet,” Liz pointed out.

“That isn’t the point.”

Then the instructor announced they’d be doing a timed race around the lake markers, and every adult collectively looked ready to riot.

“A race?” Julia shouted. “Against who? Depression?”

“We’re building teamwork,” the instructor replied cheerfully.

“Kill me now,” Amanda muttered.

The whistle blew.

Chaos erupted instantly.

Children paddled in random directions while canoes bumped into each other across the water, and everybody started shouting contradictory instructions immediately.

“LEFT,” Amanda barked at one of the girls.

“I AM GOING LEFT.”

“YOUR NORMAL LEFT.”

Liz was laughing too hard to properly help now, while Amanda became increasingly furious at the fact that the canoe refused to obey her authority.

“Can you maybe contribute something useful?” Amanda snapped suddenly at Liz as they spun sideways again.

Liz looked over.

“I am contributing.”

“You’ve barely paddled once because you keep laughing.”

“Because you’re taking this too seriously.”

“Well, somebody has to keep us alive.”

“We’re in four feet of water.”

Amanda glared at her.

“You’re being unbelievably irritating today.”

Something about the tone landed wrong this time. Sharper than usual. Not playful.

Liz’s expression shifted slightly.

“Christ, Amanda, not everything’s a fucking emergency.”

Silence settled immediately after that.

Not dramatic silence. Worse.

The sort where both people suddenly become aware they’re actually annoyed instead of just bickering for fun.

Amanda looked away first and started paddling again without speaking properly.

The children kept shouting around them while rain tapped steadily across the lake, and somewhere nearby, Kevin was desperately trying to stop two boys from deliberately ramming another canoe.

Neither Amanda nor Liz really spoke for the rest of the activity.

Across the water, Julia noticed at once.

“Oh, that’s interesting,” she muttered into her coffee thermos.

Meg followed her gaze toward Amanda and Liz sitting stiffly opposite each other in the canoe.

“Oh no,” she said delightedly. “Lovers' quarrel.”

Chapter 7: Team Building

Summary:

jealous amanda

Chapter Text

Lunch after the canoeing disaster felt louder than usual because everybody was wet, annoyed, and overtired, and children always somehow sensed when adults were close to losing patience completely. The dining hall smelled aggressively of damp coats and tomato pasta, and every surface seemed slightly sticky. Somebody had spilled orange squash across half a table, and two Year Fives were arguing with genuine emotion over whether penguins had knees.

Amanda walked in beside Anne, carrying her tray with the careful posture of somebody trying not to touch anything unnecessarily. Her hair had frizzed slightly from the rain despite her obvious attempts to control it, and she still looked deeply offended about the lake water incident.

“This place is giving me fungal concerns,” she muttered while scanning the room. “Why is everything moist?”

Anne smiled sympathetically.

“It is very damp.”

“No, but there’s damp, and then there’s this. This place is gross.”

Amanda looked across the hall automatically before she even realised she was doing it.

Liz was already sitting down near the windows with Julia and Kevin. Kevin was talking with the frantic, exhausted energy of a man who hadn’t sat quietly in about twelve hours, waving his fork around while explaining something about one of the children nearly swallowing a whistle.

Liz laughed at something he said.

Amanda stopped walking for maybe half a second too long.

Meg noticed immediately from the drinks station.

“Oh, this is getting embarrassing now,” she said happily while pouring wine into a paper coffee cup with absolutely no shame whatsoever.

Amanda looked over sharply.

“What is?”

“You two had one argument, if you could even call it that, and now you’re behaving like middle-aged divorcees on a Center Parcs holiday.”

“We did not have an argument.”

“You absolutely did,” Julia called across the hall without even looking up from her chips. “You stopped talking for nearly forty minutes. For you two, that’s basically legal separation.”

Amanda rolled her eyes hard enough that it almost looked painful, and finally sat opposite Liz instead of beside her.

It felt wrong instantly.

Not dramatic. Just unfamiliar now.

The last few days, Amanda had somehow gotten used to Liz being directly next to her all the time. On the coach. At meals. During activities. In bed, obviously, which Amanda still refused to think about too hard because the entire situation already felt dangerously intimate in a way she absolutely did not want examined properly.

Now there was a table between them instead.

Kevin was still talking.

“So then Tyler tells me he’s trained in combat because he does Krav Maga after school,” Kevin said while rubbing both hands over his face tiredly, “and honestly, at that point I didn’t have the strength to challenge it.”

“That child’s absolutely going to sell crypto one day,” Liz replied.

Kevin laughed too hard at that. He always laughed too hard around the women, like he desperately wanted to prove he belonged there.

Amanda stabbed aggressively at her pasta.

The annoying thing was that Kevin wasn’t even doing anything wrong. He was just hovering around Liz more than usual because Liz was easy to talk to, and Kevin gravitated toward people who made him feel less nervous. But every time Amanda looked up, he seemed to be standing beside Liz, offering her something.

Napkins. Tea Extra cutlery. Information nobody asked for.

“Oh, my God,” Julia muttered suddenly, staring openly at Amanda now. “You’re jealous of Kevin.”

Amanda looked genuinely horrified.

“I’m sorry?”

“You keep glaring at him.”

“I keep glaring at everyone. That’s just my face.”

“No, but specifically him,” Meg added while sitting down beside Anne and immediately stealing half her chips. “You’ve looked at Kevin more than your own child today.”

Amanda folded her arms tightly.

“I’m not jealous of Kevin. That is an insane sentence.”

Liz finally looked up properly.

“Nobody’s jealous.”

“Exactly,” Amanda replied far too fast.

Julia pointed immediately.

“There. That. You sound like somebody’s husband.”

“Shut up, Julia.”

Kevin, meanwhile, was still rambling, completely unaware that Amanda was one passive-aggressive comment away from physically launching him into traffic.

“I just think maybe the kids are overtired,” he said earnestly. “Oscar cried earlier because another boy called him ‘mid’ and honestly, I don’t even fully know what that means.”

“It means you're old,” Julia replied.

Amanda looked back toward Liz again without meaning to.

Liz was leaning back in her chair now, listening to Kevin while absentmindedly eating chips, relaxed in that very Liz way where she looked permanently unimpressed by everybody around her but still easier to be around than most people.

Amanda missed her suddenly.

The realisation annoyed her instantly.

It had only been a few hours since the canoeing thing, but the whole day felt off now because normally Liz would’ve already made at least six comments under her breath about the food or the children or Kevin’s weird, damp fleece, and Amanda would’ve responded automatically without thinking. They had slipped into routines together frighteningly quickly during the trip, and now every time Amanda looked around and Liz wasn’t beside her, she felt weirdly untethered.

Which was stupid.

Obviously.

The afternoon activities took place in something called Team Building Field, which Amanda hated before they even arrived because the phrase itself sounded aggressively middle management. The field sat behind the main lodge, surrounded by wet trees and muddy grass with ropes courses and obstacle stations spread across it, while instructors in waterproofs bounced around smiling, as if they’d never experienced despair once in their lives.

“This feels like an HR violation,” Amanda muttered while they walked over.

“It’s literally children climbing tyres,” Liz replied.

“Yes, but the energy feels fake.”

Mr. Cartwright clapped loudly while trying to organise everybody into groups.

“Okay, adults, if you could spread yourselves around the stations-”

Children immediately sprinted in opposite directions, screaming.

Kevin rushed after them, looking panicked already.

“Guys, guys, let’s not destroy equipment.”

Meg somehow acquired a clipboard within minutes and started treating the obstacle course like she was restructuring a failing company.

“Think strategically,” she told a group of children attempting to stack crates. “You need communication.”

“They’re nine,” Julia replied flatly from the sidelines.

Anne, meanwhile, had somehow become responsible for three crying children despite nobody officially assigning them to her.

“No, sweetheart, licking the rope isn’t helping,” she said gently to one little boy while simultaneously helping another zip his coat properly.

Amanda wandered between stations, pretending to supervise but mostly just watching Liz from a distance without wanting to admit she was doing it.

And Liz was fine.

That was honestly the irritating part.

She was laughing with Julia. Talking to Kevin. Helping children through one of the rope bridges while taking the piss out of the instructors under her breath.

Meanwhile, Amanda felt increasingly restless and annoyed by everybody around her. At one point, she watched Kevin hand Liz a cereal bar while smiling nervously, and before she could stop herself, she muttered,

“Christ.”

Meg appeared beside her instantly like a drunk emotional support demon.

“You are absolutely raging.”

“I’m just standing here.”

“You look like you want Kevin dead.”

Amanda scoffed.

“Kevin couldn’t provoke anything except mild dehydration.”

“Then why are you glaring at him like he’s slept with your wife?”

Amanda nearly choked on air.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

Meg grinned into her wine cup.

“There it is.”

“There, what is?”

“That face you do when somebody says something too accurate.”

Amanda looked away immediately and started aggressively tightening a child’s helmet strap despite the activity having nothing to do with helmets.

The worst part was that Julia had noticed too now.

Of course, she had.

Julia wandered over carrying a coffee and stood beside Amanda, watching Liz across the field for a second before saying casually,

“You know she keeps looking for you, too.”

Amanda crossed her arms tighter.

“She absolutely does not.”

“She does actually. Every few minutes.”

“That’s because she’s trapped here with me.”

“No,” Julia replied, still watching Liz, “it’s because you’re the person she talks to most now.”

Amanda went quiet for a second after that.

Only a second. Then,

“Well, she should branch out.”

Julia turned slowly toward her.

“You sound insane.”

Across the field, Liz finally looked over properly and caught Amanda staring.

Neither of them looked away immediately this time. Just long enough for something awkward to settle there again. Then Kevin walked back over, carrying paper cups of tea like an anxious intern trying to stop office morale collapsing.

“I got extras,” he said hopefully. “Anybody want one?”

Liz took one automatically.

“Cheers, Kev.”

Amanda looked down at the tea.

Then at Kevin.

Then back at Liz.

“That looks weak,” she said before she could stop herself.

There was a pause.

Julia physically folded over laughing.

Liz stared at Amanda in disbelief.

“What's your issue?”

“Nothing,” Amanda snapped immediately. “It just looks shit.”

Kevin looked wounded.

“I used the proper teabags.”

“That somehow makes it sadder.”

Chapter 8: Reconciliation

Summary:

liz and amanda are fine, maybe

Chapter Text

Liz walked upstairs carrying two helmets somebody had abandoned near the climbing wall because apparently no child at this school understood ownership anymore. Kevin followed beside her, holding a first aid bag against his chest while still talking about the obstacle course like he’d survived military service.

“I’m just saying there should’ve been more staff near the tyre section,” Kevin said while adjusting the bag strap on his shoulder. “One of those boys fully body-checked another child into a puddle, and nobody even reacted.”

Liz snorted while nudging open the fire door with her hip. “That’s because Year Five boys are basically just feral Labradors.”

Kevin laughed too hard again and pushed his damp hair back. “Honestly, though, I do think I’ve pulled something in my shoulder. I carried three children at one point.”

“You volunteer for too much,” Liz said while slowing near the staircase. “You need to stop trying to save everybody, Kevin.”

Kevin shrugged awkwardly and looked down at the floor for a second. “Yeah, well. People get annoyed if you’re not useful.”

Liz looked at him properly after that because underneath all the frantic energy, Kevin always seemed slightly tense, like he expected everyone around him to decide he was irritating and leave. Before she could answer properly, Amanda appeared at the top of the stairs holding two mugs of tea and immediately stopped when she saw them talking.

There it was again, that look. The knowing look, she couldn't quite understand why Amanda always looked like that at her direction, especially when she would talk to Kevin, or anyone for that matter.

“Oh, good,” Amanda said while walking down the last step carefully. “You’re alive. Mr. Cartwright just told a child off for trying to microwave a spoon.”

Liz raised an eyebrow while taking one of the mugs from her. “Why’ve you brought me tea?”

Amanda looked briefly caught off guard before recovering immediately and shrugging one shoulder. “Because the coffee machine downstairs looks infected.”

Kevin smiled politely and shifted the first aid bag higher on his shoulder. “I might go lie down for twenty minutes before dinner, actually.”

“You should,” Liz replied while watching him carefully. “You look fucked.”

Kevin laughed weakly again and started backing down the corridor. “Yeah. Bit tired.”

Amanda watched him leave before looking at Liz over the top of her mug.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Nothing.”

“He always looks like a divorced PE teacher.”

Liz nearly choked laughing into the tea, and Amanda looked pleased with herself for exactly half a second before trying to hide it.

They walked back toward Pine Room Three together without speaking properly at first because the corridor was packed with children running between rooms carrying pillows and packets of crisps. Somebody sprinted past in just one sock while Anne followed behind holding a hairbrush and speaking with the calm patience of somebody who’d fully accepted chaos as a lifestyle.

“No, darling,” Anne said while gently steering a little boy away from the stairwell. “You can’t trade ibuprofen for Pokémon cards.”

Meg leaned against the wall nearby, drinking wine from a travel mug while watching the entire scene like it was live theatre. She'd been enjoying this trip far too much. Liz kept bugging her with questions about how she smuggled basically the entire liquor aisle at Tesco.

“Oh, thank Christ,” Meg said while spotting Amanda and Liz together again. “The lesbian cold war’s over.”

Amanda looked exhausted immediately. “Please shut up.”

“You were glaring at each other for six straight hours.” Meg looked quite impressed as she stated, she couldn't hide the smirk on her face even if she tried.

“We were not.”

“You literally complained about Kevin breathing,” Julia called from further down the corridor while sitting cross-legged outside somebody’s room, eating Pringles straight from the tube.

Amanda pointed at her without slowing down. “He breathes too much.”

Inside Pine Room Three, the room felt warmer than before because the radiator had apparently decided to become violent overnight. Liz kicked the door shut behind them and dropped onto the bed with a long groan while Amanda immediately opened the tiny window a crack.

“This room smells like feet now,” Amanda complained while fanning the air dramatically with one hand. “I genuinely think the walls are sweating.”

“That’ll be Kevin’s fleece,” Liz muttered while pulling off her hoodie. “It’s bloody damp.”

All day had felt slightly awkward in that neither of them wanted to properly acknowledge they’d annoyed each other. Amanda had spent hours acting irritated and possessive without admitting why, and Liz had responded by deliberately talking to Kevin more because, in truth, Amanda deserved to be wound up sometimes.

Now they were back in the room together, and everything already felt easier again. Amanda felt a huge weight had been taken off her shoulders; she had never felt this feeling from anyone, and she hated it.

Liz stretched her legs out across the mattress and looked sideways at Amanda. “You were being weird earlier.”

Amanda sat down near the pillows while tucking one leg underneath herself carefully. “You were flirting with Kevin.”

Liz stared at her in disbelief for a second before laughing loudly enough to echo slightly around the room.

“Oh, my God.”

“You were.”

“Ew, Amanda. What the fuck are you talking about?”

“You laughed at all his jokes.”

“Not all of them, if I'm honest,” Liz said almost in a whisper.

Amanda folded her arms tightly and looked away. “Well.”

Liz kept staring at her as the whole thing was so ridiculous to her. Thoughts rushed into her head, wondering if Amanda's on medication or if she's just burnt out. Is it the divorce? Is it her ex-husband's new girlfriend? Liz couldn't make half of it.

“You got jealous of…Kevin?”

“I did not-"

"Why are you acting like this? Have you completely lost it? We're not even a week into the trip, and you've gone fucking crazy, Amanda." Liz shrieked in disbelief, cutting Amanda off.

"-get jealous,” Amanda finished her thought while reaching for her moisturiser with unnecessary force. “I just found the situation irritating.”

“The situation is me talking to my friend.” Liz looked bewildered now, hands on her hips.

“The situation is Kevin hovering around you like an emotional support animal.”

Liz laughed again, and Amanda looked over immediately despite herself.

There it was again, that automatic glance every single time Liz laughed. Amanda still didn’t seem fully aware that she did it constantly now. In fact, since they'd gotten back to their room, she hadn't paid full attention to anything Liz was saying, or anything she'd been responding to Liz; she just felt her entire nervous system dial down now that it had just been the two of them.

However, Liz noticed. She's been noticing loads of things lately. A price you pay for raising two boys practically on your own, you can never predict what they do, so you adapt and turn into a wild predator trying to catch its prey; she'd now become extremely observant, and little changes in energy, tone of voice, and facial expressions are her kryptonite.

She especially noticed the way Amanda always drifted back toward her in crowded rooms, how she relaxed slightly once they were alone again, how she complained more around Liz than anybody else because she knew Liz would actually laugh instead of getting offended.

Amanda rubbed cream into her hands while avoiding eye contact badly. “You were laughing at me during the canoeing.”

“Because you looked like a lunatic.” Liz had now calmed herself, and she sat on her side of the bed, taking off her light jacket.

“I did not.”

“You said the water looked council-funded.”

Amanda pointed at her instantly. “That was funny.”

“It was a bit funny.”

“Exactly.”

Liz smiled slightly while watching her, sizing Amanda up and down without her noticing. She was amazed and confused by how long it took Amanda to moisturise her hands and by the idea that Amanda can be sweet and funny. She shook her head to erase her thoughts.

Amanda finally looked up properly and immediately narrowed her eyes. “Do you wanna drink?” she asked suddenly while screwing the lid back onto the hand cream too fast, like even she hadn’t meant to say it out loud yet.

Liz blinked once from the bed, thrown slightly by the abruptness of it. “Right now?”

“Yes, obviously right now,” Amanda replied while standing up too quickly and reaching for her phone from the bedside table. “I’m not proposing we open a vineyard in six months.”

Liz laughed under her breath while watching her pace once across the tiny room. “You’ve already had tea.”

“That was survival tea,” Amanda said while typing quickly into her phone. “This is recreational.”

Liz stretched back against the pillows, still smiling slightly to herself because Amanda had shifted completely in the last ten minutes. The tension from earlier had mostly disappeared now, and Amanda looked looser somehow, less sharp around the edges, like the entire afternoon of weird passive-aggressive behaviour had finally burnt itself out.

Amanda’s phone buzzed almost immediately.

“She’s got prosecco,” Amanda announced while grabbing her cardigan from the chair. “Meg apparently smuggled three bottles inside a yoga mat carrier, and I'm not even gonna try to ask anything about it.”

“I fuckin' love her.” Liz

“She’s a functioning alcoholic with excellent posture.”

Liz snorted while pulling her socks back on. “Functioning's too generous.”

Amanda opened the door before turning back toward her again. “You coming or what?”

Meg and Julia had apparently taken over one of the empty staff rooms downstairs because when Amanda pushed open the door, there was already music playing faintly from somebody’s phone and at least four half-empty plastic cups balanced on the windowsill.

“Oh, thank fuck,” Meg said dramatically while sprawled across one of the chairs with her shoes kicked off already. “The custody battle’s resolved.”

Amanda immediately looked tired again. “I’m begging you to stop talking.”

Julia pointed toward them while opening another tiny bottle of wine with her teeth. “No, because seriously, dinner earlier was fucked. Kevin kept blaming himself somehow.”

“Kevin thinks everything’s his fault,” Liz replied while taking the plastic cup Meg handed her.

Anne sat curled up on the sofa under a blanket, looking warm and slightly pink-cheeked already. “He did ask me earlier whether he’d upset Amanda accidentally.”

Amanda looked genuinely offended. “Why would he ask you that?”

“Because,” Anne answered gently while sipping wine, “you looked at him like he’d reversed over your dog.”

Julia burst out laughing immediately.

Amanda dropped into the chair beside Liz with a long-suffering sigh and grabbed the prosecco bottle directly from Meg’s hand. “You’re all deeply irritating people.”

“You were jealous,” Meg said while pointing lazily at her cup. “You can’t behave like a territorial husband all afternoon and then expect silence.”

“I was not territorial.”

“You complained about his fleece.”

“Because it’s upsetting.”

Liz laughed into her drink, and Amanda looked over automatically again, the same quick instinctive glance she always did now, and this time Liz caught it immediately and held her gaze for a second longer than usual.

Amanda looked away first.

Julia saw that too, obviously, because of course she did.

“Oh, my God,” Julia muttered while leaning back in her chair. “You two are genuinely painful to be around now.”

Anne smiled softly into her wine. “I think it’s sweet.”

Amanda pointed at her immediately. “Don’t start with sweet. I’m serious, Anne, don’t ruin this for me.”

Meg topped up everyone’s drinks with the confidence of somebody who absolutely should not have been trusted with alcohol distribution.

“You know what your problem is,” Meg said while handing Amanda back her cup. “You’ve spent your whole life making people chase you, and now Liz isn’t doing it, so you’re spiralling.”

Amanda stared at her blankly. “That sounded like something said during a hostage negotiation.”

“It’s true, though,” Julia added while opening crisps aggressively. “You’re used to everybody orbiting around you because you’re terrifying.”

“I’m not terrifying.”

“Amanda,” Liz said while taking a sip of prosecco, “you once made a teaching assistant cry because she bought hummus.”

“She bought reduced-fat hummus,” Amanda corrected immediately. “That’s not food. That’s punishment.”

The room dissolved into laughter again, and Amanda smiled despite herself before hiding it behind her cup.

Amanda, drunk, wasn’t massively different from sober Amanda, really. She was still sharp and snobby and constantly complaining, but softer around the edges somehow, more honest without realising it. She leaned into people more when she laughed. She stopped checking every sentence before saying it. She looked less like somebody permanently preparing for battle.

And right now she looked relaxed, properly relaxed. Mostly because she was sitting close enough that her leg kept brushing Liz’s every few seconds without either of them moving away. The conversation kept on, Liz, on the other hand, tends to slap and push people when she's laughing, which she'd been doing plenty with Amanda.

Meg noticed that, too, because Meg noticed absolutely everything; it didn't matter if Meg was going through a zombie apocalypse, she'd still be a smart-ass.

“Oh, my God,” she whispered loudly toward Julia. “They’re touching legs.”

Amanda nearly choked on prosecco. “Jesus Christ.”

“You are,” Julia replied while squinting toward them dramatically.

“It’s a tiny room,” Amanda snapped while immediately shifting her leg away.

Two seconds later, she shifted back again unconsciously. Liz looked down at it, then up at Amanda.

Amanda caught her looking and immediately narrowed her eyes suspiciously. “Don’t.”

“Don’t know.”

“Do that face.”

“What face.”

“That smug little face.”

Liz grinned into her drink. “Stop me.”

Amanda stared at her for a second too long before taking another large sip of prosecco and muttering into the cup:

“You’re fuckin' unbearable.”

Chapter 9: You're Still Laughing

Summary:

amanda and liz, drunk together, one bed

Chapter Text

The corridor outside Pine Room Three had finally calmed down a bit, although every few minutes, some child still screamed like they’d lost a limb and then immediately recovered two seconds later. Somebody somewhere kept running even though every adult in the building had spent the last six hours shouting no running like it was a religious mantra. Now and then, another door slammed hard enough to shake the wall slightly, and somebody’s mum's voice immediately followed after it.

“FOR FUCK’S SAKE, ARCHIE.”

Then silence, then running again.

Liz shoved the room door shut with her foot while balancing two plastic cups badly in one hand, and Amanda immediately headed toward the vanity area.

“I swear to God this mascara’s fused to my fucking face,” Amanda muttered while leaning into the tiny mirror and aggressively wiping under one eye with a cotton pad. “I look like I’ve been dug up.”

Liz dropped heavily onto the bed and kicked off one trainer. While Liz was still laughing about Amanda nearly having a breakdown over accidentally touching her face, her phone buzzed against the duvet, and she glanced down at the screen before smiling despite herself. “Charlie's eaten six packets of Mini Cheddars apparently and now feels ‘wrong’ which honestly could mean anything with him,” she said while typing back one-handed. “An’ the other one’s at Lee’s pretending homework’s a hate crime.”

Amanda snorted quietly while Liz shook her head fondly. “They’re good kids, though. Absolute little bastards sometimes, obviously, but good kids.” Amanda watched her for a second after that because Liz always softened slightly whenever she talked about her boys, like all the chaos and swearing dropped out of her voice for a minute without her even realising it.

“You’ve got some on your chin an’ all.” Liz put her phone away; she'd been staring at Amanda from the side.

Amanda froze. “You absolute bitch.”

Liz laughed immediately while Amanda squinted harder into the mirror, looking genuinely betrayed by her own reflection.

“Oh, fuck off,” Amanda snapped while scrubbing at her chin. “Why would you wait until now to tell me?”

“Because it’s funny watchin’ you panic.”

“I was not panicking.” Amanda threw the used cotton pad into the tiny bin with unnecessary force and reached for another one. “This lighting’s fucking criminal.”

Liz barked out laughing and stretched properly across the bed while Amanda continued her entire skincare hostage negotiation over at the sink. Honestly, it was weird now how normal this had become because four days ago, Amanda barely looked human after eight o’clock, and now Liz was sitting watching her angrily apply moisturiser in oversized pyjama shorts while listening to her complain about water pressure.

Amanda glanced over at her through the mirror while rubbing moisturiser into one cheek with slow, aggressive movements. “Why are you staring at me like that?” she asked while narrowing her eyes suspiciously at Liz’s reflection in the tiny sink mirror.

Liz stayed sprawled across the bed with one trainer half hanging off her foot and looked around the room at the army of products Amanda had somehow unpacked onto the bedside table. “I’m still shocked you travel with this much shit,” she said while gesturing vaguely toward the rows of bottles and tubes. “Honestly, Amanda, it looks like you’ve opened a Boots concession in Derbyshire.”

Amanda scoffed while dabbing something expensive-looking under one eye. “Sorry, I believe in standards,” she replied while screwing the lid back onto a tiny glass bottle with the concentration of somebody handling plutonium.

“You brought six serums to a fuckin’ activity centre,” Liz said while sitting up properly now because she genuinely couldn’t stop looking at it all. “Who needs six separate face liquids to supervise canoeing?”

“One of them’s a mist,” Amanda corrected while holding up another bottle defensively. “And this one’s hyaluronic.”

“Christ.”

Amanda pointed at her immediately with the moisturiser bottle still in her hand. “Your skin looks like a pub table.”

“Yeah, well, my upbringing had flavour,” Liz replied while scratching absentmindedly at her arm. “Some of us were raised by stress an’ Iceland food.”

Amanda snorted before she could stop herself and turned back toward the mirror again. “You use that one moisturiser in the blue tub for literally everything. Face, hands, elbows, emotional support.”

“Because it works.”

“It’s industrial cream, Liz.”

“You sound like somebody who’s never had dry knees.”

Amanda laughed quietly under her breath while continuing her routine. It was ridiculous how seriously she took all of it because every product got layered on in a specific order while she muttered little complaints to herself about the lighting and hard water like she was trapped in a five-star hotel against her will instead of a children’s activity centre with mould in the showers and ham in the DVD player.

Amanda snorted despite herself before catching the smile too late and immediately looking annoyed she’d done it.

That kept happening now. Amanda would forget herself for half a second around Liz and then visibly remember she was supposed to be composed all the time. Liz noticed every single one of those moments because once you’d spent years raising children and surviving school-gate politics, you became weirdly good at noticing tiny shifts in people before they even realised they were happening themselves.

Amanda climbed onto the bed beside her with a long, exhausted groan while dragging the duvet up over her legs immediately, as she’d survived combat. The mattress dipped sharply under her weight and creaked loudly enough that both of them looked down at it automatically.

“Oh, fuck off,” Amanda muttered while glaring at the springs beneath them.

Liz snorted and shifted slightly to give her more room, even though Amanda still managed to spread herself across half the mattress within seconds. “Geez, you’ve gone soft.”

“My spine’s fucked,” Amanda complained while grabbing one of the flat pillows and aggressively shoving it behind her back with several annoyed little movements. “Honestly, I think canoeing’s shortened my life expectancy. I can feel my organs lower than they were yesterday.”

“You barely canoed.”

“I was exposed to it,” Amanda replied while settling back against the pillow dramatically and adjusting the duvet three separate times before finally looking comfortable enough to continue complaining properly. “That lake had bad energy.”

Liz laughed quietly while pulling her socks off under the covers. “You sat there whingin’ about the water lookin’ poor.”

“It did look poor,” Amanda argued immediately while turning toward her properly now.

“That doesn’t even mean anything.”

“You know exactly what I mean.”

Liz barked out another laugh at that, and Amanda immediately looked sideways at her automatically, same as always now, like her body reacted before her brain had time to stop it. It was quick but obvious, Amanda always checked, every joke, every sarcastic comment, every horrible little observation she made about people, she looked at Liz straight after, like she needed to see whether she’d laughed.

Liz had started expecting it now. “You really do keep checkin’ if I’m laughing,” Liz said while dragging the duvet properly over her legs and settling deeper into the mattress. “It’s weird.”

Amanda looked offended instantly while folding her arms. “I do not.”

“You literally just did it.”

“No, I looked over because your laugh sounds weird.”

Liz stared at her flatly. “Fuck off.”

“It absolutely is,” Amanda replied while pointing lazily at her from under the duvet. “Your laugh sounds like somebody losin’ a fight in Wetherspoons after six sambucas.”

Liz shoved her shoulder lightly with the back of her hand. “Fuck off again.”

Amanda laughed properly at that, louder this time, her whole face changing for a second before she caught herself. That was becoming more noticeable lately, too, because Amanda’s real laugh always arrived before the polished version of herself remembered to step back in. When she forgot to manage it, she looked younger somehow, softer around the mouth, less sharp around the edges.

And she looked pleased with herself now, sunk into the pillow with one leg tucked awkwardly under the duvet while Liz was still laughing beside her.

“You are genuinely horrible,” Liz muttered while shaking her head.

“And yet,” Amanda replied smugly while shifting further back against the headboard, “you continue to adore me.” The room went quieter for a minute after that, apart from rain against the windows and distant chaos downstairs.

Then somebody shouted, “HE PUT TOOTHPASTE IN MY PILLOWCASE.” Followed by Mr. Cartwright yelling, “WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?”

Amanda closed her eyes slowly and tipped her head back against the headboard. “This trip’s genuinely put me off children,” she said while rubbing one hand over her forehead dramatically. “I know technically I already had concerns, but now I’m fully anti-youth.”

Liz snorted into her drink and shifted further down under the duvet. “You’ve got two.”

“And I regret meetin’ most others,” Amanda replied while opening one eye again. “That little blond boy from Birch Room asked me earlier whether badgers have blood; he just walked up and said it while holding a yoghurt tube.”

“That was probably Sam Turner,” Liz said while laughing harder now. “He once told me he wanted to grow up an’ become ‘a weapon.’”

Amanda looked horrified. “See? That’s exactly what I mean. Children shouldn’t be allowed thoughts that strong before puberty.”

Liz nearly choked on her drink, laughing and leaning sideways against the pillow properly now, warmer from the prosecco and tired enough that everything felt slower and softer around the edges. Amanda watched her for a second while she laughed and then reached over absentmindedly, grabbing the edge of the duvet where it had slipped halfway down Liz’s legs.

“You’ve lost half the blanket,” Amanda muttered automatically while tugging it back over her knees with small, irritated movements. “Liz, you sleep like somebody raised outdoors.”

Liz looked down at Amanda’s hand, still holding the duvet. Amanda realised halfway through what she was doing and froze completely. For one awkward second, neither of them moved.

Then Amanda pulled her hand back sharply and sat up straighter against the pillow. “Your feet looked cold.”

Liz turned slowly toward her with the most irritating little expression imaginable already forming on her face. “Right.”

“They did,” Amanda insisted while immediately reaching for her drink again like the prosecco might rescue her from the conversation. “You had exposed ankles.”

“You tucked me in like somebody’s nan.”

Amanda pointed at her immediately with the cup still in her hand. “Don’t make it weird.”

“You made it weird.”

“I adjusted the fabric, Liz, calm down.”

Liz grinned into her drink while watching Amanda avoid eye contact with the concentration of somebody defusing a bomb. “You’re rattled.”

“I’m not rattled.”

“You are.”

Amanda groaned loudly and dropped backward onto the pillows again while covering her face with one arm. “You are insufferable.”

Liz grinned into the pillow while Amanda looked increasingly irritated with herself, then Liz’s phone buzzed beside her thigh.

“What’s that?” Amanda asked, she hadn't realised she said those words out loud.

Liz grabbed the phone and sighed immediately. “Lee.”

Amanda’s entire face shifted before she could stop it.

“At this time?” Amanda asked while unscrewing her water bottle aggressively enough to sound angry at hydration itself.

Liz unlocked the phone and started laughing immediately. “Oh, my God.”

“What?”

“He’s pissed.”

“Well, obviously.”

Liz shook her head while reading. “‘Do we own cumin or is that the dusty one?’”

Amanda stared at her blankly. “How did you stay married to that man for so long?”

“He was funny.”

“He sounds concussed.”

Another message buzzed through. Liz laughed harder this time, and Amanda shifted closer automatically, trying to read the screen.

“What now?”

Liz turned the phone toward her.

u took the good scissors in divorce btw which feels cunty if im honest

Amanda snorted so violently she nearly dropped her bottle. “Jesus Christ.”

“Told you.”

“He texts like a divorced dad trapped outside a Toby Carvery.”

Liz was still grinning while typing back, and Amanda watched her for a second too long before looking away again. The mood shifted slightly after that. Amanda picked at the edge of the duvet while staring toward the radiator. “It’s weird hearing you talk about him.”

Liz looked over. “Why?”

Amanda shrugged one shoulder. “Dunno.”

“You think we’re gettin’ back together or somethin’?”

Amanda laughed far too quickly. “Fuck no.”

“Then what?”

Amanda rubbed one hand down her face tiredly. “I just…” She stopped herself and sighed hard. “Forget it.”

“No, go on.”

Amanda looked annoyed now that she’d been pushed into honesty accidentally. “I think I’ve just got used to you bein’ around.”

Liz went quiet after that. Amanda immediately started reaching for hand cream again. She had just discovered a new coping mechanism she had. The room felt warmer now, quieter too, and both of them sank into the same bed like they’d been sharing it longer than four nights.

Amanda stared at her for another second before speaking without thinking properly first.

“I sleep better when you’re here.”

Silence, and Amanda’s eyes widened immediately after she said it.

“Oh, fuck off,” she muttered while dropping backward onto the pillow and covering her face with both hands. “Pretend I didn’t say that.”

Liz was still staring at her with those big blue eyes, trying not to smile.

“You are fucked,” Liz said while laughing quietly into the duvet.

Amanda groaned loudly into her hands. “I genuinely need somebody to shoot me.”

“You’ve gone full clingy.”

“I have not.”

“You basically just admitted you need me nearby to sleep.”

Amanda lowered one hand enough to glare at her through her fingers. “I said no such thing.”

“You literally did.”

“I meant the room’s quieter when you’re here.”

“You think I stop noise through spiritual intervention?”

Amanda dropped her hand completely and stared at the ceiling. “Shut up, Liz.”

Liz grinned wider. “You like it.”

“That sentence alone’s made me infertile.”

Liz laughed again and rolled slightly onto her side, facing Amanda properly now. Amanda stayed flat on her back for another second before eventually turning her head too. The thing Liz kept noticing now was that Amanda never really stopped looking at her anymore, even when they were talking to other people or sitting across a room, Amanda’s attention still drifted back toward her constantly, like some part of her was keeping track.

Amanda noticed when Liz left rooms, noticed when Liz laughed at other people, noticed when Liz looked tired, noticed fucking everything, and the really stupid thing was Liz had started doing it too. Outside the room, another door slammed, then Julia’s voice travelled down the corridor loudly enough to hear through the walls.

“If anybody’s child’s crying over a friendship bracelet again, I’m callin’ Ofsted.”

Amanda snorted into the pillow. “She’s had enough.”

“She’s one Capri-Sun away from homicide.”

Amanda laughed quietly again before looking toward Liz’s phone still sitting beside her.

“Does Lee always text you pissed?” Amanda asked while taking another sip of prosecco and pulling the duvet higher over her chest.

“Pretty much,” Liz replied while checking the message again briefly before locking her phone. “Usually after the pub. Half the time I can’t even understand what he’s on about.”

Amanda frowned slightly. “That feels exhausting.”

“It’s mostly stupid stuff,” Liz said while shrugging one shoulder. “Photos of kebabs. Voice notes where you can hear football in the background. Last month he texted me ‘u up’ at one in the mornin’ then immediately sent a picture of a traffic cone.”

Amanda snorted loudly. “Christ.”

“He gets sentimental when he’s drunk.”

“He sounds concussed.”

“He sort of is all the time.”

Amanda smiled into her drink for a second before looking over again properly. “Does he know about this room situation?”

Liz immediately started laughing before she could even answer. “Absolutely not.”

Amanda stared at her. “Oh, my God.”

“He’d combust,” Liz replied while rubbing at her eyes tiredly. “Honestly, he still thinks you hate me.”

Amanda looked genuinely thoughtful at that while tracing one finger around the rim of her plastic cup. “He definitely still thinks we hate each other.”

“We mostly did.”

“We absolutely did,” Amanda corrected while nodding once. “You were deeply annoying.”

“You called me common because I brought vodka to sports day.”

“You brought vodka in a Lucozade bottle.”

“It was efficient.”

Amanda shook her head slowly, like she was still appalled by the memory. “You shouted at a Year Three dad for mansplaining raffle tickets.”

“He deserved it.”

“You told him to shut the fuck up in front of a bouncy castle.”

“He was being a prick in front of a bouncy castle.”

Amanda laughed again despite herself and shifted further down into the pillows now that the alcohol had started properly settling into both of them. “Honestly, I was terrified of you for about six months.”

Liz looked over in disbelief. “You?”

“Yes, you,” Amanda replied while pointing at her lazily. “You always looked like you were two seconds away from headbutting somebody.”

“That’s just my face.”

“No, your face is fine. Your energy was very ‘woman banned from several pubs.’”

Liz barked out laughing again and nearly spilled her drink over the duvet. “Fuck off.”

“You used to stare at me in the playground like you wanted me dead.”

“That’s because you kept talkin’ to me like I worked for you.”

Amanda looked mildly defensive immediately. “I speak like that to everybody.”

“Exactly.”

Amanda opened her mouth to argue before stopping halfway through, as there wasn’t much defence against that. She looked down into her cup for a second instead, smiling slightly to herself, then she looked back over.

“You hated me too, though,” Amanda said while nudging Liz lightly with one foot under the duvet. “Don’t rewrite history.”

Liz grinned tiredly and leaned her head back against the pillow. “Yeah, but you got funnier.”

"That’s not a crime.”

“It should be.”

Liz laughed into the pillow again.

Amanda watched her quietly for a second before speaking again in a lower voice now that the room had settled properly.

“You know I didn’t actually hate you.”

Liz looked up at her immediately.

Amanda looked uncomfortable already, like she regretted starting the sentence halfway through it.

“You absolutely did.”

“I found you irritating.”

“That’s basically affection from you.”

Amanda rolled her eyes but smiled slightly anyway. “You always looked so unimpressed by everything.”

“Because most school stuff is bullshit.”

“See?”

Liz laughed softly and shook her head while stretching her legs further underneath the duvet. “You were awful, though.”

Amanda smiled into her drink with absolutely no shame. “I know.”

“No, honestly, Amanda,” Liz continued while turning onto her side properly to look at her, “there were moments I genuinely thought about pushin’ you into traffic, like physically, I used to see you walkin’ toward the school gates in them stupid massive sunglasses an’ think, fuckin’ hell, here she comes.”

Amanda looked delighted by that instead of offended and pulled the duvet tighter around herself. “You were obsessed with me.”

“Oh, fuck off.”

“You were,” Amanda insisted while pointing lazily at her with one finger. She snorted loudly and shifted sideways against the pillow, so she was facing her properly now. “You fancied me from the start.”

Liz stared at her in disbelief. “You are deranged.”

“You absolutely did,” Amanda continued while grinning now because she clearly enjoyed winding Liz up more than oxygen. “You used to watch me constantly.”

“I watched you because you looked like a Karen.”

Amanda barked out laughing at that and nearly spilled prosecco down herself. “That is the most offensive thing I've ever heard.”

“You terrorised people for sport.”

“I did not.”

“You once made me cry in a Waitrose car park.”

Amanda blinked hard. “Did I?”

Liz looked at her flatly. “Yes.”

Amanda frowned slightly while trying to remember. “Why?”

“You told me my earrings looked council.”

Amanda stared at her for one silent second while the memory visibly came back, then she burst into laughter so violently she nearly slid off the pillow altogether, clutching the duvet against herself while gasping for breath. “That is fucking hilarious.”

Liz shoved her shoulder hard while trying not to laugh. “You’re a terrible person.”

“They probably were council earrings,” Amanda replied while still laughing helplessly. “What did they look like?”

“They were hoops.”

“Oh, Christ.”

“They were from Accessorize.”

Amanda completely lost it again at that, dropping her head back against the pillow while laughing so hard her face had gone pink now. “Jesus fucking Christ, Liz.”

“They were nice!”

“No, they weren’t,” Amanda wheezed while wiping carefully under one eye because she was already paranoid about mascara even half-drunk in bed at midnight. “They absolutely had diamantés on them.”

Liz looked offended because they did have diamantés on them. “It was 2014.”

“That makes it worse.”

“You had a fuckin’ fedora phase.”

Amanda gasped dramatically and sat up straighter against the headboard. “That was one hat.”

“You wore it to brunch.”

“It was winter.”

“You looked like a magician.”

Amanda groaned loudly and threw her head back into the pillow again, while Liz finally started laughing properly too, both of them half sunk under the duvet now, with tired, drunken laughter bouncing around the tiny overheated room while somebody somewhere downstairs screamed the word penis loud enough to echo through the corridor.

That was the thing now. Amanda still said awful things constantly, still judged people within three seconds of meeting them, still spoke like she was permanently moments away from filing a complaint against humanity itself, but Liz had started hearing the humour underneath it instead of just the sharpness. A few months ago, half these conversations would’ve ended in genuine arguments. Now, Amanda called her common, and Liz mostly just waited for the next insult because chances were it’d actually be funny.

Amanda eventually calmed down enough to breathe normally again and rubbed under one eye carefully with her fingertip. “I can’t believe you cried over earrings.”

“I was havin’ a bad week,” Liz muttered while pulling the duvet higher up her chest.

“What happened?”

Liz shrugged one shoulder lazily. “Lee’d pissed me off, one of the boys had thrown up in my car, an’ then you looked me dead in the eye outside Waitrose and said I looked like I sold fake cigarettes.”

Amanda thought about that seriously for a second before nodding once. “That does sound like me.”

“It was horrible.”

“You should’ve told me.”

Liz turned toward her immediately. “So you could’ve bullied me harder?”

Amanda considered it honestly for a second, face completely serious. “Potentially.”

Liz snorted loudly and shoved at her arm again. “You’re such a cow.”

“I know.”

Outside the window, the car park lights glowed faintly through the curtains, and the room had gone quieter now apart from the occasional bang somewhere down the corridor and distant voices from teachers still trying to settle children who absolutely should’ve been asleep hours ago. The radiator hissed softly underneath the window while both of them sank lower into the bed without even thinking about it anymore.

Amanda shifted under the duvet and frowned suddenly while her leg brushed Liz’s accidentally. “Why are your feet always freezing?”

Liz looked offended immediately. “I don’t know.”

“You do know,” Amanda replied while nudging one of Liz’s feet with her ankle and recoiling instantly. “Bloody hell, Liz.”

“Told you.”

“Go see a doctor.”

“I’m poor. I'll sleep it off.”

“That’s not how circulation works.”

“It does in Enfield.”

Amanda laughed quietly under her breath and pulled the duvet tighter around herself. “Touch me with them again, and I’m reporting you to a GP.”

Liz grinned tiredly and stretched one leg deliberately against Amanda’s calf this time.

Amanda jerked dramatically. “Fuck off!”

“You’re bein’ dramatic.”

“You’re like a corpse.”

“You’ve had colder men in your bed.”

Amanda stared at her, then she burst out laughing again while grabbing one of the pillows and smacking Liz badly with it across the shoulder.

“Oh, fuck you, actually.”

Amanda kept complaining, but didn’t actually move away. That silence settled again after a while, comfortable now instead of awkward. They could hear rain against the windows and distant voices downstairs where somebody was clearly still trying to calm children down.

Then Amanda spoke again, quieter this time. “I haven’t slept properly in ages, actually.”

Liz looked over at Amanda, who stared at the ceiling while talking like she didn’t want to fully look at her during this bit.

“Since the divorce, mostly. I either wake up constantly or I can’t switch my brain off properly.”

Liz stayed quiet.

Amanda laughed once under her breath. “God, this sounds pathetic.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“It absolutely does.”

“It sounds normal.”

Amanda looked over finally. “You slept alright after yours?”

Liz shrugged slightly. “Not really. First few months I kept wakin’ up thinkin’ I’d forgotten somebody somewhere.”

Amanda smiled faintly at that. “That’s because you’ve got children.”

“No, really, one night I woke up convinced I’d left a child in Tesco.”

“Had you?”

“Not that time.”

Amanda laughed again and rolled slightly closer without noticing.

“You know what’s weird?” Liz asked quietly while staring up at the ceiling now, one hand tucked under the pillow behind her head. “You’re actually easier to live with than Lee.”

Amanda turned toward her immediately with genuine offence written all over her face. “That cannot possibly be true.”

“It is, though,” Liz replied while grinning tiredly. “You don’t leave wet towels everywhere for a start.”

“I’m not an animal.”

“And you don’t watch videos out loud on your phone.”

Amanda gasped softly as she’d just heard about a murder. “Lee does that?”

“All the fuckin’ time.”

“That’s barbaric.”

“He’ll just sit there at midnight watchin’ videos about UFOs at full volume like the rest of us don’t deserve peace.”

Amanda looked horrified now. “Absolutely not.”

“He once watched eight conspiracy videos in bed back-to-back.”

“Why eight?”

“I don’t know. I fell asleep during number five.”

Amanda stared at her in disbelief. “Why did you marry him?”

Liz shrugged lazily underneath the duvet. “I was tired.”

Amanda burst out laughing so loudly that somebody immediately banged on the wall beside them.

“Sorry,” Liz shouted automatically while laughing into the pillow herself.

Then Julia’s voice yelled through the wall from somewhere nearby. “I CAN STILL HEAR YOU, LESBIANS.”

Amanda immediately dragged the duvet halfway over her face. “I hate her so much.”

“You love her.”

“She’s a demon.”

“She brought you prosecco.”

“She used prosecco.”

Liz was still laughing quietly when Amanda looked over at her again, eyes heavy with tiredness now but still fixed on her properly.

“You know she’s right, though,” Amanda said while picking absentmindedly at a loose thread on the duvet.

Liz blinked once and looked over. “About what?”

Amanda hesitated immediately, then looked away again almost as soon as she’d said it. “Nothing.”

“No, say it now.”

Amanda groaned loudly into the pillow. “Forget it.”

“You started it.”

Amanda stayed quiet for a few seconds too long while Liz kept staring at her, waiting for an answer. Finally, Amanda muttered into the duvet, voice muffled and annoyed with itself already.

“We do act a bit coupley.”

Liz stared at her properly after that.

Amanda noticed instantly and looked irritated with herself all over again. “Oh, God.”

“You think we act like a couple?”

“I said a bit.”

“You truly got jealous of Kevin.”

“Stop bringing Kevin into this conversation before I throw myself down the fuckin’ stairs.”

Liz laughed harder at that and rolled slightly onto her side to face her properly now. Amanda watched her again; there it was, every single time. Liz didn’t think Amanda even realised she'd done it anymore, because it happened constantly now. Amanda said something; Liz laughed. Amanda looked over straight away, like she needed to check she was still there and still listening.

And now Amanda had moved closer again without even noticing because their shoulders were almost touching under the duvet, neither of them mentioned it.

Amanda yawned suddenly and looked annoyed about that too, rubbing under one eye with the heel of her hand. “I’m exhausted.”

“You’ve drunk half a bottle of prosecco.”

“You sat in a canoe complainin’ about ducks.”

“One duck looked judgmental.”

“It was a duck.”

“It knew what it was doing.”

Liz grinned into the pillow while Amanda settled lower under the duvet beside her. Her face looked different now; she was tired, less tense somehow. Even her voice had softened a bit over the last hour. Normally, Amanda spoke like every conversation was a competition she intended to win. Right now, she just sounded comfortable.

Amanda noticed her staring again and narrowed her eyes suspiciously. “What now?”

“Nothin’.”

“You keep doing weird little pauses tonight.”

Liz shrugged one shoulder underneath the duvet. “You’re different here.”

Amanda frowned slightly at that. “Different bad?”

“No.”

Amanda stayed quiet for a second while looking at her properly.

“You are too,” she admitted eventually.

“How?”

“You’re less…” Amanda waved one hand vaguely in the air while trying to find the word. “Chaotic.”

Liz looked offended immediately. “That’s rude.”

“You know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t. Explain yourself.”

Amanda sighed dramatically and shifted onto her side properly now so she was facing Liz fully. “Usually you walk into rooms looking like you might start a fight with a printer.”

“That’s just stress.”

“And now you’re…” Amanda paused again before shrugging slightly. “Calmer.”

Liz snorted softly. “You’re less scary.”

Amanda looked horrified. “Absolutely not.”

“You are, though.”

“I’ve still got range.”

“You cried over mould in the shower yesterday.”

“It looked aggressive.”

Liz laughed again, quieter this time because they were both tired enough now that everything had slowed down. Amanda reached over without really thinking and brushed a strand of hair back from Liz’s face; the movement happened naturally, easily, like she’d already done it a hundred times before.

Then both of them froze. Amanda’s fingers stayed near Liz’s temple for half a second too long before she pulled her hand back sharply.

“You had…” Amanda cleared her throat awkwardly and looked anywhere except directly at her. “Hair.”

Liz stared at her.

“Right.”

Amanda looked like she genuinely wanted the building to collapse around her. “Oh my fucking God,” she muttered while dragging the duvet over half her face again.

Liz started laughing immediately.

“You’re actually proper gone.”

“Shut up.”

“You stroked my face.”

“I moved one follicle.”

“You’re in love with me.”

Amanda made a strangled noise of outrage into the pillow. “I would literally rather die.”

Liz was still laughing when Amanda reached out blindly from under the duvet and shoved her shoulder hard enough to make the mattress creak again.

“Go to sleep, you prick.”

Liz settled deeper into the pillow, still grinning while Amanda stayed mostly hidden beside her underneath the duvet, one eye visible and glaring tiredly across at her. The room went quieter after that, except for a warm radiator, muffled voices somewhere down the corridor, and rain tapping faintly against the windows.

Amanda eventually lowered the duvet slightly and looked over again.

“You still laughing?”

“A bit.”

“You’re horrible.”

“You love it.”

Amanda stared at her for a long, tired second.

Then muttered very quietly into the pillow,

“Yeah. Unfortunately.”

Chapter 10: Too Late Now

Summary:

The trip is ending. Amanda hates that. Liz finds this deeply suspicious. Several poor decisions are made.

Chapter Text

Amanda should have gone to sleep about an hour ago.

The problem was that every time the conversation seemed like it might finally die, one of them said something else, and the whole thing started up again. The room had settled into that strange middle-of-the-night quiet where every sound felt slightly louder than it should. The radiator was still making occasional clicking noises, rain tapped against the window every few minutes, and somewhere further down the corridor, a toilet flushed, but compared to the rest of the week, the activity centre felt almost peaceful. Amanda lay propped against two pillows she'd stolen from the cupboard while Liz lay beside her underneath the duvet, and despite spending the entire day outdoors, neither of them seemed remotely interested in sleeping.

"You realise we're gettin' on the coach in about eight hours," Liz said while checking the time on her phone and immediately groaning. "Christ."

Amanda looked equally offended by the information.

"Why would you tell me that?"

"Because it's true."

"I was happier before I knew."

"You'll survive."

Amanda adjusted the duvet around her legs and frowned at the ceiling.

"I don't want to get on that coach."

Liz laughed.

"That's because you've spent the entire week complainin' about this place and now you've accidentally Stockholm-syndromed yourself."

"I have not."

"You have."

"I still hate it here."

"You cried when they ran out of proper butter."

Amanda turned her head.

"That was a reasonable response."

"It wasn't."

"It absolutely was."

Liz was still laughing when Amanda reached over and shoved her shoulder lightly through the duvet.

The strange thing was that none of this felt unusual anymore. Sharing a bed should probably have felt unusual, talking until one in the morning should probably have felt unusual, Amanda voluntarily touching another human being without immediately complaining about it should definitely have felt unusual, and yet the week had worn away most of the awkwardness so gradually that neither of them had noticed it disappearing. Four nights ago, Amanda had spent twenty minutes arguing about pillow allocation, tonight she'd been sitting close enough that their legs kept touching under the duvet, and neither of them had bothered moving.

"You know what's annoying?" Amanda asked while rolling onto her side.

"What?" Liz asked while doing the same.

Amanda groaned immediately, "Everything reminds me of you now."

Liz blinked.

"What?"

Amanda looked annoyed that she'd said it. "You heard me."

"No, I heard you, I'm just tryin' to work out what the fuck that means."

Amanda rubbed one hand over her face.

"It means somebody did something stupid at lunch, and my first thought was you'll find this funny. Then somebody nearly fell into a canoe, and my first thought was you'll find this funny. Then Kevin spent twenty minutes panickin' about sunscreen, and my first thought was-"

"I'll find this funny."

"Exactly."

Liz was grinning now, her head still sunk into the pillow while she looked at Amanda like she'd just accidentally admitted something important. The smile kept getting bigger the longer Amanda sat there looking irritated about it.

"You're smiling," Amanda said while immediately regretting drawing attention to it because now Liz looked even more pleased with herself.

"I know," Liz replied while making absolutely no effort to stop.

"Stop it. I hate it."

"I know."

Amanda pointed at her from across the small gap between them, the duvet shifting around her knees as she sat up slightly.

"This is why I shouldn't tell you things."

Liz laughed quietly through her nose and shook her head.

"You spent years insulting me."

"Constructive criticism."

"You called my birthday cake aspirational."

Amanda rolled her eyes immediately.

"It was."

"It was a caterpillar cake."

"It wanted to be more."

Liz stared at her for a second before the laugh escaped anyway. Amanda tried to keep a straight face and failed almost immediately because she still thought it was funny. The worst part was that Liz's laughing always made her want to keep talking, which felt deeply unfair.

"You're unbelievable," Liz said while adjusting the duvet around her legs and looking at Amanda like she genuinely couldn't work out whether she was joking.

"No, I'm right."

"You are absolutely not right."

"There were extra decorations."

"My son put Smarties on it."

"Exactly."

Liz laughed so hard the mattress shook.

Amanda laughed too, despite herself, and dropped her head back against the pillow. The conversation kept drifting after that, jumping from topic to topic the way it always seemed to when they were tired. They talked about school events, bad holidays, ex-partners, terrible gifts, parents' evenings, Julia's inability to mind her own business, and Kevin's ongoing mission to apologise for events he hadn't caused.

"Do you know what Kevin said to me after dinner?" Liz asked while pulling the duvet higher.

Amanda immediately looked concerned.

"What now?"

"He apologised for the weather."

Amanda stared at her.

"He what?"

"He said sorry about the rain."

Amanda covered her face with both hands.

"Oh, Kevin."

"I thought he was joking."

"He wasn't, though."

"He absolutely wasn't."

Amanda laughed so hard she nearly rolled off the bed.

"He needs protecting from the world."

"He needs protectin' from himself."

"He'd apologise to a burglar."

"He probably has."

Amanda wiped under one eye and shook her head.

The laughter faded gradually after that, and the room became quieter again; neither of them seemed in a hurry to fill the silence immediately. The thought of leaving tomorrow kept creeping back into Amanda's head, which she found increasingly irritating because she'd spent the entire trip wanting to go home; now, home felt oddly abstract, she knew she'd enjoy her own bed and her own bathroom and being able to buy coffee that didn't taste like regret, but she also knew the moment the coach pulled away this would be over.

No more late-night conversations, no more complaining together, no more automatically finding Liz in crowded rooms; that last thought lingered longer than the others.

"You've gone weird again," Liz said while watching her.

Amanda sighed.

"Apparently, I do that now."

"You've been doing it all week."

Amanda stared at the ceiling for a second before speaking.

"I think I'm going to miss you."

The words landed between them before she could stop them.

Amanda knew she'd said too much immediately. The second the sentence left her mouth, she wanted it back; it wasn't because it wasn't true, because unfortunately it was, but because she hated being the first person to say things like that. She hated putting something real into a conversation and then having to sit there waiting for the other person to react.

Liz didn't laugh, she didn't make a joke or immediately change the subject, she just looked at her, and somehow that was worse.

"There it is," Amanda muttered while rubbing one hand over her forehead. "I've ruined it."

"No, you haven't," Liz said quietly while shifting slightly closer on the mattress.

Amanda opened her eyes again.

Liz was looking at her differently now. There wasn't anything dramatic about it; she didn't look shocked or overwhelmed or even particularly surprised. She just looked honest, like she wasn't trying to dodge the conversation or make it easier for either of them.

Amanda looked away first.

"You don't have to pretend you didn't hear it."

"I'm not pretending anything."

"Right."

Liz let out a small breath and adjusted the duvet around her legs before settling back against the pillow. The room had gone strangely quiet. Rain still tapped against the window now and then, and the radiator made the occasional clicking noise, but neither of them seemed interested in rushing to fill the silence the way they usually would.

"Amanda."

Amanda glanced back at her.

"You haven't ruined anything."

Amanda gave a short laugh that didn't sound very convincing.

"Feels like I have."

"Why?"

"Because now it's weird."

Liz smiled despite herself.

"It's only weird because you're making it weird."

Amanda groaned and dropped her head back into the pillow.

"That's exactly the sort of thing somebody says when it's definitely weird."

Liz laughed softly at that. The sound lingered in the room for a second before fading away again, and Amanda found herself listening for it longer than she meant to.

"You know what the stupid part is?" Liz asked eventually while turning her head slightly towards her.

Amanda swallowed.

"What?"

Liz held her gaze for a moment before answering.

"I was thinkin' the same thing."

Amanda stared at her.

"Really?"

"Yeah," Liz said while turning onto her side properly and tucking one arm underneath the pillow. "I mean, I'm lookin' forward to my own bed because this mattress feels like it's made out of old newspapers, and I miss the boys, and I'd quite like to go a full day without hearin' somebody shout the word willy from across a field, but yeah, I'm gonna miss this."

Amanda stared at her.

Liz shrugged slightly.

"What?"

"You make it sound so normal."

"What?"

"That."

"What, missin' somebody?"

"Yes."

Liz looked confused by the question.

Amanda looked away first.

The thing was, Liz always spoke about people so easily; she talked about her children constantly, she talked about Anne with affection, she worried about Kevin, she checked on people, she remembered things, she made room for people without seeming to notice she was doing it.

Amanda had spent most of her life treating relationships like negotiations, people wanted things, people expected things, and people disappointed you eventually. That was usually how it worked; even when people were nice, there was normally something attached to it, some expectation waiting further down the line. Liz somehow operated entirely differently, and Amanda still hadn't worked out how.

"You're doin' that thing again," Liz said while narrowing her eyes slightly and shifting further onto her side.

"What thing?"

"Starin' into space."

"I'm thinking."

"You're always thinkin'."

Amanda let out a quiet laugh and rubbed her thumb against the edge of the duvet.

"That's because somebody has to."

"Rude."

"It's true."

Liz rolled her eyes but smiled anyway, the expression lingering as she looked back at her. Amanda noticed it immediately; she noticed everything now. At some point during the week, she'd started paying attention to things she never used to. The way Liz smiled when she was trying not to laugh, the way she went quiet whenever she was actually listening, the way she always tucked her hands underneath the duvet when she was tired, none of it should have mattered as much as it did.

"You know that's not actually a personality trait, don't you?" Liz asked while watching her.

"What isn't?"

"Thinking."

Amanda looked offended.

"Of course it is."

"No, it isn't."

"It absolutely is."

"You make it sound like you're the only person in Britain capable of having thoughts."

Amanda gave a small shrug.

"The evidence supports that theory."

Liz laughed under her breath and shook her head, still smiling despite herself. Amanda found herself watching the smile again and immediately looked away, annoyed at herself for doing it. Unfortunately, the moment she looked away, she became aware of the fact she'd been looking in the first place.

The stupid thing was that she hadn't even meant for any of this to happen. The entire trip had started with her trying to avoid being trapped in a room with people she barely tolerated, then she'd ended up with Liz, and somehow every day after that had made the next day easier. They'd developed routines without discussing them. Amanda automatically made tea for both of them, Liz automatically saved Amanda a seat at meals, and Amanda complained. Liz laughed, Liz wandered off, talking to people, and Amanda inevitably found her again twenty minutes later.

It had become normal far too quickly.

"Can I ask you something?" Amanda said while adjusting the duvet around her legs.

Liz immediately looked suspicious.

"Depends."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only answer you're getting until I know what the question is."

Amanda sighed.

"Why do you actually like me?"

Liz barked out a laugh.

"What?"

"I'm serious."

"You've picked one in the morning to have a crisis?"

Amanda folded her arms.

"I'm asking a question."

Liz looked genuinely baffled.

"I like you because you're funny."

Amanda stared.

"No, be serious."

"I am serious."

"No, you're not."

"Liz, you laughed because I said something funny."

"Because you spend eighty percent of your life complainin'."

"That's called standards."

"You once sent back tap water."

"It tasted wrong."

"You cannot know what tap water tastes like."

"I can."

Liz laughed again, and Amanda felt that irritating rush of satisfaction she'd become far too familiar with over the last week.

"You know," Liz said after a minute while tracing absent-minded patterns against the edge of the blanket, "when I first met you, I thought you were the most terrifying woman I'd ever seen."

Amanda looked delighted.

"Thank you."

"That wasn't a compliment."

"It was."

"No, honestly, you scared the shit out of me."

Amanda smiled at that, completely unrepentant.

"Good."

Liz laughed and shook her head.

"You had sunglasses on."

"It was sunny."

"It was March."

Amanda gave a small shrug.

"The sun was available."

"You looked like you were about to sack somebody."

"I probably was."

Liz laughed quietly again, and Amanda found herself smiling too. It wasn't even the joke; it was the fact that Liz still looked so amused by her after years of knowing her. Most people got tired of Amanda eventually; they got used to her or annoyed by her or both, but Liz still looked entertained.

The conversation had slowed down completely now; neither of them seemed interested in filling every gap anymore. They just kept talking whenever something occurred to them, and every time silence arrived, it stayed a little longer than before. Amanda looked across at Liz without really thinking about it and found her already looking back.

"What?" Liz asked while smiling slightly.

Amanda immediately looked away.

"Nothing."

"Bullshit."

Amanda sighed and adjusted the duvet higher over her stomach.

"You laugh differently with people."

Liz blinked.

"What?"

"You do."

"What does that even mean?"

Amanda frowned because she wasn't entirely sure herself.

"I don't know."

"Helpful."

"You've got different laughs."

Liz was laughing already.

"Apparently that's normal."

Amanda smiled despite herself.

"No, seriously."

"You're analysin' my laugh?"

"I spend too much time around you."

The words slipped out before Amanda had a chance to filter them. Liz's expression changed immediately, just enough that Amanda wished she'd phrased it differently.

"There it is again," Liz said while pointing at her.

"What now?"

"You say somethin' nice and then look annoyed."

"I don't."

"You absolutely do."

Amanda opened her mouth to argue and then stopped because she couldn't think of a single convincing defence. Liz looked far too pleased with herself.

"I hate that you're observant," Amanda muttered.

"I've got two sons."

"That's not an explanation."

"It kind of is."

Amanda smiled slightly, and Liz settled lower into the pillow again, looking entirely too comfortable for somebody sleeping in what was essentially a glorified school dormitory.

Tomorrow they'd go home. The coach would arrive, children would lose belongings, parents would stand in the car park collecting bags that didn't belong to them, somebody would realise they'd left a charger behind, Kevin would probably apologise for something that wasn't his fault, Julia would make inappropriate comments for the entire journey home.

And then it would be over. The thought sat there longer than she wanted it to. Parents would exchange numbers and promises to organise things that nobody would organise, and everybody would go back to their normal lives. The thought sat heavily in her stomach; she didn't want to examine why.

"You know what's annoyin'?" Amanda asked quietly.

"What?" Liz replied while looking at her again.

Amanda hesitated, already regretting bringing it up. She let out a short laugh under her breath and looked away towards the window.

"Nothing."

"No."

"Forget it."

"You brought it up."

Amanda rubbed her forehead.

"I just don't really want this week to be over."

Liz looked at her for a moment.

Then nodded.

"Yeah."

That was it. No joke, no sarcasm, no attempt to soften it or laugh it away. Liz just agreed with her like it was the most obvious thing in the world. Amanda felt something tighten uncomfortably in her chest because somehow that answer was worse than teasing would've been. If Liz had laughed, she could've hidden behind that. Instead, she'd understood exactly what Amanda meant without needing any explanation.

Amanda looked away first. A week ago, that would've been ridiculous. Amanda had built an entire personality around making other people uncomfortable before they got the chance to do it to her. Now she was lying in a tiny room in Derbyshire, struggling to hold eye contact because Liz was looking at her too kindly.

"I hate this," Amanda muttered eventually while rubbing one hand over her face.

Liz frowned.

"What?"

"This."

"What's this?"

Amanda gestured vaguely between them before immediately looking annoyed with herself.

"That."

Liz laughed quietly.

"You're gonna have to be more specific."

Amanda groaned and dropped her arm across her eyes.

"I don't know how to explain things."

"That's never stopped you before."

"I'm serious."

"So am I."

"You know what annoys me?" Amanda asked eventually.

Liz smiled slightly.

"We've already played this game twice."

"I'm serious."

"Go on then."

Amanda exhaled slowly.

"I spent years thinking you hated me."

Liz barked out a laugh immediately.

"Amanda."

"No, genuinely."

"You were awful."

"I wasn't awful."

"You made me cry in a Waitrose car park."

Amanda covered her eyes with one hand.

"We've discussed this."

"You called my earrings council."

"They were."

Liz started laughing again and pointed at her.

"There she is."

Amanda smiled despite herself.

"I just don't understand how we've ended up here."

Liz's laughter faded, and she looked at her for a second before shrugging.

"I dunno."

"That's helpful."

"It's the truth."

Amanda turned her head.

Liz was still looking at her with the same calm expression she'd had all evening.

"You make everything sound easy," Amanda said quietly.

"It isn't easy."

"You act like it is."

Liz thought about that for a moment.

Then shook her head.

"No. I just think most people spend too much time fighting things."

Amanda laughed once under her breath.

"Most things deserve fighting."

"Not everything."

Amanda opened her mouth to argue and then stopped because, irritatingly, she wasn't entirely sure she disagreed."You've gone quiet again," Liz said.

Amanda laughed softly.

"Apparently, I do that now."

"You do."

Amanda hesitated.

Then spoke before she could stop herself.

"I think this is your fault."

Liz blinked.

"What is?"

Amanda looked at her.

All the joking disappeared from her face for the first time that evening.

"This."

The word hung between them.

Liz didn't ask her to explain. She didn't jump in with a joke or immediately try to make it easier. She just looked at her, and that made everything worse because it meant she understood. Of course, she understood. Amanda felt suddenly exposed, as she'd accidentally said something out loud that should've stayed inside her head.

Liz shifted slightly closer on the mattress. It wasn't much, barely anything, just enough that Amanda noticed it immediately and couldn't stop noticing it afterwards.

Amanda looked down briefly before forcing herself to look back up again. Liz was still there, still looking at her, still waiting, the patience of it nearly undid her.

"You know," Amanda said quietly while trying and failing to sound casual, "this is probably a terrible idea."

Liz smiled.

"Probably."

"Good."

"Very sensible."

Amanda nodded.

"Extremely."

The conversation should have ended there. It was the perfect opportunity for one of them to laugh, change the subject, say goodnight, or do literally anything else. Instead, they just stayed where they were, a second passed, then another.

Liz laughed softly under her breath, and Amanda felt herself smiling back before she could stop it. There it was again, the thing she'd spent the entire week trying not to examine too closely.

The feeling that kept showing up whenever Liz laughed at something she'd said, whenever she walked into a room, whenever Amanda automatically looked for her in a crowd of people. Every day of the trip had made it harder to ignore, and at some point, she'd stopped being confused by it. The problem wasn't that Amanda didn't know what was happening anymore; the problem was that she knew exactly what was happening and hadn't got the faintest idea what to do about it.

"Oh, for fuck's sake," Amanda muttered.

"What?" Liz asked while immediately starting to laugh again.

Amanda shook her head, then leaned forward.

The kiss happened before either of them had a chance to start thinking properly again. There wasn't a speech beforehand, no dramatic declaration; it just felt like the natural endpoint of a conversation that had somehow been going on for the entire week. Amanda's hand found Liz's arm without really thinking about it, and Liz kissed her back immediately, which surprised Amanda far less than it probably should have.

Her other hand came up without thinking, holding Liz's face properly now, fingertips disappearing into her hair while she tilted her head slightly and kissed her again. It wasn't rushed, it wasn't desperate, it felt almost absurdly natural considering how impossible the idea would've seemed a week ago.

Amanda was straddling Liz now, one hand threaded through her hair while the other fumbled impatiently with the waistband of her trousers. Liz's nails pressed into her shoulders as a breathless, "Fuck." slipped from her lips, and the sound alone made Amanda smile.

She started slow on purpose, teasing her just enough to make Liz squirm beneath her. The reaction was immediate. Liz let out a helpless whimper and pushed her hips up, chasing more, and Amanda felt a smug rush of satisfaction at how quickly she'd unravelled. "Don't be impatient," Amanda murmured against her skin, her voice rough with amusement.

Liz's hand tightened in Amanda's hair, fingers tangling through the strands as she tugged impatiently. Amanda's free hand wandered across her body, squeezing and caressing her breast in slow, deliberate movements. Every sound Liz made only encouraged her further, and Amanda found herself grinning against her skin, completely intoxicated by the sight of Liz falling apart beneath her.

"God, Amanda…" Liz's voice cracked as Amanda slid two fingers inside her, curling them just right, her tongue relentless. The wet sound of it filled the quiet room, Liz's thighs trembling around her head.

Liz came and pulled Amanda up to her face and kissed her thoroughly. Then, she pushed to turn her over, wanting to be in control.

Amanda let out a soft gasp as the tables turned, her back meeting the mattress with a sudden, breathless thud. The sudden shift in power sent a jolt of electricity straight down her spine. Above her, Liz was flushed, her chest heaving, eyes dark with a fierce determination that made Amanda’s heart hammer against her ribs.

"My turn," Liz breathed, her voice a low, commanding tremble that completely replaced her previous vulnerability.

She pinned Amanda’s wrists above her head, her grip firm and unyielding. Amanda’s smug grin melted into a sharp, hitched breath as Liz leaned down, deliberately mirroring the slow, torturous pace Amanda had set just moments before. Liz trailed a line of burning kisses down Amanda's jawline, lingering over the sensitive pulse point at her throat until Amanda was the one squirming, her hips arching instinctively against the frustratingly agonising restraint.

"Who's impatient now?" Liz whispered against her collarbone, a wicked edge of satisfaction in her tone as Amanda let out a low, frustrated moan.

With her hands trapped, Amanda was entirely at Liz's mercy, completely undone by the sudden, intoxicating shift in control. Liz took her time, savouring every hitch in Amanda's breath and every desperate murmur, fully intent on returning the favour until Amanda was completely unraveled beneath her.

"You're so wet," Liz whispered in Amanda's ear.

The sudden friction of the kiss sent a jolt straight to Amanda's core. She arched up into the touch, her trapped hands twitching against Liz’s firm grip. The raw, heavy heat between them was almost overwhelming, and Liz’s whispered words only made Amanda’s breath hitch in a desperate gasp.

Liz didn't give her time to recover. Breaking the kiss just enough to breathe, she shifted her weight, her knee sliding between Amanda's thighs to part them further. The deliberate, heavy pressure sent a wave of liquid heat through Amanda, eliciting a broken hum from the back of her throat.

"Liz, please," Amanda choked out, the last vestige of her composure entirely gone. The smug, teasing woman from minutes ago was completely buried under a wave of desperate need.

Liz let out a low, satisfied sound against Amanda's lips, clearly thrilled by the begging. She released Amanda's wrists, but before Amanda could even think of reaching for her, Liz’s hand slid down the flat of her stomach, fingers tracing an agonisingly slow path downward until she finally found exactly what she was looking for.

Amanda's eyes went wide, and she threw her head back into the pillow, a loud, uninhibited cry slipping past her lips as Liz sank two fingers into her slick warmth, immediately finding a rhythm that had Amanda completely at her mercy.

They pulled apart after a second and just looked at each other. Amanda stared, her breathing still uneven, trying to find her bearings in the sudden stillness of the room. Liz stared back, her hair a wild mess against the sheets, her face flushed. Neither of them seemed entirely sure what expression they were supposed to be making, the heavy intensity of a moment ago evaporating into the quiet air and leaving them stranded somewhere between shock and amusement. The silence lasted about three seconds.

"Well," Amanda said, the single word sounding incredibly small in the quiet room.

"Yeah," Liz replied, her voice still a little raspy as she let out a long breath.

Amanda immediately covered her face with both hands, the heat of her palms pressing against her cheeks. "Oh, my God."

Liz started laughing, the sound bubbling up naturally, shaking her shoulders. Amanda pointed at her through the gaps in her fingers, trying to look stern despite her burning face. "No."

"I'm sorry," Liz managed to choke out, though she wasn't putting any effort into looking remorseful.

"No, you're not."

"I'm really not," Liz admitted, her eyes crinkling at the corners.

Amanda dropped backwards onto the pillow with a heavy groan, letting her hands fall away. "This is a disaster."

"It literally isn't," Liz said, shifting slightly to look down at her.

"It absolutely is." Liz was still smiling, that soft, lingering expression that completely changed her face, and Amanda hated how much she liked seeing it. It was unfair how easily Liz had slipped back into her own skin.

Amanda stared up, the reality of their wider world crashing back in. "This is exactly the sort of thing Julia somehow predicts."

"Oh, she's gonna be unbearable," Liz agreed, a grin tugging at her mouth.

"She's already unbearable."

"Fair."

Amanda groaned again and stared up at the ceiling, tracing the faint shadows in the dark. "She's going to talk about this for the next ten years."

"Assumin' she finds out," Liz noted, turning her head on the pillow.

Amanda slowly lowered her hands and looked across the short distance at her. "Liz."

"What?"

"She already knows."

Liz laughed so hard she nearly rolled off the bed, the sheer certainty in Amanda's voice catching her completely off guard. Amanda watched her for a second, watching the way her shoulders shook, before looking back up at the ceiling. The horrifying thing was that she was probably right, somewhere in the building, Julia was almost certainly asleep with the smug confidence of somebody who'd solved a puzzle days ago and was just waiting for everyone else to catch up.

Amanda should've been panicking. She should've been trying to work out what happened next, parsing the awkwardness of the morning to come. Instead, she just felt lighter, like something tight in her chest had finally uncoiled. Tomorrow was still coming, the coach would still arrive on time, the children would still lose half their belongings by noon, and somebody would still leave a charger behind in the lounge. None of that had changed. Liz was still beside her, still laughing, still there.

Amanda turned her head and found Liz already looking back at her, the laughter dying down into something quiet and steady. Neither of them said anything for a moment because there wasn't really anything left to say. The conversation they'd been having all week had finally caught up with them, and neither of them seemed particularly interested in running away from it anymore.

Chapter 11: What Now?

Summary:

morning after and end of trip

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

The morning arrived with the exact unyielding lack of excitement Amanda had anticipated all week. The grey Derbyshire light leaked through the thin curtains of the dormitory, exposing the drab furniture and the tangled mess of the duvet. Amanda was already awake when the first distant sounds of slamming doors and children’s voices echoed down the corridor.

She lay perfectly still, her back pressed against Liz’s chest, the heavy, grounding weight of Liz’s arm slung over her waist. Everything felt different, yet entirely unchanged. There was no change in the atmosphere, just the quiet, domestic reality of two people who had spent years circling each other finally collapsing into the same space.

The memory of the night, not just the desperate heat of the touch, but the quiet, vulnerable hours that followed when they fell asleep tangled together, sat heavily and warmly in Amanda’s chest. For someone who usually calculated every risk, she found herself remarkably unbothered by the fact that she had just completely upended her carefully structured life.

When Liz finally stirred, she tightened her arm around Amanda, buried her face into the crook of Amanda’s neck with a sleepy, raspy groan, and murmured something completely unintelligible about the noise outside. Amanda didn’t move away; instead, she let her head fall back against Liz’s shoulder, watching the dust motes dance in the cold morning light.

The silence of the room felt entirely different from how it had been an hour ago; it was no longer heavy with the weight of things unsaid, but settled and thick with the reality of what they’d finally done. Amanda stood by the foot of the bed, her fingers curled tightly around the hem of her cashmere jumper, staring at the mess of the rumpled sheets.

The bed looked like a battlefield, a visual record of every wall she’d spent years building finally being torn down in a single night. She felt horribly exposed in the grey morning light, her mind already trying to slip back into her professional armour, searching for a way to categorise the evening as a "lapse in judgment" or a "situational anomaly."

She was waiting for the awkwardness to hit, the inevitable moment where one of them would look at the floor and start talking about the school coach departure times just to bridge the gap.

Instead, she felt the mattress shift as Liz moved toward her. Liz didn’t hesitate, and she didn't offer a polite, distant "good morning" that would have signaled a return to their old roles. She simply walked into Amanda’s space, her movements slow and grounded, and reached up to smooth a stray strand of hair behind Amanda’s ear. Her fingers lingered there for a second, the skin-to-skin contact sending a jolt through Amanda that felt far too much like a beginning.

"You're doing it again," Liz murmured, her voice still rough and low from sleep.

Amanda blinked, her eyes finally meeting Liz’s. "Doing what?"

"Thinking," Liz said, a small, knowing smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.

She didn't pull her hand away; instead, her thumb traced the line of Amanda’s jaw, a gesture so casual and intimate it made Amanda’s breath hitch.

"You're trying to work out where to file this. You're trying to figure out if you need to apologise or if I’m going to make it weird."

Amanda let out a shaky breath, her shoulders dropping just an inch. "It’s a lot to file, Liz. We have to be on a coach with thirty children in less than an hour. I don't exactly have a template for this."

"Good," Liz replied softly, her eyes steady and remarkably clear. "Because I don't want a template. And I'm not going to let you pretend this was just the mountain air getting to your head." She leaned in just enough that their foreheads touched, a silent anchor in the middle of the room. "We’re not managing this, Amanda. We’re just... doing this. Alright?"

Amanda looked at her, really looked at her, and saw the same quiet, unshakeable confidence that had been there at two in the morning. The panic that had been bubbling in her chest started to subside, replaced by a strange, terrifying warmth.

She realised then that the "inconvenient" feeling in her stomach wasn't dread; it was the realisation that for the first time in her life, she didn't want to be in control. She just wanted to be here.

"Alright," Amanda whispered, her hand finally reaching up to catch Liz’s wrist, holding her there. She glanced nervously toward the partition wall.

"But you do realise Julia was in the room next door? The walls in this place are practically made of papier-mâché."

Liz let out a short, genuine bark of laughter, completely unbothered. "Oh, I know. I heard her sigh loudly at her emails around midnight. If she heard anything else, it would give her something to think about besides her gas bill." She leaned down and kissed Amanda's forehead. "Now get your shoes on, mate, or Kevin's going to come in here and apologise for the sun rising too early."

The walk down the corridor toward the main staircase felt entirely different from how it had for the last five days. Usually, Amanda moved through the activity centre with her chin tucked in, her eyes fixed firmly on the linoleum floor as if she could physically manifest a barrier between herself and the relentless enthusiasm of the staff.

Now, she was acutely aware of Liz walking half a step behind her, the heavy tread of her boots a steady, rhythmic constant that kept Amanda from rushing. They didn’t speak, and they didn't hold hands; there was no need to invite a crisis before they’d even found the luggage labels, but the space between them felt charged, a quiet perimeter that belonged exclusively to them.

Amanda kept her eyes straight ahead, her fingers gripping the handle of her small suitcase so tightly her knuckles turned white, her mind still trying to wrap itself around the fact that she had slept, actually slept, for four uninterrupted hours with another human being's breathing filling her ear.

When they reached the double doors of the dining hall to drop off their room keys, the noise hit them like a physical blow. It was the standard morning-of-departure madness: thirty-two children who had spent the night swapping sweets and telling ghost stories, now entirely incapable of locating their own footwear.

The room smelled overwhelmingly of burnt toast, damp raincoats, and the distinct, vinegar-tinged scent of cheap floor cleaner. Kevin was standing near the juice dispenser, looking like a man who had been awake since dawn, attempting to solve a Rubik's Cube that was missing half its stickers.

His hair was sticking up at a bizarre angle, and the moment he caught sight of Amanda, his face twisted into an expression of profound guilt.

"Amanda, Liz, good morning," Kevin stammered, instantly dropping a stack of plastic name badges onto the floor and scrambling to retrieve them. "I am so incredibly sorry about the coach delay. The driver had an issue with his tachograph, completely out of our hands, of course, but I feel entirely responsible. If I’d checked the transport manifest at six instead of six-thirty, we might have avoided the crossover. And the rain! I looked at the barometer in the office, and it’s dropping rapidly. I’ve already spoken to the kitchen about giving the children an extra biscuit for the road, but honestly, the whole schedule is a shambles. I am so, so sorry."

Amanda stopped, her usual blistering critique of Kevin’s administrative anxiety rising to her throat out of sheer habit. The corporate, defensive instinct that usually governed her interactions with the world suddenly felt entirely useless.

She didn't need to terrify Kevin; she didn't need to terrify anyone anymore. She looked from his frantic, badgered face over to Liz, whose eyes were dancing with that familiar, wicked affection.

"Kevin," Amanda said, her voice surprisingly level, lacking the usual razor-sharp edge that usually sent him into a tailspin. "The coach driver’s tachograph is a legal requirement, not a personal failure on your part. Stop apologising for the transit laws of this country. And for fuck's sake, leave the barometer alone."

Kevin blinked, his mouth falling open slightly as he clutched the rescued name badges to his chest like a shield. He looked at Amanda as if she had just spoken to him in Aramaic, entirely unaccustomed to her delivering a sentence that didn’t involve an implicit threat to his livelihood.

"Right," he whispered, looking faint. "Yes. Thank you, Amanda. That’s... that’s very clinical of you. Extremely reassuring."

"Don't thank her yet, Kev," Liz chimed in, her voice a warm, raspy contrast that immediately restored the room's oxygen levels. She reached out and patted Kevin's shoulder, a gesture so effortless and unthinking it made Amanda’s chest ache with a sudden, fierce pride.

"If we're stuck here another hour, she’s going to start auditing the tuck shop. Go get yourself a tea. You look like you’re about to have a stroke."

"Yes. Tea. Excellent," Kevin muttered, already backing away toward the kitchen hatches with the frantic gratitude of a hostage who had just been granted a brief reprieve. "I'll check on the biscuits. The chocolate ones. For morale."

As Kevin scurried off, Liz turned her head, her shoulder still pressed firmly against Amanda’s. The noise of the dining hall hummed around them, the scraping of plastic chairs, the high-pitched arguments over a missing Game Boy, the smell of institutional grease, but between them, the quiet remained completely intact.

"You were nice to him," Liz noted, her eyebrows raised in mock suspicion.

"Are you ill? Do I need to check your forehead again?"

"I was not nice," Amanda snapped, though there was absolutely no conviction behind it. She adjusted the strap of her handbag, her fingers brushing against Liz’s arm as she did. "I was efficient. There is a distinction. If Kevin continues to vibrate at that level of anxiety, he will attract fruit flies."

"Whatever you say, mate," Liz murmured, the old, familiar slang slipping out, but the look she gave Amanda was anything but casual. It was long, heavy, and full of the private language they’d spent the last seven hours establishing in the dark. "Come on. Let's go find the dragon before she starts telling the kids where babies come from."

They found Julia exactly where they expected to find her: perched near the water fountain by the main glass exit, holding a damp paper cup and tapping her foot with the cold, calculating precision of a woman who was already drafting a highly litigious email to the local education authority.

She was locked in an intense, animated conversation with Meg, who was casually leaning against a noticeboard, looking remarkably unfazed for seven in the morning. But the moment Amanda and Liz walked through the inner doors together, Julia’s focus shifted instantly.

The grievance vanished from her face, replaced by an expression of such pure, unadulterated predatory glee that Amanda felt an immediate urge to turn around and walk back into the woods.

"Well, well, well," Julia purred, her voice low enough to escape the ears of the passing year-fives but dripping with absolute triumph. She stepped into their path, blocking the exit with a terrifyingly serene smile. "Look at you two. The survivors of the Great Derbyshire Experiment. You both look so... unbothered."

"We are perfectly fine, Julia," Amanda said quickly, her voice dropping into its most formidable, school-governor register. She stood slightly ahead of Liz, an instinctive, defensive movement that did not escape Julia’s notice.

"The coach has arrived, the luggage is being sorted, and we are on schedule to return to London before the traffic on the M1 becomes entirely unmanageable."

Julia didn't even listen to the words. Her eyes were darting between them, tracking the exact distance between their boots, the slight misalignment of Amanda’s usually immaculate collar, and the quiet, steady way Liz was standing behind her.

A massive, terrifying grin slowly spread across Julia’s face, the kind of expression usually reserved for when she found a parking space directly outside the school gates during a downpour.

"Oh, don't give me the itinerary speech, Amanda," Julia scoffed softly, leaning in closer, her face alight with the sheer joy of being right. "You have your 'I've just successfully negotiated a corporate merger' face on, and Liz looks like she’s just won a meat raffle. It’s pathetic. You’re both transparent. Isn't that right, Meg?"

Meg took a slow sip from her travel mug, her expression a mix of dry amusement and utter lack of surprise. "Oh, completely. Julia actually called me at six forty-five this morning, Amanda. From the hallway. She was whispering so loudly I thought there was a gas leak."

Amanda's jaw went tight, her head snapping toward Julia. "You called Meg? Before seven in the morning? On an educational trip?"

"Darling, the partition walls in Room 4B are practically made of dried oregano," Julia whispered delightedly, tapping Amanda’s arm with a patronising tenderness that made Amanda’s jaw click. "I didn't even need to listen. Honestly, it was the silence that gave you away. For once, you weren't tossing and turning or letting out those long-suffering sighs all night. I actually thought you'd died. I told Meg hours ago, 'Put them in a room with a broken radiator and no wine, and the walls will crumble.' I should have put money on it. I could have paid for Paul's cricket pads."

"There was no broken radiator," Amanda said coldly, though she could feel the heat rising in her throat, hot and betraying. "And your theories are entirely circumstantial."

Meg let out a quiet snort, shifting her rucksack on her shoulder. "Look, Amanda, don't worry about it. Honestly, we’re all just glad the tension is gone. The staff room was getting hazardous. Liz, you look entirely too smug, by the way. It’s weird."

"I'm always smug, Meg," Liz replied, though she was already grinning, her hands tucked deep into her jacket pockets as she kicked a stray pebble across the linoleum. "And Julia, if you don't step away from the exit, I'm going to tell Kevin you volunteered to count the wet wellies."

"Threats won't work on me, dear, I’ve already won," Julia said, giving a final, triumphant wink that felt like a physical assault. She turned on her heel and began marching toward the double doors, calling out a cheerful, loud instruction to a passing child while casting one last, incredibly satisfied look over her shoulder.

"I suggest you two find somewhere with good suspension on the bus. You look like you've had a very... exhausting night."

Meg gave them a sympathetic, lingering look before following Julia out. "See you on board. Try not to murder her before the services."

Amanda stood frozen by the water fountain, her hands curling into fists inside her pockets. "I despise her," she muttered to the empty air. "I genuinely despise both of them."

"Yeah," Liz’s voice came from right behind her, low and warm and entirely unbothered by the performance. Amanda felt Liz’s hand slide into her pocket, her fingers finding Amanda’s and squeezing them briefly through the fabric, a quick, hidden pressure that made the entire chaotic foyer disappear for a second. "But they’re right about the coach. Come on, let's get on before Kevin finds that barometer again."

The air outside was sharp, smelling of wet asphalt and diesel fumes as the year-fives scrambled toward the coach like a frantic, brightly coloured herd. Amanda kept her head high, maintaining a pace that suggested she was in complete control of her surroundings, even as her heart did a strange, rhythmic gallop against her ribs.

Liz was a constant presence at her shoulder, moving with a lazy, effortless grace that made the chaos of the car park feel like background noise. They reached the steps of the coach, and for a fleeting second, the reality of the situation hit Amanda; the closed-off space, the three-hour journey, and the fact that everyone on this bus now occupied a front-row seat to the wreckage of her privacy.

Inside, the coach was a humid microclimate of damp wool and salt-and-vinegar crisps. Julia had, true to her word, colonised a row near the back, her legs crossed and her eyes fixed on the door like a vulture watching a watering hole. Meg was already settled beside her, scrolling through her phone but looking up the moment they stepped into the aisle.

The tension in the air was thick enough to carve, but Liz didn't even blink. She just nudged Amanda forward toward an empty pair of seats three rows ahead of the 'Dragon’s Den'.

"This'll do," Liz murmured, tossing her rucksack onto the overhead rack.

Amanda slid into the window seat, her movements stiff and precise. She stared out at the grey Derbyshire landscape, watching a stray Year 5 student attempt to kick a puddle into the luggage hold. She felt the seat beside her dip as Liz sat down, the familiar scent of Liz’s jacket, something like cold air and tobacco, settling into the small space between them.

For a few minutes, they were just two adults on a school trip, surrounded by the high-pitched shriek of prepubescent excitement and the thud of bags being shoved into lockers.

"You okay?" Liz asked, her voice low enough to be buried by the shouting from the back of the bus.

Amanda didn't look away from the window. "I’ve spent the better part of a decade cultivating a reputation for being entirely untouchable, Liz. In the space of one morning, Julia has managed to turn my personal life into a spectator sport. I am currently deciding between a dignified silence and throwing myself out of the emergency exit while we’re still on the A6."

Liz let out a soft, huffed laugh, and Amanda felt a warmth bloom against her thigh as Liz shifted closer. "They’re just talking, Amanda. Let 'em. They’ve got nothing else to do for three hours except argue about whose turn it is to buy the gin when we hit London. Besides…" Liz leaned in, her voice dropping to a rough, private rasp that made the hair on Amanda's arms stand up, "Julia’s just pissed off she didn't get to film it. She loves a drama she didn't write."

Amanda finally turned her head, her gaze meeting Liz’s. The chaos of the bus seemed to recede, the screaming children and the smell of crisps fading into insignificance. Liz looked tired, her eyes still a little heavy from the night before, but there was a steadiness there that Amanda found herself leaning into. It was the same unshakeable honesty that had unraveled her at two in the morning.

"She’s going to tell everyone, you know," Amanda whispered, her fingers tracing a restless pattern on the armrest. "By Monday morning, the school gates will be a biohazard of gossip. Anne will probably try to organise a celebratory brunch, and Kevin will likely offer to pay for our 'union' with his pension fund."

"Let 'em," Liz said, her shrug so casual it was almost offensive. She reached over, and beneath the cover of Amanda’s long coat, she laced her fingers through Amanda’s. "Let 'em talk. I've been the school gate pariah for years, mate. It’s actually quite fun once you get used to the judging looks. Also," she squeezed Amanda’s hand, her thumb grazing over her knuckles, "I’m not going anywhere. If they want to make it a thing, let’s give ‘em a thing to talk about."

The coach groaned to life, the engine vibrating through the floorboards. As they pulled out of the activity centre, the grey sky finally broke into a steady downpour.

Amanda looked back at the window, watching the blur of green and grey. She felt Liz’s hand in hers, a secret, solid weight that felt more real than any of the noise behind them. She realised then that the fear wasn't about the gossip or the loss of her reputation; it was the terrifying, wonderful possibility that for the first time in years, she didn't have to be the woman in the sunglasses. She could just be the woman in the window seat, holding onto the only thing that made the journey home worth taking.

The coach hit a deep pothole as they swung onto the main road, causing a collective shriek of excitement from the year-fives in the middle rows. Amanda felt the jolt travel straight up her spine, but Liz didn’t let go of her hand. If anything, the grip beneath the folds of the smuggled duvet tightened, a silent anchor against the rising tide of salt-and-vinegar fumes and the hum of the engine.

For a few miles, the steady vibration and the rain lashing against the glass created a strange, hypnotic sort of peace, allowing Amanda to lean her shoulder tentatively against Liz’s, watching the grey Derbyshire landscape blur into a continuous streak.

The peace, however, was temporary. The coach gradually slowed to a crawl, the indicators clicking with irritating persistence as they pulled into the concrete expanse of the first motorway service station. The "quick toilet break" was always where the fragile hierarchy of these trips dissolved into a frantic scramble for overpriced lattes, and the children immediately began outshouting Kevin’s panicked instructions at the front of the bus.

As the aisle cleared, Julia stood up, stretching her arms with a feline grace before sliding into the row directly behind them. Meg followed, leaning over the headrest with her travel mug clutched between both hands. The predatory glee from the foyer had settled into something quieter, but the sharp, analytical look in Julia’s eyes hadn't wavered.

"Alright, look," Julia murmured, her voice uncharacteristically low as she leaned forward into the gap between the seats. "Before we get off this bus and hand these monsters back to their respective families, we need to establish the ground rules. Because I am many things, Amanda, but I am not a saboteur."

Amanda stiffened, her professional mask instantly locking back into place as she slowly turned her head. "I am entirely unsure what rules you think need establishing, Julia. We are currently arriving at a service station."

"Oh, stop it," Meg sighed, rolling her eyes but keeping her voice down to a conspiratorial whisper. "We know, Amanda. We’ve known since seven this morning, and frankly, the lack of screaming from your row for the last fifty miles has confirmed it. But we also know what the school gates are like. If Anne gets even a sniff of this, she’ll try to organise a celebratory committee and buy matching bunting from John Lewis, and Kevin will probably weep."

Julia nodded, her expression surprisingly serious as she looked between Amanda and Liz. "Exactly. It would be an absolute bloodbath of patronising comments and group chats. So, here is the deal: Meg and I say absolutely nothing. Not a word to Anne, not a word to the PTA, nothing. It stays in Derbyshire. On Monday morning, you two go back to ignoring each other by the bike sheds, and we will play along like none of this ever happened."

Amanda blinked, genuinely caught off guard by the sudden flash of loyalty from a woman she usually spent her life trying to outmanoeuvre. She looked down at her lap, then glanced sideways at Liz.

Liz had finally opened her eyes, watching Julia with a faint, wry smile. She didn't look panicked; she just looked incredibly tired. "And what's the catch, Jules?" Liz asked softly. "Because you don't usually keep a secret out of the goodness of your heart."

"The catch," Julia purred, the familiar, wicked glint returning to her eyes as she leaned back, "is that I get the absolute, unadulterated pleasure of watching Amanda pretend she still despises you while knowing exactly what her collarbone looks like in the dark. It is the greatest psychological leverage I have ever possessed, and I intend to savour it privately for the next five years."

Meg let out a dry snort and tapped the back of Amanda's seat. "She’s right, you know. It’s much more fun if nobody else knows. Consider it a pact. Now go get your terrible coffee before Kevin tries to do a headcount in the car park."

With a final, decisive nod, Julia turned and slid down the aisle toward the exit, her loud, authoritative voice immediately returning as she began berating a child for attempting to buy an energy drink. Meg gave them both a small, reassuring shrug before following her off the bus.

The space fell quiet again, the humid air of the coach suddenly feeling much cooler through the open front doors. Amanda sat perfectly still, her mind rapidly processing the terms of the agreement. The relief that washed over her was so immense it made her dizzy.

The armor was back on; the boundary lines were reset. On Monday, she would still be the formidable, immaculate Amanda who scoffed at Liz’s boots and made passive-aggressive comments about the school charity raffle. The world wouldn't get to touch this.

She felt Liz shift beside her, sliding her hand out from under the duvet to stretch her fingers. "Well," Liz murmured, her voice a low, raspy hum against the glass. "That went better than expected. You get to keep your terrifying reputation, and I don't have to change my outfit for the school run."

Amanda didn't look at her, her eyes fixed firmly on the sliding glass doors of the service station in the distance. "Do not get complacent, Liz. On Monday morning, if you stand anywhere near my car while wearing that dreadful fleece, I will completely ignore your existence. I will look right through you."

"I’d expect nothing less, mate," Liz whispered.

But as Amanda stood up to smooth down her coat, her fingers brushed against Liz’s shoulder, a brief, hard pressure that was entirely hidden from the windows of the bus. She stepped into the aisle, her chin up and her heels clicking sharply against the floorboards, ready to face the crowd outside with her usual cold, untouchable perfection. The secret was safe, the walls were back up for the public, but as she glanced back one last time before hitting the steps, she caught the slow, private promise in Liz’s eyes. The act was about to begin, but the reality was already waiting for the dark.

Notes:

happy pride month <3

Chapter 12: London

Summary:

Returning home would be much easier if home didn't feel so different.

Chapter Text

The problem with returning home was that home expected you to continue exactly where you'd left off. Amanda discovered this approximately seven minutes after walking through her front door. The washing machine was making a noise that sounded expensive. Somebody had left three unopened letters on the kitchen counter.

Her son had somehow managed to leave a school blazer draped over the back of a dining chair despite possessing an entire wardrobe specifically designed for clothes. The dishwasher needed emptying, and the milk was two days from expiring. Nothing had changed, and that was almost more irritating than if everything had.

She stood in the middle of the kitchen with her suitcase still beside her and stared at the familiar room. The trip already felt strange and disconnected. It was like she'd stepped out of one version of her life and back into another without any transition period in between. A week ago, she'd been sleeping in a room called Pine Room Three with a woman she'd spent years arguing with.

Last night she'd fallen asleep with Liz's arm around her waist. Now she was standing next to a dishwasher, wondering whether she needed to call a plumber; it felt completely unreasonable.

Amanda dropped her car keys onto the counter and rubbed both hands over her face. The drive back from school had been uneventful in the most frustrating way possible. Parents collected their children, teachers unloaded luggage, Kevin apologised for the traffic conditions on the M1 despite having absolutely no influence over the motorway network, and Julia smirked at her whenever she got the opportunity, clearly enjoying their little pact.

Everything had happened exactly as expected, except now Amanda was alone. The silence felt different and painfully noticeable. She hadn't realised how used she'd become to another person being nearby, and the thought annoyed her immediately.

She unpacked half her suitcase before giving up. She made tea, forgot about it, made another cup, and drank half of that one. Then she spent twenty minutes staring at work emails without reading a single word. By six o'clock, she was convinced she was losing her mind. By seven, she was checking her phone every five minutes. By eight, she was actively angry about checking her phone every five minutes. At eight forty-three, it finally rang. Amanda answered before the second ring, then immediately hated herself for it.

"Hello," she said, trying to sound normal.

Liz laughed softly down the line. "That's embarrassin'."

Amanda leaned against the kitchen counter. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"You answered that before I'd finished dialing."

"I happened to be holding my phone."

"At nine o'clock on a Sunday night."

Amanda looked at the digital clock on the oven. It was exactly nine o'clock. That felt worse somehow. "I hate you," she muttered.

"No, you don't," Liz said easily.

Amanda closed her eyes. The irritating thing was that Liz sounded the same. She had the same voice, the same laugh, and the same unbothered ease. Amanda had spent the entire day convincing herself Derbyshire had been a temporary lapse in judgment brought on by proximity, exhaustion, and an alarming amount of prosecco. Hearing Liz speak immediately destroyed that theory.

"How was your day?" Liz asked. In the background, something metal clattered loudly.

Amanda frowned. "What was that?"

"A saucepan."

"Why?"

"I dropped it."

"Why?"

"Because I was makin' dinner, Amanda."

Amanda looked at the untouched pasta she'd bought on the way home. "Oh." A pause followed. It wasn't awkward, just familiar. It was the sort of pause they'd somehow become very good at.

"I miss you," Liz said.

Amanda stopped breathing for about three seconds. It wasn't because the words were dramatic or surprising, but because Liz said them so simply. It was like she was stating the weather or acknowledging something entirely obvious. Amanda stared at the kitchen wall. The silence stretched out between them until Liz let out a heavy sigh.

"Right, well, that's gone well."

Amanda laughed despite herself. "You can't just say things like that."

"I can."

"No, you can't."

"I literally just did."

Amanda pressed the heel of her hand against her forehead, smiling at the floor. "You are impossible."

"You knew that already." Another clatter sounded down the line. "Hold on, just turning the heat down."

"What are you actually doing?" Amanda asked.

"Makin' fish fingers."

Amanda blinked. "Fish fingers."

"Yeah."

"For dinner."

"Yeah."

Amanda looked around her immaculate kitchen. She looked at the expensive kettle, the marble countertops, and the untouched vegetables she'd bought because she thought responsible adults probably should. Then she laughed, properly laughed, the kind that escaped before she could stop it.

"What?" Liz asked immediately.

"Nothing."

"No, tell me."

Amanda shook her head even though Liz couldn't see it. "I just spent forty pounds in Marks and Spencer, and you're eating fish fingers."

"They're good fish fingers, though," Liz argued, her voice warm. "Proper cod. None of the cheap stuff."

"I'm sure they are."

"They are."

Amanda could hear the smile in her voice, and she could picture her standing in her kitchen, making that specific face she always made. It shouldn't have been possible to see it so clearly after less than twenty-four hours apart. It felt ridiculous, and yet she didn't want to hang up.

"You should have seen him at the luggage carousel," Liz said, her voice dropping. "He was checking the bag tags like he thought MI5 had swapped the Year Five school bags for contraband. I thought he was going to cry when Toby’s rucksack turned up without the dinosaur keyring."

Amanda let out a quiet scoff, shifting her weight on the dining chair and pulling her jumper down over her knees. "Kevin’s entire life is a series of small tragedies. I honestly don't know how his wife copes. If my husband had spent that much time obsessing over coach tachographs, I’d have filed for divorce on the M6."

"Yeah, well, Jill’s a saint," Liz hummed. "Or she just tunes him out. That's what I do. Just nod, say 'Good job, Kev,' and wait for him to vibrate into another room."

"It’s exhausting just watching it," Amanda said. She leaned her head back against the wood of the chair, staring up at the dark kitchen ceiling. "And Julia wasn't helping. Did she actually have to make that announcement about the end-of-term drinks over the coach's microphone? It was entirely unnecessary."

"Oh, she was just marking her territory, mate," Liz laughed softly. "She loves knowing something everyone else doesn't. Meg was loving it too, don't pretend she wasn't. She had that look on her face she gets when she's two gins in and watching a row break out at a wedding."

"Meg is a spectator to chaos," Amanda muttered, though there was no real bite to it. "But at least she has the decency to be quiet about it. Julia’s eyes were practically boring holes into the back of my neck for three hours. I could feel the smugness radiating through the headrest."

"She won't say anything," Liz said, her voice turning a bit more grounded, reassuring. "We've got the pact. She likes the secret too much to ruin it. If she tells Anne, the fun’s over for her."

"I suppose," Amanda murmured.

A comfortable silence settled between them, the kind that didn't need to be rushed or filled with an excuse. Outside, a car drove past the front of Amanda's house, its headlights casting a brief, sweeping shadow across the kitchen wall before disappearing.

"What are the boys doing?" Amanda asked quietly, breaking the quiet just to hear Liz's voice again.

"Asleep. Finally," Liz said. "Took 'em two hours to calm down after the services. They wanted to show me a dead beetle they found near the petrol pumps. Had it in a plastic cup. I told 'em to leave it in the porch, but I’m eighty percent sure it’s currently under one of their pillows."

Amanda grimaced, though she was smiling. "That is absolutely repulsive, Liz."

"It’s nature, Amanda. Very educational."

"It’s hygiene, Liz. There is a difference."

"Whatever you say, mate," Liz murmured, and Amanda could hear her shifting, the distinct rustle of bedding or a sofa cushion coming through the speaker. "What about yours?"

"In his room. On his tablet, no doubt," Amanda sighed. "He barely looked up when I walked in. Just asked if I’d brought back any of those flapjacks from the activity centre."

"Did you?"

"Certainly not. They looked like they were held together with industrial glue."

Liz chuckled, a low, gravelly sound that felt far too close for the distance between their houses. "You missed a trick there. Could've used 'em as a bribe for Monday morning."

Amanda glanced down at the illuminated screen of her phone, noticing the time for the first time in hours. It was ten to eleven. The evening had completely vanished, swallowed up by a conversation that had no real point, no agenda, and no deadline. Usually, by this time on a Sunday, Amanda had her outfit for the morning steamed, her calendar reviewed, and her mind locked in a state of rigid preparation.

Now, she was just sitting in the dark, reluctant to say goodbye.

"It’s late," Amanda said softly, though she didn't move an inch.

"Yeah," Liz replied. She didn't offer to hang up either. "It is."

"We have the playground run in less than nine hours."

"Don't remind me. I’ve gotta find the matching shoes by then." A pause, then Liz’s voice softened just a fraction. "You gonna be alright tomorrow? With the face? The 'I don't know who Liz is' routine?"

Amanda looked out at the dark silhouette of the trees in her garden. "I’ve been practicing that face for forty years, Liz. I think I can manage it for twenty minutes by the school gates."

"Good," Liz hummed. "Just don't look too mean, yeah? Might hurt my feelings."

"You don't have feelings to hurt," Amanda retorted, her voice dropping to a whisper.

"Get some sleep, Amanda."

"You too."

Neither of them hung up for three seconds after that, the line humming with the quiet warmth of London settling down for the night, before the screen finally went black.

Chapter 13: Thursdays

Summary:

gotta love thursdays. amanda is confused

Chapter Text

The thing Amanda hadn't expected about Thursdays was how quickly they stopped feeling like visits. At some point between Derbyshire and October, she'd stopped arriving at Liz's house with the vague awareness that she was stepping into somebody else's space.

She still knocked because she wasn't an animal, but most of the time, one of the boys shouted "it's open" before she even reached the door, and Amanda found herself walking straight into the familiar chaos without thinking.

This Thursday was no different. One son was sitting at the kitchen table, attempting maths homework, the other was lying across the sofa in the living room, complaining loudly about having to read a book that Amanda strongly suspected he hadn't actually opened.

The washing machine was running, the kettle had recently boiled, and somebody had left football boots in the hallway despite being asked not to approximately eight thousand times. Amanda stepped over them automatically and hung her coat on the hook beside the door.

"You left your boots there again," she called out, kicking one closer to the skirting board.

"It's not me," came the immediate response from the living room.

"There are literally only four people in this house, and I didn't wear muddy studs today," Amanda said, walking into the kitchen. "So, unless your mother has taken up Sunday league, they're yours."

"It wasn't me," the voice insisted, entirely unbothered.

Liz looked up from the counter where she was chopping carrots and raised her eyebrows, a half-eaten biscuit resting near the chopping board. "It was definitely him."

"I know," Amanda said, pulling out a chair and sitting down.

The strange thing was that nobody acknowledged her arrival anymore, nobody stopped what they were doing or made a fuss, nobody even asked if she wanted tea, because there was already a chipped blue mug waiting beside her usual chair, steam still curling off the top. That should probably have felt significant, or at least worth a moment's thought. Instead, it just felt completely normal.

"What's for dinner?" Amanda asked, reaching for the mug and wrapping her hands around the warmth of it.

Liz shrugged, tossing the carrots into a pot. "Depends on how ambitious I'm feeling. I was thinking about proper food, but then I looked at the state of the living room."

"So fish fingers."

"Possibly. Or those little potato smiley faces if they haven't gone frosty at the back of the freezer."

Amanda smiled into her tea. "A culinary triumph, as always."

The evening unfolded the way most Thursdays did. Homework became complaints, complaints became negotiations, and negotiations eventually became dinner. Amanda spent twenty minutes explaining fractions to a child who clearly had no intention of learning fractions and every intention of arguing about the fundamental fairness of maths.

"No, look," Amanda said, tapping her pen against the worksheet. "If you have a pizza and you cut it into four pieces, and you eat three of those pieces, you've got three-quarters."

"Why would I eat three pieces?" the boy asked, staring at her blankly. "That's too much pizza. I'd get sick."

"Because that's the answer on the page."

"But why?"

Amanda stared at him, her professional patience wearing thin. "Because mathematics."

"That isn't a reason."

"It absolutely is. It is the only reason."

Liz was leaning against the sink, laughing quietly into her mug. Amanda pointed her pen at her without looking away from the worksheet. "Don't encourage him, Liz. He's using existential dread to avoid long division."

"I'm not encouraging him," Liz said, totally unrepentant. "I'm just enjoyin' the show. You look proper headteacherly when you get annoyed."

"I am a headteacher, Liz. And I am not annoyed, I am merely... structured."

Amanda sighed heavily, closing the textbook. The child looked instantly victorious, sliding his chair back before she could change her mind. The entire household seemed determined to make her life more difficult, and yet she didn't want to leave.

Dinner happened around seven, consumed in a flurry of passing ketchup bottles and loud debates about a school trip. Afterwards, one boy disappeared upstairs to a video game, the other became distracted by the television, and the kitchen slowly settled into the comfortable, messy aftermath that followed family meals.

Plates sat stacked beside the sink waiting to be washed, school letters occupied half the counter, and somebody had abandoned a glass of lukewarm squash right beside the fruit bowl.

Amanda stood at the sink, rinsing a bowl under the hot tap while Liz stood next to her with a tea towel. The arrangement had happened naturally enough over the weeks that neither of them questioned the division of labour anymore.

"You know," Liz said, reaching for a clean plate, "you don't actually have to do that."

Amanda glanced sideways, her sleeves rolled up to her elbows. "Do what?"

"The dishes. You always do the dishes, you're a guest."

"I'm aware I don't have to. But that's because your dishwasher frightens me."

"It's a standard Hotpoint, Amanda. It doesn't bite."

"It sounds like a haunted submarine, Liz. I fully expect it to explode every time you turn the dial."

Liz laughed, a warm, gravelly sound that filled the small space between them. Amanda handed her another wet bowl, their fingers brushing briefly, a casual touch that didn't feel heavy or fraught anymore.

"I'm serious, she’s already got the aprons," Liz said, leaning back against the counter as she shook out the tea towel. "Pink ones. With little glittery paws on the front. She told the head of infants that she couldn't take the Tuesday afternoon reading groups anymore because she had an intensive course in Westie clipping."

Amanda let out a sharp, genuine laugh, shaking her head as she wiped down the hobs. "Please tell me you’re making that up. Tell me the educational standards of this borough haven't dissolved to the point where we are losing certified staff to terrier maintenance."

"I wish I were, mate," Liz grinned, her shoulders shaking. "But she's dead set. Said dogs don't talk back, and they rarely have parents who threaten to take you to the local authority because their little darling didn't get the main part in the nativity."

"Well, she has a point there," Amanda murmured, her fingers lingering on the edge of the cooker. "Mrs. Higgins called my office three times yesterday because Darius didn't get cast as the innkeeper. She actually used the phrase 'stifling his theatrical trajectory.' He’s seven, Liz. He spent the entire rehearsal yesterday trying to see if his head would fit through the banisters in the main hall."

"He's got vision, though, you've gotta give him that," Liz chuckled, reaching over to turn off the radio that had been murmuring in the corner. "What did you tell her?"

"I told her the casting decisions were final and that if Darius spent less time pretending to be a helicopter during assembly, we might consider him for a speaking role next term." Amanda straightened up, looking at her clean hands. "She threatened to write to the chair of governors. Again. I think it’s her favorite hobby."

"Let her write," Liz said softly, her tone shifting into something a bit more grounded as she watched Amanda. "Old Sir John doesn't even read his own emails. He’ll just nod, delete it, and ask you if the school roof is still leaking."

"It is, as it happens," Amanda sighed, but the tension was already leaving her shoulders.

They stood there for a moment, the silence expanding between them like a comfortable habit. The kitchen smelled faintly of detergent and roasted carrots, a heavy, domestic scent that Amanda was beginning to associate entirely with the end of the week.

She didn't feel the need to look at her watch, and she didn't feel the usual urgent pressure to explain why she was still standing in someone else’s house at half past eight on a Thursday night.

"We need to sort out the logistics for the last week of term," Amanda added after a while, her voice dropping a fraction. "The Carol Service is on Thursday. I’ll be stuck at the church until at least eight."

"Right," Liz said, nodding as she folded the cloth neatly over the taps. "I can pick up your lot with mine if you want. Bring 'em back here, feed 'em some of those frozen pizzas you hate, keep 'em alive until you’re done being official."

Amanda looked at her, her chest tightening with that familiar, inconvenient warmth. "You don't have to do that, Liz. It’s too much."

"It's just pizza, Amanda. It’s fine." Liz stepped out of the narrow gap between the counter and the table, her shoulder brushing against Amanda's arm as she moved toward the fridge. "Besides, your boy’s better at the multiplayer games than mine are. Keeps 'em from murdering each other."

Amanda dried her hands on a tea towel and leaned back against the counter, looking at the room. The boys were upstairs now, the television downstairs had gone quiet, and a soft rain was beginning to tap lightly against the kitchen window.

Liz was still talking, moving onto the logistics of secondary school applications for next year. Amanda listened automatically at first, nodding along, but then something shifted inside her.

"...because next year he'll be applying," Liz was saying, stacking the clean plates back into the cupboard. "Which is just mental, really, because I'm sure he was six about five minutes ago. I'm going to have to buy a proper blazer and everything."

Amanda nodded. "That's how children work, unfortunately."

"No, it isn't. It's a scam."

"It absolutely is. But they don't usually ask permission to grow up."

Liz rolled her eyes, turning around to face her. Amanda laughed softly, but as Liz kept talking about school uniforms, bus routes, and the details of next autumn, the image of the future arrived so effortlessly that it startled her. She could see it clearly. Next year, another Thursday night, the same kitchen, the same conversation, the same comfortable life.

For a second, she found herself imagining what they would do for Christmas, then summer, then another year after that. It wasn't a grand, romantic daydream. It was just more of this, more Thursdays, more tea, more arguing over fractions, and more ordinary evenings spent standing in a kitchen while Liz talked about things that mattered. Amanda stared down at the laminate countertop, the feeling hitting her so suddenly that she almost missed the next words out of Liz's mouth.

"...when all the divorce stuff's finally finished, anyway," Liz said casually, wiping down the table.

Amanda looked up, her posture instantly going rigid. "What?"

Liz paused, the dishcloth in her hand. "The divorce. With your ex. You said the next hearing was next month."

"Oh," Amanda said. "Yes. It is."

"You alright?"

Amanda immediately nodded, forcing her shoulders to drop. "Fine. Absolutely fine."

Liz studied her face for a second, her sharp eyes lingering on the tight line of Amanda's jaw, but she didn't press. Amanda reached for her mug, taking a sip just to give her hands something to do, but the tea had gone completely cold.

The divorce. Everybody kept talking about the divorce as though it was the main obstacle, the big finish line they were all waiting for. Amanda had spent months thinking the same thing: that once the paperwork was signed, the lawyers disappeared, and the asset division was sorted, everything else would become obvious and clear.

Now, standing here, she wasn't so sure. The divorce wasn't really the frightening part anymore. The frightening part was what happened after it was done. She'd spent most of her adult life being somebody's wife, and before that, she'd spent years training herself to become the perfect version of one.

Every future she’d ever imagined had included that rigid structure of marriage, family, and shared expectations. Even when those things stopped making her happy, they'd still provided a script. They told her exactly who she was. What happened when all of that completely disappeared?

"Amanda."

She blinked, snapping out of her thoughts. Liz was watching her from across the small kitchen table, the dishcloth abandoned.

"You've gone somewhere," Liz said softly.

Amanda forced a quick, practiced smile. "No, I haven't. I'm right here."

"You have. You do that thing where your face goes completely blank, and you look like you're calculating a tax return."

"I was just thinking."

"Yeah, well, that's usually where the trouble starts with you."

Amanda laughed automatically, expecting Liz to join in, but Liz didn't. She just kept her steady, honest gaze fixed on her, and that was never a good sign.

"You alright?" Liz asked again, her tone quieter this time.

Amanda looked around the kitchen. She looked at the crumpled school letters, the drying dishes, the rain hitting the glass, and the familiar, unglamorous clutter of a life being lived in real time. Then she looked back at Liz, steady, certain, and completely comfortable in herself in a way Amanda had never quite managed.

Liz knew exactly who she was. She wasn't waiting for her life to begin after something else ended; she was already right in the middle of it. Amanda suddenly felt incredibly tired, the weight of her own complicated, private performance pressing down on her.

"Yeah," Amanda said eventually, her voice barely above a whisper.

Liz continued looking at her for a long moment. Amanda held the look, trying to appear anchored, but she had to glance away first. The truth was she wasn't sure about anything anymore, and for the first time since Derbyshire, that uncertainty actually terrified her.

It wasn't because she doubted how she felt about Liz; it was because she was starting to realise exactly how much she did, and how easily she could let herself sink into this.

The kitchen carried on around them exactly as it always did on a school night. Upstairs, one of the boys shouted something about a missing charger, a bedroom door slammed, and the washing machine clicked as it finally finished its spin cycle. Life didn't stop for a crisis.

Amanda wrapped both hands around her cold mug, listening to the normal, messy noise of the house. For weeks, she'd been treating this whole thing like something temporary, a lovely, secret escape she could fit around the edges of her real life until the storm passed.

Standing there in the quiet of Liz's kitchen, she realised she might have it completely backwards, and she had absolutely no idea what to do with that thought.

Liz didn't say anything else. She just reached up, her hand sliding from Amanda’s waist to trace the tense line of her shoulder, her fingers warm and deliberate against her skin. It was a slow, heavy movement that didn't leave any room for the panic still spinning in Amanda's head.

When Amanda turned around to face her, the kitchen and the school gates and the lawyers didn't matter anymore. Liz met her halfway, her mouth warm and familiar, pulling Amanda in with a quiet, unhurried intensity that instantly cut through the chill of the room.

It wasn't frantic like Derbyshire had been; it was settled, thick with the weight of the last three months of Thursdays finally catching up to them in the dark.

Every touch felt entirely deliberate, a smooth undoing of the professional armour Amanda had spent the day wearing. Liz’s hands were rough and grounded against her skin, anchoring her to the bed while the rain lashed relentlessly against the windowpane.

In the small, heavy space between them, Amanda forgot about the template. She forgot about the script. She just let herself sink into the solid, breathless reality of Liz’s weight, her own hands curling fiercely into Liz's shoulders as the rest of the world completely fell away.

Afterwards, the room returned to that deep, quiet stillness that only ever existed after the house had gone completely to sleep. Amanda lay with her back pressed against Liz’s chest, the heavy, familiar weight of Liz’s arm slung right back over her waist, her thumb lazily grazing Amanda’s hip.

"Alright?" Liz murmured, her voice a rough, post-coital rasp against the back of Amanda's neck.

Amanda closed her eyes, the last of the tension draining out of her spine as she let her head fall back against Liz's shoulder. "Yes," she whispered into the dark kitchen-scented air of the bedroom. "Surprisingly, yes."

"Told you," Liz hummed, her breath warm against Amanda's skin as she pulled the heavy duvet up over them both. "No thinking allowed until Friday."

Chapter 14: Christmas Lights

Summary:

The divorce papers finally arrive. Liz talks about next year. Amanda realises those might not be the same conversation.

Chapter Text

The brown envelope arrived on a Tuesday afternoon, slotted neatly between a frantic WhatsApp notification from the class group chat about a lost cashmere-blend school jumper and a highly stressful invoice from the suppliers for her boutique.

By the time Amanda got home, her feet were throbbing from her designer pointed flats, and she felt the familiar, low-grade headache that always came from pretending everything in her life was completely under control.

She almost missed the letter entirely. It was sitting on the hall table, tucked beneath a glossy takeaway leaflet for a new artisanal pizzeria and a crumpled school flyer. It was just a plain brown envelope with a typed address and a boring first-class stamp. No dramatic legal seal, no life-changing appearance. Just ordinary, heavy-gauge office stationery from the central London law firm she’d been paying a ridiculous hourly rate to since July.

Amanda stood staring at it for a full minute, her keys still gripped tightly in her hand, before she finally took off her pristine trench coat and hung it up, ensuring the shoulders aligned perfectly on the hanger.

She walked straight past it into the kitchen. She made a pot of Earl Grey, using the loose-leaf tea, because tea bags were an architectural failure, and carefully measured out the oat milk. When she carried her mug back into the hallway, the envelope hadn't moved. It looked completely absurd sitting there next to a half-empty tub of expensive lip balm and a plastic hair clip.

Eventually, the floorboards creaked upstairs, and her daughter came wandering down, her school socks bunched around her ankles and her iPad clutched against her ribs.

"Mum," she said, shifting her weight on the bottom step.

Amanda looked up from the table, her hand resting on the edge of the radiator. "What, darling?"

"You've been staring at that piece of paper for like ten minutes."

"I have not," Amanda lied, instantly adjusting the cuffs of her cardigan and smoothing her hair. "I was merely deciding whether to organise the mail before or after I look over the inventory for the shop."

"You have," her daughter insisted, stepping down onto the linoleum. "I came down to get a glass of squash, saw you, went back up to finish a video, and you’re still in the same spot. It’s weird."

Amanda glanced at the grandfather clock in the dining room. It had been seven minutes, actually. Close enough. She picked up her tea, taking a cautious sip that did absolutely nothing to clear the sudden, dry tightness in her throat.

Her daughter wandered closer, her eyes tracking Amanda’s rigid, perfect posture. She pointed a thumb at the brown paper. "Is it shop stuff? Did another customer try to return a scented candle after burning the whole thing?"

"No," Amanda said crisply.

"Tax stuff?"

"No."

"Parking fine?"

Amanda gave her a pointed, authoritative look over the rim of her mug. "I don't get parking fines, darling. I am a highly precise driver."

"You got one last summer when we went to John Lewis," her daughter countered, a tiny, knowing smirk appearing at the corner of her mouth.

"That was a technical dispute regarding the council’s lack of clear signage in the multi-storey."

"It was three fines, Mum. In one week."

Amanda sighed heavily, setting her tea down with a small, sharp clink. "It isn't a parking fine."

Her daughter stepped right up to the table, her casual indifference dropping away as she squinted at the typed return address in the upper-left corner. Her expression changed slightly, her shoulders shifting back as she realised exactly what it was.

"Oh," she said quietly.

Amanda looked away, focusing on a tiny, almost imperceptible scuff mark near the front door. "Oh?"

"The... the final divorce thing? With Dad?"

Amanda gave a single, stiff nod. "The decree absolute paperwork. Yes. The final legalities."

Her daughter was quiet for a moment. It wasn't the awkward, heavy silence that used to follow mentions of her father during the first bitter weeks of the split, back when Amanda was still trying to pretend they were just taking "a little marriage sabbatical" to the other mums at the gate. It was just a thoughtful, observant pause.

"Are you gonna open it?"

"Yes," Amanda said, her voice sounding far more clinical and breezy than she felt. "One doesn't simply leave it to biodegrade on the console table. It would ruin the aesthetic of the hallway."

"Right," her daughter said. Another pause stretched out, filled only by the distant hum of the designer fridge from the kitchen. "You don't have to do it right this second, though. You look like you're about to sit an exam."

Amanda let out a dry, unexpected laugh, the tight posture in her chest cracking just a fraction. "I've sat exams, darling. They were significantly more straightforward than this."

"You looked less stressed when you were organising the school winter fayre," her daughter noted, crossing her arms.

"That is a historical inaccuracy. I was practically catatonic during the winter fayre. Anne managed to lose the keys to the tombola, and Julia brought shop-bought mince pies. It was an absolute battlefield."

"Your hair was neater then."

Amanda groaned softly, reaching down to pick up the envelope. She turned it over in her hands, feeling the thick, unglamorous texture of the paper, then immediately put it back down in the same spot. Her daughter watched the entire sequence with brutal accuracy.

"Mum," she said, her tone dropping into something surprisingly mature. "Just open it. Get it over with."

"Wonderful," Amanda muttered, her fingers twitching against her skirt. "Even my own child is bullying me in my own hallway now. The breakdown of parental respect is absolute."

"You deal with the school gate mums all day. You're completely immune to bullying."

"That is not how psychological immunity works, I assure you. Kevin’s passive-aggressive comments about the class charity collection are deeply wounding."

"Just open it," her daughter said firmly, nudging the envelope an inch closer to Amanda’s fingers. "Go on."

Amanda finally slipped her perfectly manicured finger under the flap, tearing the paper with a sharp, ragged rip that sounded incredibly loud in the quiet house. She pulled out the contents, three pages of crisp, white bond paper, stapled at the top left.

The text was exactly what she’d spent months negotiating and bleeding money for. Dates, formal case numbers, signatures from a judge she’d never met, and standard legal jargon detailing the final, irrevocable dissolution of her marriage.

It was entirely sterile. There was nothing emotional in it, no mention of the years she’d spent pretending they were the perfect, enviable couple, no footnote about the absolute misery of the final two years in that silent, overly decorated house. Just an official confirmation that a legal contract between two citizens had been dissolved by the state.

When Amanda had imagined this specific afternoon six months ago, sitting in her lawyer’s office with a chest full of hot, defensive pride, she had expected a massive wave of relief. She had thought there would be a sudden lightness in her lungs, or at least a grim satisfaction that she’d maintained her dignity.

Instead, she just felt strangely hollowed out. It was like she’d spent half a year sprinting up an incredibly steep hill to keep up appearances, only to realize there was absolutely nothing waiting for her on the other side except an empty field and a long walk back.

"You alright?" her daughter asked, her eyes searching Amanda’s face.

Amanda looked up, instantly smoothing her features into her standard, effortless "everything is fabulous" expression. "Fine. Perfectly fine. In fact, it’s a positive milestone."

Her daughter immediately pulled a face, rolling her eyes toward the ceiling. "Oh, brilliant. So you're not fine at all then."

"I am a grown woman, darling, and I am telling you I am perfectly fine. The paperwork is exactly as my solicitor outlined."

"Mum," her daughter said, her voice softening into something genuine. "You don't have to do that voice with me."

Amanda looked down at the pages, folding them back along their sharp, crisp creases. She did it meticulously, lining up the edges until they were perfectly square, before sliding them back into the torn brown envelope. "I just... I suppose I thought I’d feel different. Less heavy."

Her daughter nodded once, leaning against the doorframe. "Yeah," she said quietly. That was all. Somehow, the total lack of fuss made Amanda feel even more exposed.

Thursday arrived in a chaotic, exhausting blur. The final two weeks before the Christmas holidays always transformed the school gates from a standard social hierarchy into a loud, frantic madhouse.

The mums were all vibrating on a frequency of pure stress, arguing over who was contributing what to the teacher's end-of-term hamper, and Kevin had already cornered Amanda twice about the "gender politics" of the school nativity.

By the time Amanda finally managed to escape the drop-off and her afternoon shift at the boutique, her head was pounding with a dull, persistent ache. She drove through the dark London streets, the winter air thick with fog, and arrived at Liz's house just after six o'clock.

Amanda had framed it to her daughter as a "casual childcare swap", a chance for her daughter to study and escape the post-divorce quiet of their own house, while Amanda ostensibly helped Liz manage her chaotic household.

The outdoor Christmas decorations were already in full swing.

A string of cheap multi-coloured lights had been strung haphazardly around the front bay window; the left half was flashing with aggressive, strobe-like speed, while the right half appeared to have given up entirely, hanging dead and dark against the brickwork. It was the exact kind of aesthetic disaster that would normally give Amanda a minor panic attack.

"Alright, mate?" Liz called out from the kitchen, her voice easily cutting through the noise. She was wearing her old work flannel, the sleeves rolled up to reveal her forearms, still smudged with a bit of grey dust from the yard. "Don't let them tell you the blue controller doesn't work; it just needs a proper tap on the side."

Amanda stood in the tiny hallway, hanging her pristine coat on the peg next to a row of damp school bags. "I am absolutely not participating in any digital disputes tonight, Liz."

"Sit down, Amanda, before you drop from the look of you," Liz chuckled, turning back to the hob.

Dinner was a loud, messy affair involving an enormous pot of spaghetti bolognese. One of the boys managed to drop a meatball directly onto his clean trousers within three minutes, the other immediately blamed the gravity of the room, and the household hummed with its usual, unchic energy.

It was loud, chaotic, and entirely real. And yet, the entire time, Amanda could feel the distinct, heavy weight of the divorce papers folded neatly inside her luxury leather handbag, which was resting on the floor right beside her chair. It felt like an anchor she was dragging around behind her.

Once the plates were cleared, the children scattered with practiced efficiency. The boys went back to their digital warfare upstairs, and the kitchen slowly settled into the comfortable, messy aftermath that followed family meals.

Amanda stood by the counter, slowly stirring a fresh mug of tea, while Liz went to work shoving plates into the dishwasher with her usual lack of ceremony.

"We should definitely do something next summer," Liz said casually, stepping over to wipe a stray bit of tomato sauce off the counter. "Maybe take the boys somewhere down south if the traffic isn't a nightmare. Depends on the football pre-season schedules, obviously."

Amanda set her tea down carefully, trying to ground herself. "Your son is twelve, Liz. He plays for a local Sunday league team. They don't have a pre-season tour."

"Exactly," Liz said without missing a beat. "Which means the manager is incredibly organized and unhinged about training dates. But we'll figure it out. Maybe summer. Maybe Easter first, depending on when the term ends. We've got the secondary school transition visits in March anyway, so we’ll be busy then."

She kept talking, her voice steady and practical as she ran through the calendar, school holidays, bank holidays, uniform fittings for next autumn. It was a completely ordinary list of completely ordinary things. The kind of casual, logistical conversation people only ever had when they completely took for granted that there would be a next year together. A future that was already signed and paid for.

Amanda froze internally. Liz had answered so naturally. There hadn't been a single second of hesitation, no careful calculation of boundaries. It was just an automatic assumption. In Liz’s mind, there was never any question that when next summer arrived, they would be right there in the middle of the plans. Liz said we without hesitation. Liz had started imagining a future, and Amanda realized she hadn't. Not because she didn't want one, but because she didn't know how.

"Earth to Amanda," Liz's voice broke through.

She blinked, her head snapping up. Liz was standing right in front of her, a slight frown puckering the space between her eyebrows. "What?"

"You vanished," Liz said gently, setting her cloth down. "You went off into that dark place again."

"I didn't vanish," Amanda said, her rigid, perfect posture instantly snapping back into place. "I was calculating the term dates."

The next afternoon, the cold winter sun was already dropping below the horizon when Amanda ran into Julia in the school car park. The ground was slick with black ice, and Julia was wrapped in an enormous faux-fur coat that made her look like a highly fashionable bear as she fumbled with her car keys.

Julia took one look at Amanda’s face as she approached her vehicle and immediately stopped, her key ring dangling from her fingers. "Oh, no," Julia said, her voice dropping into a groan. "You've got your thinking face on, Amanda."

Amanda hesitated, the cold air stinging her cheeks. She looked down at her immaculate leather gloves, smoothing the material over her knuckles. "The divorce papers arrived yesterday. The final ones. The decree absolute."

Julia blinked. For a split second, her usual sharp, cynical gate-persona faltered, replaced by something genuinely surprised. Then a wide, bright smile broke across her face. "Well. My goodness. Congratulations, darling! That’s... that’s huge. We should get drinks. Proper drinks, at that ridiculously expensive place with the velvet chairs."

Amanda didn't answer. She just kept her eyes fixed on the gravel between her boots, her mouth pressed into a thin, straight line.

Julia’s smile slowly disappeared, her posture shifting as she took off her oversized sunglasses. "Oh," she said softly, the tone entirely different now. "You don't look relieved."

Amanda looked away, watching a car pull out of the school gates. "Everyone keeps talking about the divorce as though it were the main obstacle. I spent months believing that once the paperwork was signed, everything else would become clear."

For a long moment, neither of them spoke. The distant sound of children shouting from the after-school club drifted across the playground, thin and sharp in the freezing air. Julia leaned back against her car door, her fur coat rustling against the metal.

"You know," Julia said, her voice uncharacteristically serious, devoid of any of her usual performance. "Everybody thinks the leaving is the hard part. The shouting, the splitting of the expensive wine glasses, the dramatic exit into the Uber."

Amanda let out a short, humorless laugh. "It felt fairly difficult at the time, Julia, I assure you."

"No," Julia said, shaking her head firmly. "That’s just logistical anger. The hard part is figuring out who the hell you are after the dust actually settles."

Amanda stared at her, her hand freezing on her car handle.

"I've watched enough of my friends go through it," Julia continued softly. "You spend years being the perfect, envy-inducing wife with the perfect, envy-inducing house, and then suddenly the paperwork says you're just... you. It’s terrifying, because you realise you’ve entirely forgotten who that person is without the audience."

Something in Amanda's chest tightened so hard it felt like a physical stitch. She couldn't look Julia in the eye. Because that was exactly it, it wasn't the legalities, or the finances, or the finality of the signatures. It was the vast space that came after the performance was over.

That night, Amanda stayed at Liz's house much later than she usually did on a weekday. By eleven, the children were all asleep upstairs, the house had gone completely still, and the rhythmic thud of the washing machine had finally stopped.

Outside the bedroom window, the cheap, broken Christmas lights continued to blink, casting soft, intermittent flashes of red and green across the plaster of the ceiling.

Liz was lying beside her under the heavy duvet, her head propped up on her hand. Amanda was staring straight up at the ceiling, her hands flat against her stomach, the rigid perfection she maintained all day finally beginning to fracture in the dark.

"Amanda," Liz's voice broke through the quiet, closer now.

"Hm?"

"You're miles away again, mate," Liz said, her hand reaching out under the covers to nudge Amanda’s hip. "I can practically hear the cogs grinding from here."

Amanda let out a soft, tired laugh, her shoulders sinking into the mattress. "I know. I'm sorry."

"What are you thinking about?"

For a second, Amanda considered using her standard defense, a quick lie about school schedules. Then she looked at the red light flashing across the wardrobe door and decided against it. "The divorce papers came on Tuesday, Liz."

The bedroom went completely quiet. Liz shifted her weight, dropping her head back onto the pillow so she was looking directly at Amanda's profile in the dim light. "Oh," she said softly. "The actual final ones? How do you feel?"

"That’s the absurd part," Amanda whispered, her voice cracking slightly in the dark. "I thought I’d feel different. I thought I’d feel lighter, or at least have some sense of clarity. I spent months believing there would be some completely new, flawless version of me waiting on the other side of that envelope, but I just feel hollow. I thought there'd be some version of me waiting on the other side, but I don't know who I am anymore."

Neither of them spoke for a few breaths. The winter wind rattled the windowpane lightly. Then, Liz reached across the space between them and slid her fingers into Amanda’s hand, her grip warm, rough, and completely solid.

"You don't have to figure it out tonight, Amanda," Liz said quietly, her thumb rubbing a slow circle over the back of Amanda's knuckles. "The paper just arrived two days ago. Give yourself five minutes."

Amanda let out a soft, dry laugh, but her throat felt tight. Liz's words were meant to be comforting, but they were exactly the wrong thing to say. Amanda didn't want to wait. She desperately wanted the answers delivered to her immediately in a beautifully presented summary. She wanted a script to tell her what to do next.

But Liz already knew who she was. Liz didn't look at her own life through the lens of what other people expected to see; she was entirely anchored in her own skin, already living in the middle of her real life. Amanda felt incredibly tired, the weight of her own complicated, private performance pressing down on her.

Later, long after Liz’s breathing had slowed into the deep, heavy rhythm of sleep, Amanda stayed wide awake. The old house creaked occasionally as the temperature dropped, and outside, the broken string of Christmas lights continued their silent, relentless flash, dark, flash, dark through the thin curtains.

Beside her, Liz slept peacefully, her arm still draped loosely over Amanda’s waist, anchoring her to the bed. Amanda lay perfectly still, listening to the quiet sound of her breathing.

A few months ago, the thing she’d been most afraid of was the simple act of falling in love with another woman. It had felt like an impossible, terrifying deviation from her carefully curated life script. But standing here now, she realised that part wasn't the scary bit anymore. She was entirely, irreversibly in love with the woman sleeping next to her.

The frightening part was everything that came next.

Because Liz talked about next summer, next Easter, and next year at the dinner table as though those things were completely obvious, like milestones on a road they were already traveling down together.

Liz was ready for a future, but Amanda still felt like she was standing in the ruins of her past, terrified of the old life breaking apart completely when the children knew nothing, the school gates knew nothing, and only Julia and Meg held the truth.

Finding her way out meant letting go of the script entirely, and lying there in the dark, watching the red lights blink across the ceiling, Amanda had never felt more terrified.

Chapter 15: In Plain Sight

Summary:

At the winter fayre, a single word lands harder than Amanda expects. Liz finally tells her what it feels like to be hidden.

Notes:

ive planned this fic for almost 2 months now ive basically finished it but everytime i read it back i keep changing everything and i neveer write happy shit so :DDDDD

Chapter Text

The annual winter fayre was always the longest day of the school year, but by three o'clock on Saturday afternoon, Amanda felt like she had been on her feet for a week. The main hall was completely packed. It was incredibly hot, the air thick with the smell of damp coats, spilled mulled wine, and the overly sweet icing from the Class 2 cake stall.

Amanda stood near the double doors, holding her clipboard tight against her ribs. She was tracking everything with her usual nervous energy. The tombola table was already running out of prize labels, the extension lead for the mince pie warmer was stretched way too thin across the floorboards, and Kevin was currently having a minor crisis near the entrance because the eco-friendly artificial snow hadn't expanded correctly.

"Amanda, thank goodness," Anne said, pushing her way through the crowd while holding a tray of empty plastic cups. Her face was bright red. "The Year 4 raffle has completely ground to a halt. Darius has managed to drop the book of pink tickets behind the radiator, and there’s a queue of grandparents stretching all the way back to the main corridor. It’s a total bottleneck. Can you do something?"

Amanda clicked her pen twice. "I’ll handle it, Anne. Go and check on the kitchen staff. Make sure they aren't letting the urns run dry."

As she walked toward the corner where the raffle was set up, she spotted Liz.

Liz had arrived an hour earlier with her two boys. Georgie and Manus had immediately taken off with them, the four of them disappearing toward the coconut shy with a handful of pound coins.

Liz hadn't even asked what needed doing; she had just rolled up the sleeves of her flannel shirt and started helping. Right now, she was lifting a heavy wooden trestle table by herself, shifting it two feet to the left so the fire exit wasn't blocked, while laughing with the school caretaker about something.

She looked completely at home in the middle of the mess, her old denim jacket a sharp contrast to the smart wool coats and cashmere scarves the other parents were wearing.

Amanda’s chest did a strange, tight flip. It was that familiar, heavy feeling she spent most of her working days trying to push down. She took a deep breath, adjusted the collar of her silk blouse, and walked over to the raffle stall.

The queue had already started moving by the time she got there, mostly because Liz had stepped in behind the table. She had a biro tucked behind her ear and was tearing off ticket stubs with fast, easy movements, chatting to the parents as they handed over their money.

"There you go, love," Liz was saying to Mrs. Higgins, handing her a long strip of blue tickets. "Fold them up small and keep them in your pocket. The top hamper’s got a proper bottle of gin in it this year, so you’ve got a good chance."

Mrs. Higgins turned around as Amanda stepped behind the table, looking visibly relieved. "Oh, Amanda, honestly. Your partner’s absolute magic with the cash box. We’d have been stuck here until five if she hadn't come over and sorted out the change."

Amanda stopped moving.

The background noise of the hall, the loud Christmas music, the shouting children, and the clinking coins seemed to go completely quiet. Mrs. Higgins wasn't smirking or trying to drop a hint. She wasn't one of the gossipy mums from the morning drop-off who looked for things to talk about.

She was just an elderly grandmother who didn't follow the school gate politics at all. When she used the word, she meant it entirely innocently, just a partner for the stall, a teammate to help manage the chaotic afternoon rush.

But the word hit Amanda like a physical blow anyway. Her brain didn't process the context; it only registered the syllable. The correction came out of Amanda’s mouth before she could even check herself. Her voice was too fast, too loud, dropping into her stiffest headteacher tone.

"She's not my partner."

Mrs. Higgins blinked. The smile left her face instantly, replaced by a look of sheer confusion. She had only meant the woman helping out with the change, but Amanda’s sharp, immediate defense made the moment instantly awkward. Mrs. Higgins looked from Amanda’s rigid shoulders down to Liz, who was still holding the book of blue raffle tickets in her hand.

"Oh," Mrs. Higgins said, her face turning pink. She shifted her handbag up her arm. "Sorry. I just thought... sorry."

"Liz is a parent volunteer," Amanda said, her voice sounding incredibly tight as she stared down at her clipboard, desperate to force the exchange back into a safe, clinical box. "She offered to help us with the heavy lifting and the logistics this afternoon."

"Right. Of course, that's what I meant," Mrs. Higgins muttered, looking thoroughly embarrassed as she quickly shuffled away into the crowd toward the tombola.

Mrs. Higgins disappeared into the crowd. For a second, neither of them moved. Amanda kept staring at the cash box, her eyes fixed on the metal edge. Beside her, Liz finished tearing off the strip of tickets she’d been holding. The movement was completely normal. Almost. The smile she’d been wearing all afternoon was gone.

"Need anything else?" Liz asked.

Amanda looked up. Liz was already stepping away from the table, her hands sliding into her pockets. Before Amanda could answer, she’d disappeared back into the crowd.

Amanda stood alone behind the stall, using her fingers to count out a stack of five-pound notes that she had already counted twenty minutes ago.

"Bloody hell, Amanda, you look like you’ve seen a ghost," Meg’s loud voice boomed out from behind her.

Meg strode over to the raffle stall, carrying a plastic cup overflowing with mulled wine and looking entirely unbothered by the school rules. Her expensive leather coat was undone, and she was already half-laughing before she even reached the table. "If you count those fivers any harder, you're going to put your thumb straight through them. What's crawled up your arse?"

Amanda forced her facial muscles into a stiff, professional smile, her fingers freezing on the cash box. "Nothing at all, Meg. Just trying to ensure the floats are balanced for the afternoon draw. It's a very busy day."

"Right," Meg said, taking a loud sip of her drink and scanning the room with bright, sharp eyes. "Well, whatever it is, you need to loosen up. It’s a primary school fayre, not a board meeting. By the way, I saw Liz hauling those massive trestle tables near the entrance earlier. Absolute lifesaver, that woman. I told her she should put it on her CV. Where’s she gone anyway? I wanted to buy her a drink."

"She went back into the hall," Amanda said, her voice coming out a little too quickly, her eyes darting away to look at her clipboard. "She's... helping out where needed."

Meg looked at her for a second, her eyebrows lifting slightly behind her designer glasses. She didn't say anything immediately, but her sharp corporate instincts usually picked up on a shift in tone long before anyone else did.

Before Meg could press the issue, Julia practically collapsed against the edge of the raffle table, a cloud of frantic, stressed-out energy following her.

"Amanda, thank God, I've been looking for you everywhere," Julia gasped, her hair coming loose from her clip, her eyes wide with total panic. "I’ve completely lost James. I left him at the face-painting queue for two minutes because Ivy was throwing up simulated strawberry icing behind the Year 3 display, and now he’s just gone. He’s completely vanished. Do you think he’s gone outside? It’s pouring rain. Oh god, the Alpha Mums are already looking at me like I’m a terrible mother, I can see them whispering near the mince pies-"

"Julia, breathe," Amanda interrupted, her headteacher voice kicking in automatically, grateful for the distraction. "James is fine. I saw him five minutes ago with Kevin near the eco-snow machine. Kevin was letting him help push the expansion buttons."

Julia let out a massive, shuddering sigh of relief, dropping her head into her hands. "Oh, thank god. Thank god. I am on the absolute verge of a nervous breakdown, I swear. I still have to bake forty biscuits for tomorrow's church group, and my house looks like a bomb site." She lifted her head, looking between Amanda and Meg, her frantic mind finally slowing down enough to look at Amanda's face. "Wait, Amanda... you look awful. Are you okay?"

"I am perfectly fine," Amanda said stiffly, clamping the clipboard tight against her chest. "I simply have a great deal to manage."

Meg took another slow sip of her wine, her eyes narrowed slightly as she watched the tight line of Amanda's shoulders. "She's lying, Julia. Come on, Amanda, out with it."

Amanda felt a drop of sweat run down the back of her neck. The heat in the hall was getting suffocating. "Mrs. Higgins called Liz my partner," she said, her voice dropping to a sharp, low whisper so the surrounding parents couldn't hear.

Julia blinked, her chaotic mind trying to process the information. "Your partner? Like... at the stall?"

"Yes," Amanda snapped, her face burning. "But I corrected her. Immediately. I told her Liz was just a parent volunteer. I had to, Julia. It wouldn't have been appropriate to leave it hanging. Not here, not in front of everyone."

Julia stared at her, her own domestic anxieties momentarily forgotten. A rare look of quiet, serious pity crossed her face. "Why did that bother you so much, Amanda?"

"Because it isn't true," Amanda said, her jaw tight, her voice rising slightly before she caught herself. She looked around the crowded hall nervously. "It isn't public, Julia. Nobody at this school knows anything. The children don't know, the chair of governors doesn't know. It’s a private matter. She isn't my partner when we are standing in this hall."

Meg didn't say anything for a long moment. She just set her plastic cup down on the wooden table with a soft thud. The boisterous, hard-partying energy she usually brought to the group vanished, replaced by the blunt, unvarnished honesty she normally reserved for the boardroom.

"You're an idiot, Amanda," Meg said quietly.

Amanda’s head snapped up, her defensive pride flaring. "Beg your pardon?"

"You heard me," Meg said, leaning her hands on the table and looking directly into Amanda’s eyes. "You’re so busy trying to keep your life looking like a bloody John Lewis catalogue that you can't even see what's right in front of you. You think you're protecting your job or your reputation, but you're just being a coward."

"Meg, don't," Julia said softly, looking uncomfortably between them, intimidated by the sudden tension.

"No, Julia, she needs to hear it," Meg said, her voice steady and completely level. She looked back at Amanda. "Liz rolled up her sleeves today and worked her arse off for your school because she cares about you. She doesn't give a toss about the PTA or what the school gate mums say behind her back. And the second someone uses a word that makes you uncomfortable, you drop her like a hot potato just to keep the governors happy."

Amanda opened her mouth to argue, to deploy a perfectly structured defense about her hierarchy, the delicate nature of her position, and the absolute necessity of boundaries. But the words died in her throat.

"You're exhausting yourself," Julia added in a rare moment of quiet clarity, her voice gentle compared to Meg's. "You’re trying so hard to keep everything in a perfect little box so nobody sees a single flaw. But Meg's right, Amanda. You can't control what people think forever."

Meg picked her cup back up, turning away toward the crowd. "Fix it, Amanda. Before you look up and realise you've managed to keep your perfect little reputation entirely intact, and you're sitting in that big house completely on your own."

The two of them walked away, leaving Amanda standing entirely alone behind the stall. She kept her eyes fixed on the metal cash box, her fingers trembling slightly as she counted out the same stack of five-pound notes for the third time.

The drive back to Liz’s house was completely silent. The boys and Georgie were crammed into the back of the transit van, totally exhausted from running around all afternoon. Georgie was leaning her head against the side window, her eyes shut and her iPad sitting unread in her lap.

Liz kept both hands on the steering wheel, her eyes locked onto the wet road ahead. The green light from the dashboard clock showed it was just past nine o'clock.

It wasn't until they were standing in the quiet of Liz’s kitchen, after the kids had gone upstairs and crawled into their beds, that anyone spoke. The kitchen was cold, and the old boiler in the corner was making a loud clicking noise as it tried to start up.

Amanda stood near the kitchen table, her wool coat still buttoned up to her chin, and her leather gloves clutched tight in her hand. She couldn't bear the quiet anymore. She needed to explain it, to fix the tension before she went home.

"I corrected her," Amanda said, her voice sounding thin in the quiet room. "It wouldn't have been appropriate."

Liz stood by the counter, her back to the room. She didn't move for a few seconds. Then she closed the fridge door and turned around, leaning back against the laminate with her arms crossed over her chest. She gave a single, slow nod.

"Right," Liz said.

Amanda immediately hated that answer. It was too flat, completely stripped of the casual warmth that usually filled the kitchen. She shifted her weight, her heels loud against the linoleum. "Right?"

"Yeah," Liz said.

"That's all you're going to say?"

Liz looked down at the floor for a second, staring at the toes of her work boots, before lifting her eyes again. "What do you want me to say?"

Amanda opened her mouth, then closed it. "I don't know."

Liz rubbed a hand across the back of her neck, looking incredibly tired. "I get it, Amanda."

"No, you don't," Amanda said, her voice dropping to a whisper.

"I do." Liz's voice wasn't angry; it was just steady and completely level. "I know exactly why you said it."

Amanda felt her stomach drop, a cold sensation spreading through her chest. "You do?"

"'Course I do," Liz said, giving a small, heavy shrug. "You got scared."

Amanda looked away, her eyes fixing on the crumpled school letters sitting by the fruit bowl. She felt completely exposed, stripped of the armour she’d been wearing all day. "It wasn't about you."

The second the words left her mouth, she knew she’d made it worse. The kitchen felt completely silent, the small clicking of the boiler the only sound left.

Liz laughed once. It wasn't because it was funny. It was just a short, dry sound, like there wasn't anything else to do with the sentence. "Yeah."

Amanda winced, her fingers tightening around her leather gloves until her knuckles ached. "That's not what I meant, Liz."

"I know." Liz pushed herself away from the counter, straightening up. "But that's sort of the problem, isn't it?"

Amanda swallowed hard, her throat feeling dry. She wanted to step closer, to reach out, but the space between the kitchen table and the counter felt completely unbridgeable.

"I've never asked you to tell anybody," Liz said, her voice quiet and simple.

"I know."

"And I'm not asking now," Liz said, folding her arms over her chest again. "But standing there while you explained who I was..." She shook her head once, her mouth dropping into a tight line. "That felt rotten."

Amanda stared at her. She had a dozen logical arguments ready, a whole list of reasons why the timing was wrong and why the school environment was a specific kind of minefield. But none of them fit the look on Liz's face.

"You said I was a volunteer," Liz said.

Liz gave a small, careful shrug, looking out the dark kitchen window where the rain was starting to streak against the glass. "I know that's technically true." The corner of her mouth twitched into a tiny, humorless line. "I just didn't realise that's what I was."

She didn't wait for Amanda to answer. Liz walked right past her, her shoulder brushing against Amanda's arm, not with the warm, easy touch from before, but with a deliberate, heavy distance.

"Go on up," Liz said, her hand reaching for the light switch by the door. "I'm going to check the back lock."

"Liz, don't. Please."

Amanda’s hand shot out, catching Liz by the stiff fabric of her flannel sleeve before she could flick the switch. Her fingers were trembling. "Don't just turn the lights out on me. Don't do that."

Liz stopped, but she didn't look back around. Her arm stayed completely rigid under Amanda's grip. "I’m not turning the lights out on you, Amanda. I'm trying to lock up so we can go to bed."

"You know what I mean," Amanda whispered, her voice cracking as the perfect, controlled headteacher persona finally began to splinter at the edges. "You're slipping away into that... that quiet place you go when you're done with someone, and I'm standing right here."

Liz slowly turned her head, her face half-shadowed by the dim light of the single bulb over the sink. "I'm not done with you. If I were done with you, your bags would be on the front porch, and I’d be down the pub. I'm just tired."

"I was terrified," Amanda blurted out, the truth tearing out of her before she could polish it or dress it up in professional vocabulary. She let go of Liz’s sleeve, her hands dropping uselessly to her sides. "When Mrs. Higgins said it, my chest went completely tight. I didn't even process that she just meant the stall, all I heard was the word, all I could think about was the morning drop-off, the governors, the whispering... Julia and Meg already know, and it feels like the walls are closing in on me, Liz. I just... I panicked."

Liz looked at her for a long, heavy beat. The harsh line of her mouth softened, just a fraction, but she didn't step closer.

"I know you panicked," Liz said, her voice dropping into that painfully simple, grounded register. "I told you. I get it."

"Then why are you looking at me like I've ruined everything?"

"Because you don't see what you actually did," Liz said. She leaned her lower back against the doorframe, folding her arms over her chest again. "You think you were protecting your job, or your kids, or your big house. But you weren't. You were protecting yourself."

"That's not fair," Amanda said, her throat tightening. "I have to think about the optics. If the school board-"

"I don't give a fuck about the school board, Amanda," Liz interrupted, her voice steady and quiet. "And neither did Mrs. Higgins. But you were so busy building a wall to keep the rest of the world out that you didn't care if you jammed my fingers in the bricks while you did it."

Amanda winced, the analogy cutting straight through her remaining defenses. She looked down at her expensive leather gloves, still clenched tightly in her fist.

"You're staying here," Liz continued, her eyes fixed on Amanda's face. "You’re sleeping in my bed. You’re letting me hold you when you cry about the divorce papers, and you're letting my boys make a total mess around your kids. We're living a whole life together behind this closed door." She gave a short, humorless shrug. "But the second we’re out there, under the proper lights, you treat me like a secret you're ashamed of. Like I'm some messy bit of rubbish you tracked in from the car park."

"I am not ashamed of you," Amanda breathed, stepping forward, desperate to close the distance between them. "Liz, I swear to you, I am not ashamed of you."

"Then what are you?" Liz asked.

The question was so direct, so entirely devoid of malice or accusation, that Amanda couldn't find a single word to fill the space. She stood there in her smart wool coat, looking entirely out of place in the cramped, cold kitchen, completely stripped of her armor.

Liz waited a few seconds, then let out a long, slow breath through her nose. She didn't look angry; she just looked incredibly sad. "That's what I thought," Liz said softly.

She turned back to the door, her hand moving past the light switch to the heavy iron bolt of the back door. She slid it into place with a loud, final clack that echoed through the quiet house.

"Go on upstairs," Liz said, not looking back. "The immersion heater's been on for an hour, so the water's warm if you want to wash your face. I’ll be up in a minute."

Chapter 16: Someday

Summary:

Amanda spends so long trying to protect her life that she never notices she's letting it slip away.

Chapter Text

The Thursday after the winter fayre felt wrong from the moment Amanda turned her car engine off in Liz’s driveway. It wasn't a hostile atmosphere; there was no slamming of cupboard doors or heavy, pointed sighs. It was far more disorienting than that. It was simply off.

Amanda had driven over alone under the pretense of dropping off some leftover PTA printouts. When Amanda walked through the back door, carrying a towering, glossy stack of Vogue editions she’d promised to clear out and her second-best wool coat over her arm, the routine of the house clicked into motion exactly as it always did.

Liz was standing by the stove; she didn't look angry. When she turned around, her face was perfectly pleasant.

"All right?" Liz said, reaching for the kettle. "Tea?"

"Yes, please. That would be wonderful," Amanda said, her voice coming out with that precise, polite posture she usually reserved for a difficult conversation with a private school admissions officer.

She sat down at the Formica kitchen table, unbuttoning her cuffs, her eyes tracking Liz’s movements with an ache she couldn't quite stabilise. She was waiting for a sign. A stiff shoulder, a slightly harder drop of the ceramic mug against the counter, a lack of eye contact, anything she could identify as proof that Liz was still carrying the weight of the raffle stall.

But there was nothing. Liz handed over the mug, gave her a brief, entirely normal smile, and went back to checking the fish fingers under the grill.

That was what made it worse. Liz wasn't cold; she was accommodating. Friendly, politely normal, it was a terrifyingly efficient performance of a good host, and it left Amanda completely stranded on the outside of it.

"Liz," Amanda began, her fingers tightening around the warm curve of the mug. "About Saturday. I really think we should-"

Liz pushed past the table to slap the kitchen window pane, trying to get the latch to catch against the rising wind outside. It took three loud, rattling thuds before it finally clicked shut. She turned back to the counter, entirely unbothered, wiping her damp hands on her jeans. "Sorry, what were you saying?"

"I just meant... regarding what happened with Mrs. Higgins, I feel-"

The back door rattled open, and Charlie let himself in, his school jumper half-tucked and his face streaked with dirt from the yard. "Mum, the chain's come off my bike again. It’s all greasy."

"Brief it in the scullery, then, don't get it on the rug," Liz said, already moving past Amanda’s chair without her shoulder so much as brushing Amanda’s sleeve. "Go wash your hands for tea first."

Every opening Amanda tried to find over the next three days vanished exactly like that; life simply got in the way. The kettle boiled; a child spilled blackcurrant squash; the timer on the cooker went off. Liz never dropped her guard, but she never raised her voice either. She simply remained entirely, smoothly accessible, while staying a thousand miles away.

Amanda found herself wishing, with an increasing sense of neurotic anxiety, that Liz would just shout at her. An argument was a structure Amanda understood; an argument had parameters, it had an opening statement, a period of negotiation, and a conventional resolution. You could apologise for a specific insult, or you could negotiate a settlement.

This quiet, pleasant distance felt like being slowly, systematically disassembled by someone who wasn't even angry enough to look her in the eye.

Tuesday evening, the school Carol Service provided Amanda with the ultimate hiding place. St. Jude’s Church was freezing, the massive stone pillars sweating cold, damp despite the roaring gas heaters near the pews. It was the usual mid-December madness, a high-stakes logistical nightmare that required every ounce of Amanda’s executive control.

The Year 2 angels were currently missing three sets of tinsel halos. The vicar was complaining that the extension cords for the keyboard were a trip hazard, and Kevin was hovering near the font, sweating profusely while trying to hand out programs to parents who were aggressively demanding extra seating tickets.

"Amanda, thank goodness," Anne whispered, scurrying up the aisle with her cardigan buttoned up wrong. "The Year 5s have started eating the decorative satsumas from the altar display. And Mrs. Henderson is threatening to pull her boy out of the choir entirely because he’s been put in the second row behind a taller child."

"Anne, take a breath," Amanda said, her voice dropping into that smooth, unshakeable register that made the other mothers instantly fall into line. "Tell Mrs. Henderson that the choir is arranged strictly by vocal pitch, not height, and that her son’s tenor is essential for the descant. Then go and confiscate the fruit."

"Oh. Right. Yes, Amanda," Anne murmured, visibly steadied, scurrying off toward the altar.

Amanda adjusted the lapels of her tailored camel coat, checked her personalized leather clipboard, and stepped up to the front pews to coordinate the arrival of the school governors.

She was completely in her element. She was smart, she was entirely competent, she was the absolute center of gravity in the room. Parents in the front rows were watching her with that familiar mixture of deference and social anxiety, nodding respectfully as she guided the unruly crowd into order.

Then she looked toward the back of the church.

Liz had walked in. She was wearing her heavy denim jacket over a dark jumper, her hair pulled back in a messy clip that looked like it had been done in the wing mirror of the van.

Charlie was trailing behind her, his coat unzipped and his school tie slightly askew. Georgie and Manus, who had arrived separately with their grandmother earlier, had immediately spotted him and walked to the back, laughing at something Charlie was doing with his program.

Amanda watched them from her elevated position near the front aisle. She saw her daughter reach over to help Charlie untangle his scarf, she saw Liz take a crumpled tissue out of her pocket and hand it to Max without looking up.

And for the first time in her life, the sight of her daughter looking settled didn't bring Amanda a sense of relief. It brought a cold, sharp spike of absolute terror.

People were looking at them. They were building a picture of Amanda’s life, a map with Liz’s house and Liz’s boys right at the center of it, and it was a picture that Amanda still hadn't admitted to herself was real.

She was standing at the front of the church, holding the seating chart, surrounded by her social achievements, and she felt like a fraud who was about to be caught out by her own child's seat selection.

The service itself passed in a blur of flickering candlelight, slightly out-of-tune recorders, and the smell of damp wool. When the final blessing was given, the congregation dissolved into the traditional, loud chaos of the church hall for mince pies and lukewarm coffee.

Amanda was immediately trapped. This was the part of the evening she normally excelled at, the strategic mingling, the graceful handling of difficult parents, the small talk that kept her status secure.

"A wonderful turnout, Amanda, truly," Mrs. Gable said, cornering her near the tea urn while holding a paper plate of half-eaten pastries. "The infants were adorable. Now, tell me, what are your plans for the holidays? Are you spending it with family?"

"Yes, absolutely," Amanda said automatically, her official smile clicking into place before her brain could even process the prompt. "Just a quiet one this year, I think. Very traditional."

"Will the kids be with their father this year?" another mother, Mrs. Croft, asked, leaning in with an expression of entirely genuine, neighborly interest. "It’s always so difficult that first Christmas after a split, isn't it? My sister went through it last year. The scheduling is a nightmare."

Amanda’s hand froze on her coffee cup.

It was a perfectly reasonable question. It wasn't a trap; it was just the standard conversational currency of December. But the words seemed to bounce off the stone walls, echoing in Amanda's ears until her chest felt tight.

Her divorce was finalised, her marriage was over. The large, pristine house she still lived in with the perfect tree didn't feel like a family home anymore, and the structured dinner at her mother's place had lost its shape. Johnny had Georgie and Manus for Boxing Day, but for Christmas itself...

"We’re... we’re still finalising the details," Amanda said, her voice dropping its smooth resonance, sounding suddenly thin and uneven. "Excuse me, I just need to check on the kitchen staff."

She turned away before they could answer, her heart thumping against her ribs as she navigated the crowded hall. She was looking for an exit, a quiet corner to catch her breath, when she spotted Liz across the room.

Liz was leaning against a radiator, a paper cup of coffee in her hand, surrounded by a group of the Year 4 dads. She was laughing, her head tilted back, her face completely bright and unburdened by the room. She belonged there because she didn't care enough about the room to let it make her small.

Amanda stood near the door, watching her from the shadows of the corridor, and the realisation hit her with the force of a physical blow.

When people asked her about Christmas, when they asked about her family, when they asked about her future, her next year, her life after the wreckage of the last twelve months, the answer in her head wasn't her mother’s house, or her own empty, perfectly decorated lounge, it was Liz. It was the clicking boiler, the grease on the scullery floor, the boys shouting in the living room, and the heavy duvet that left a gap in the middle.

The answer was Liz, but she had spent the entire evening standing under the lights, and she hadn't said it out loud once.

Midnight came, and Amanda had dropped her kids off back at her own house with her mother, who was staying the night to look after her, and driven back to Liz's alone.

The kitchen at Liz’s house was dark, the only illumination coming from the small orange neon bulb on the side of the kettle. Upstairs, the boys' rooms were silent and heavy with sleep.

Amanda stood by the table, still wearing her silk blouse but with her hair down, her fingers tracing the worn edge of the wooden placemat. Liz was leaning against the counter, her arms crossed over her chest, waiting for the water to heat up. The old boiler gave its familiar, metallic click in the corner.

"I know I handled Saturday badly," Amanda said.

The words came out too fast, too cluttered. It was an Amanda apology, an attempt to manage the narrative before it could manage her. "I was tired, and the situation with Mrs. Higgins was highly ambiguous, and given the current scrutiny regarding my position with the committee following the separation, I felt it was necessary to maintain a clear line of demarcation between my responsibilities at the school gates and my-"

"Amanda," Liz said quietly.

Amanda stopped. She looked up, her pulse racing. Liz hadn't rescued her; she hadn't offered a polite "It’s fine" or a casual wave of her hand to clear the air. She just stood there, her blue eyes steady in the dim light, letting the silence stretch until Amanda felt the frantic urge to fill it again.

"I panicked," Amanda admitted, her voice dropping until it was barely audible above the hum of the kettle. "When she said the word... 'partner.' I didn't think about the stall. I just thought about what people would say if they knew."

Liz looked down at the linoleum for a second, then looked back up. She didn't look angry; she just looked entirely detached from the explanation.

"I don't need everybody to know about us, Amanda," Liz said, her voice very quiet, very level. "I’ve never asked you to fly a flag from the school roof. I like my life private, but I need you to stop acting like knowing me would ruin your life."

The line hit Amanda right in the sternum, sharp and cold. She felt her mouth open to deploy the usual arguments, the delicate nature of her social standing, the gossip at the school gates, the specific social minefield of their little circle.

"You don't understand the pressure," Amanda whispered, her hands baring into fists against her skirt. "The parents... women like Anne or Meg... if they think I’ve lost control of my personal life, if they think I’m not what they expect-"

"Amanda," Liz said again, stepping forward just enough so the light from the kettle caught the tired lines around her eyes. "The school gates aren't the problem here. The PTA isn't the problem. The bloody parents aren't the ones keeping you awake at night."

"Then who is?"

"Nobody scares you more than yourself," Liz said.

The kitchen went completely quiet. The kettle reached its boil and clicked off with a sharp, heavy snap, leaving only the sound of the rain outside against the glass.

Amanda stood there, the truth of the sentence settling into her bones like lead. The obstacle wasn't the school circle, it wasn't the divorce papers or the whispering mothers by the mince pies, the obstacle was the forty years she had spent building a fortress out of other people’s expectations, and her own absolute, paralysing inability to imagine a life outside her head.

Liz looked at her for a long moment, then reached for the teapot. "Go on up," she said softly, her tone returning to that polite, gentle distance that had started on Thursday. "I’ll bring the mugs up in a minute."

An hour later, they were in bed.

They were closer than they had been after the fayre; Liz was lying on her back rather than turned away, her shoulder occasionally brushing against Amanda’s as the mattress shifted. But it wasn't fixed, the space in the middle of the duvet was gone, replaced by a strange, heavy awareness of each other that felt twice as wide.

Outside, the cheap Christmas lights on the front windowsill flashed their thin streaks of red and green across the plaster of the ceiling. Red. Green. Red. Green.

Amanda lay perfectly flat, her hands resting on her stomach, staring straight up into the flickering dark. She thought about Christmas, she thought about family, she thought about the way Georgie had looked sitting next to Liz's boys in the pew tonight.

Every image of the future she had allowed herself to see over the past month, every single one of them, included the small kitchen downstairs, the mud by the door, and the sound of Liz's voice over the kettle.

And for the first time since she had walked away from her marriage, Amanda allowed herself to ask a question she had spent her whole life hiding from.

If nobody else was stopping me... what would I actually choose?

The red light flashed across the white ceiling, turning it the color of an old wound, before fading back into the dark. Beside her, Liz shifted under the blanket, remembering the quiet boundaries of her own house, sighing softly in her sleep, still completely out of reach.

Chapter 17: Borrowed Things

Summary:

Charlie accidentally calls her Mum. A cashier mistakes them for a family. Liz writes "Partner" on a school form without a second thought.

Amanda discovers that the things she wants most are the very things she's still refusing to choose.

Chapter Text

The silence in Amanda’s house didn't feel like peace. Usually, her sprawling, open-plan kitchen was a command station. Her life ran on a high-octane fuel of perpetual movement, the sharp clack-clack of her stilettos across the Italian marble as she micromanaged Georgie’s tennis schedule, edited her social media feed to a blindingly perfect sheen, or drafted devastatingly polite text messages designed to keep Julia in a permanent state of nervous collapse.

But on this particular morning, the engine had cut out completely.

Her mother had swept in at nine o’clock sharp, wrapped in expensive wool and disapproval, to take Georgie for a day out involving a ballet matinee and tiny, crustless sandwiches. Suddenly, Amanda was left with an unsettling void.

There were no school runs to dominate, no agonisingly slow emails to craft to her ex-husband, no frantic PTA committees to chair. She stood by the kitchen island, enveloped in a cream cashmere sweater that cost more than Liz’s monthly mortgage payment, staring at her own reflection in the polished chrome of the kettle. She looked, as always, entirely flawless, but inside the silence of the big house, she felt like a ghost haunting her own pristine museum.

Then her phone vibrated violently against the quartz countertop, the noise rattling the empty air.

"Yeah, all right?" Liz’s voice poured through the speaker, gravelly, unceremonious, and entirely unbothered by the chilly, polite distance that had lingered between them since the disaster of the school carol service.

In the background, there was chaos as running water and someone, probably Max, was thumping a plastic drum. "Look, I’m taking the boys out to the garden centre. Charlie is pitching a bloody fit because his guinea pigs apparently need a 'festive log cabin' for the winter, and Max is bouncing off the walls. Fancy it?"

"Yes," Amanda said. The word escaped her throat with an uncharacteristic, almost desperate speed. She caught herself instantly, smoothing down the front of her sweater and forcing her tone back to its standard, effortless drawl. "I mean... I suppose my afternoon has opened up slightly. It might be quite... grounding to see how the other half purchases their winter greenery."

"Right. Well, put some flat shoes on for once, Amanda. The car park is basically a swamp."

The regional garden centre was a loud, humid, consumer hellscape, smelling intensely of wet pine needles, cheap paraffin heaters, and damp peat. It was exactly the sort of establishment Amanda usually visited exclusively to gather ammunition.

Under normal circumstances, she would be scanning the aisles to spot the sort of tragic, uncoordinated mothers who bought artificial tinsel wreaths or let their children run wild near the porcelain gnomes, just so she could tear them apart over wine with Meg later.

But today, they had driven twenty miles out of their usual radius. They were far beyond the territory of Southfield. There was no risk of a frantic, tear-stained Julia cornering them near the poinsettias to weep about school-gate politics, and absolutely no danger of Kevin trying to force a heavy, homemade mince pie into their hands.

"Mum! Look! It’s got a light-up nose!" Charlie shouted, tugging violently at the sleeve of Liz’s faded denim jacket as he pointed toward a giant, slightly cross-eyed plastic reindeer.

"It’s tacky, Charlie, we’re not buying it," Liz sighed, though her attention was entirely occupied by trying to stop Max from eating a handful of loose decorative bark from a display bin. "Max, put that down. It’s not a biscuit, mate. Amanda, grab his hand before he poisons himself, will you?"

"Goodness, Max, no," Amanda murmured. Her voice had lost its usual sharp, performative edge, replaced by a surprising warmth. She reached down and took the toddler's small, sticky hand in hers.

His fingers were covered in the sticky residue of a half-eaten tube of Smarties, but she didn't flinch or reach for her hand sanitizer. Instead, she pointed her leather handbag toward a row of miniature, glitter-dusted saplings. "If we are going to indulge the guinea pigs in a festive aesthetic, Max, we should at least ensure it’s cohesive. Look at those, much more dignified."

"Whatever she said," Liz muttered, a small, rare smile tugging at the corner of her mouth as she watched Amanda actually navigate the mud-streaked aisles without her usual shield of disdain.

For nearly two hours, Amanda simply lived in the moment. She held the lukewarm, slightly bitter cardboard cups of machine coffee while Liz wrestled a massive, soil-heavy terracotta pot into the bottom of a rusty trolley.

She listened to Charlie explain the exact mechanical differences between various brands of outdoor fairy lights. When Max grew tired of walking and began to whine, Amanda didn't offer a clipped, judgmental comment about parental boundary-setting; she simply adjusted her designer bag, shifted her weight, and held his small hand a little tighter as he stumbled along the gravel.

Nobody was looking at her, nobody was calculating her social standing based on the company she kept, she felt a strange, scary lightness in her chest, she was pretending to belong to this loud, messy, uncoordinated unit, and it felt better than her own perfect life.

Then, at the checkout, the bubble popped.

The area was a bottleneck of festive irritation, frustrated parents, leaking bags of compost, and a mechanical singing Santa that kept repeating the same four bars of Jingle Bells. Max was growing increasingly frantic, his small legs giving out from exhaustion, and Charlie was leaning heavily against Amanda’s side to avoid a bloke carrying a sharp-looking holly bush.

Without looking up, entirely out of pure, unthinking physical habit born from a long autumn of shared carpools and kitchen-table tea, Charlie reached out and firmly gripped the pocket of Amanda’s expensive camel coat.

"Mum, can we get these cinnamon sticks for the kitchen?" Charlie asked absentmindedly, his eyes locked on a basket of decorative spice bundles by the till. "The ones that smell like proper Christmas?"

The word "Mum" hit Amanda like a physical blow. Her entire body went rigid beneath her layers of cashmere, her heart gave a sudden, violent thud against her ribs, and a wild, fluttering panic choked the breath out of her.

Charlie realised his mistake a second later. His face turned an instant, bright crimson, and he dropped her coat as it had burned him. "Sorry," he mumbled quickly, staring intensely at his trainers.

The cashier, a tired-looking middle-aged woman wearing a tinsel headpiece that had begun to sag over one ear, gave them a warm, maternal beam as she scanned a heavy sack of guinea pig sawdust. "Oh, don't you worry about it, love. It’s a full-time job keeping track of them at this time of year, isn't it? Your boys are certainly keeping you on your toes today, Mum."

Amanda’s mouth opened, the automatic, high-society correction rising instantly to her lips. 'Oh, goodness, no, I’m not his mother, I’m-'

But the words wouldn't come out, they dissolved in her throat, leaving her standing there with her chest tight, her official social smile completely failing to engage.

It wasn't the panic of being caught out by a Southfield parent; it was something far more intense. It was the terrifying, intoxicating weight of how effortless it felt to be mistaken for exactly what she secretly wanted to be.

Liz didn't jump in with a sharp joke to break the spell, she didn't correct the cashier with her usual blunt realism, she simply pulled a crumpled twenty-pound note from her pocket, handed it over, and grabbed the heavy plastic bags.

"Right," Liz said, her voice quiet and completely flat as she nudged Charlie toward the exit. "Car. Move it, boys."

They stopped for lunch at a damp, traditional roadside pub, the kind of place with a sticky carpet, brass ornaments on the walls, and a menu dominated by microwave-heated pies. Amanda sat tucked deep into the corner of the faux-leather booth, her coat remaining firmly buttoned up to her chin, her fingers obsessively tracing the small scratch on her designer watch face.

The retreat was instantaneous, the moment they had stepped back into the cold December air, Amanda had rebuilt her walls, block by pristine block. Her posture was back to its rigid, defensive perfection, her eyes scanning the pub door every time the latch rattled, her voice returning to that slightly elevated, brittle tone she used to signal distance.

Liz sat directly opposite her, helping Max cut up a jumbo fish finger while Charlie aggressively poured tomato ketchup over a mountain of chips. She didn't prod. A week ago, Liz would have cracked a cynical joke about Amanda looking like she’d been dropped into a sewage works. She would have challenged the sudden, frosty boundary.

But today, Liz stayed entirely quiet, she just watched Amanda over the rim of her pint glass with a slow, heavy expression in her eyes.

The silence between them wasn't angry; it was worse. Liz was finally starting to realise that the school gates, the PTA, and the ghost of Johnny weren't the things keeping Amanda locked away, Amanda was her own warden. She was completely trapped inside the fortress of her own vanity, and the sheer effort of trying to pull her over the wall was beginning to make Liz very, very tired.

At five o'clock, they were back at Liz’s house. The boys had dropped their muddy boots in the hall and immediately sprinted upstairs, their small feet creating a vibration through the ceiling as the grand construction of the guinea pig grotto began in earnest.

The house was in its usual state of lived-in chaos. Mismatched winter coats were spilling off the wooden pegs in the hallway, a pile of unopened council letters sat on the telephone table, and the kitchen had that faint, persistent smell of damp dog and burnt toast.

Amanda, driven by the sheer neurotic necessity of keeping her hands busy so she wouldn't have to look Liz in the eye, stood at the small sink, wiping down the greasy mugs from breakfast.

"I’ll just tidy these papers for you," Amanda said, her voice tight as she reached for a chaotic stack of school leaflets resting on top of the microwave. She just wanted to put them into a neat, straight pile so she could feel in control again.

She stopped.

It was a standard, bright yellow school medical form for Southfield's, the kind the office aggressively hounded you for before the Christmas holidays. It was dog-eared and smudged with a faint ring of tea. In the bold black box marked Section 4: Alternative Emergency Contact, Liz had filled out the spaces in her heavy, messy handwriting.

Name: Amanda Hughes.

Address: Written out in full, without a single spelling mistake.

Relationship to Child:

Liz hadn't written "Friend." She hadn't bothered with the polite safety of "Neighbor" or "PTA."

In the small, official box, she had simply scrawled: Partner.

Amanda stood completely frozen by the microwave, the damp tea towel dangling from her fingers. Liz hadn't made a grand romantic gesture, she hadn't asked for permission or demanded a massive talk about the future.

She had just casually walked up to the school office and put Amanda's name down on the official record because, to Liz, it was just common sense. She simply assumed that if Charlie fell off his bike or Max spiked a fever, Amanda was the person who would show up.

A sharp, sickening lurch of guilt made Amanda’s stomach drop. On her own immaculate forms, safely locked away in the neat bureau of her large, lonely house, the emergency contact was still her mother. Or Johnny. She hadn't made a single millimeter of official room for Liz.

That night, Amanda didn't drive back to her own house. She stayed, but the small double bed felt miles wide.

Liz was propped up against the headboard, her reading glasses sliding slightly down her nose as she turned the page of a battered thriller with a soft, dry scrape.

She looked completely normal, entirely unbothered by the day. Amanda lay perfectly flat beside her, a heavy interior design magazine resting open on her lap, though her eyes hadn't moved past the same photograph of a kitchen for nearly forty minutes.

The quiet in the room was driving Amanda mad.

"When did you put me down as an emergency contact?" Amanda asked suddenly. Her voice was very small, stripped of her usual sharp, confident gatekeeper tone.

Liz didn't look up from her book, she didn't even pause her thumb on the edge of the page. "A few months back. Around the time Max had that bastard of an ear infection, and you sat in the walk-in clinic with him for four hours because my van wouldn't start."

Amanda swallowed hard, her fingers tightening around the edge of her magazine until the thick paper crinkled. "You didn't ask me."

Liz finally stopped reading. She lowered the book onto her lap, shoved her glasses up onto her head, and turned her face to look at Amanda in the colorful shadows. She wasn't trying to be deep or dramatic. She just looked a bit amused and entirely practical.

"Didn't think I needed to, mate," Liz said, letting out a short, quiet breath. "You were already doing the school runs anyway. I just put it on the paper so the old bags in the front office wouldn't give you a hard time if you ever had to pick them up."

She didn't wait for a reply, and she didn't look for an emotional confession. Liz just reached out, clicked off the small bedside lamp, and settled heavily down into the pillows, turning her back to Amanda and pulling the duvet up over her shoulder.

"Night," Liz muttered into her pillow.

Amanda lay perfectly still in the dark, her eyes fixed on the ceiling as the red light flashed across the plaster, turning it the color of an old wound before fading back into the black.

Liz had made it sound so simple, a practical choice to stop the school office from nagging her. But as Amanda lay there, listening to the steady, distant sound of the rain against the glass, she was still utterly terrified of what would happen to her carefully built fortress the moment she actually had to admit how badly she wanted to stay.

Chapter 18: Fault Lines

Summary:

For one weekend, Amanda gets to live inside the future she's spent two years refusing to choose.

The worst part is how much it feels like home.

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

The rental cottage in the Peak District was called "The Brambles," but it wasn't nice. It was just a cold, damp stone house that smelled like old woodsmoke and sheep, and the radiators made a horrible banging noise every time the heating went on.

It was a last-minute group thing to get through the miserable days between Christmas and New Year, when everyone was sick of their own houses, and the kids were driving them up the wall.

But as Amanda stood in the small kitchen on Friday afternoon, watching Kevin sweat over three massive bags of groceries from Aldi, she knew exactly how fragile this whole setup was.

Amanda was wearing her proper tweed jacket and her good boots, which felt completely ridiculous against the peeling wallpaper in the hallway, but she was determined to keep her distance, so she just stood by the kettle looking down her nose at everything.

"Look at this place," Julia groaned, kicking the back door open and dragging a completely mud-splattered Ivy inside by her hood. "The garden is basically a vertical cliff, and James has already scraped his knee, and I’m ninety percent sure the boiler is about to blow up, so Amanda, sweetie, where is the gin because if I don't get a drink right now, I am going to walk into those hills and never come back."

"On the counter, Julia, next to the olives," Amanda said, putting on her loudest, most impatient voice. "And tell James to stop wiping his knee on the furniture because it’s hard enough to get a deposit back without your kids bleeding all over the place."

"Right, out of the way, posh line," Liz muttered, shoving right past Amanda with two massive blue IKEA bags full of loose footballs and wellies and multi-packs of crisps, wearing her oldest tracksuit bottoms and looking like she was planning to spend the next three days drinking lager straight out of the tin. "Charlie! Max! Get your stuff upstairs before Max starts wiping his nose on the curtains."

The whole house instantly filled with the kind of banging and shouting that Amanda usually spent her life trying to avoid, doors were slamming, and kids were screaming, and Kevin was already starting a long, boring explanation about how he was going to make a slow-cooker stew for ten people with this one blunt knife he’d found in a drawer.

It was messy, and it was loud, and it was just completely normal, and as Amanda watched Liz kick a stray boot out of the way without even looking down, her stomach did a strange little flip.

Every holiday she’d ever had with Johnny had been a massive performance where they went to some expensive villa in Portugal and sat in total silence by the pool making sure Georgie and Manus didn't get their clothes dirty so they could take a nice photo for Facebook, there was never any dirt or noise or people shouting over each other, and she just stood there watching it all happen around her.

Saturday afternoon, the weather was completely miserable, just a gray drizzle that meant they couldn't go for a walk, so all the kids and all five adults were stuck inside the damp living room together.

Julia was predictably on the verge of a total meltdown because she was trying to force James to do his reading comprehension while Ivy kept trying to eat the dead woodlice by the hearth.

"Has anyone seen James?" Julia suddenly shrieked, dropping a handful of wet tea towels onto the table and looking completely wild-eyed. "Seriously, where is he? Ivy said he went into the garden, and the gate was open, and there’s a massive stream at the bottom of the road, I knew we shouldn't have come here-"

"Julia, shut up, he's fine," Meg said, not even looking up from her laptop where she was typing out work emails and drinking white wine at two in the afternoon.

"He's not fine! He’s five! He could be in a ditch!"

Amanda ran a hand over her hair and sighed. "I’ll check the back room, but if he's ruined his coat, Julia, I’m not the one washing it."

They found him in the utility room twenty minutes later, he hadn't fallen into a stream at all, he was just sitting flat on the concrete floor happily stuffing salt-and-vinegar crisps into his mouth, and Liz was leaning against the broken washing machine next to him drinking a Stella, reaching down now and then to wipe a smear of crisp dust off the toddler’s face with her sleeve.

Julia let out a massive, dramatic sob and dropped to her knees. "Oh, thank God, honestly, Liz, you’re better with my kids than I am; I’m an absolute rubbish mother."

Kevin laughed loudly from the doorway. "Too right, Liz is the only one who can get my two to sit still, she just gives them a packet of Quavers, and they do whatever she wants."

Everyone had a laugh about it because it was just a joke, but Amanda didn't laugh; she just stood in the dark corridor watching Liz ruffle James' hair before Julia dragged him away.

It wasn't just that Liz was good with Charlie and Max; she was just good with all of them. She didn't hover or shout or try to make them look perfect, and upstairs, Manus was currently in Charlie’s room laughing so loudly over some football cards that Amanda could hear it through the ceiling.

Liz didn't need Amanda’s structured, organised world at all; she was completely fine on her own, and that thought made Amanda feel incredibly small and uncomfortable.

That night, they all went down to the local pub, which had a sticky carpet and a roaring fire, and the kids were all around the back in the family room building a massive fort out of chairs and winter coats while the adults sat around a big table by the bar.

The drinks were coming fast, and Meg was on her third gin, telling a terrible story about her boss, and Julia was finally relaxing a bit, and Kevin was sitting back looking very pleased with himself because everyone had eaten his stew.

"Funny, innit," Kevin said, taking a big gulp of his bitter and looking around the table. "Feels like we’ve been doing this forever."

Nobody really said anything, Meg just nodded, and Julia took a sip of her wine because he was right, the whole thing felt totally normal, just passing napkins and complaining about the school and sitting together in the warmth.

Then Kevin looked right at Amanda and said, "Hard to remember a time when Amanda wasn't turning up at Liz's place every five minutes, really."

Julia giggled knowingly, and Meg’s eyes went straight to Amanda with a massive, dangerous smirk on her face, while Kevin just sat there totally oblivious. Amanda’s glass stopped right outside her mouth, her fingers going totally stiff against the glass.

"Well," Amanda said, her voice going very high and sharp as she set her glass down hard on the table. "I’m sure Liz’s neighbors are sick of looking at my car, Kevin, but someone has to keep the property values up on that street."

"Oh, shut up, Hughes," Liz muttered, nudging Amanda’s shoulder with her own in that casual, heavy way she always did, and Amanda just stared straight ahead at the bar with her heart thumping against her ribs while Julia stared down at her wine glass, trying very hard to pretend she wasn't listening.

An hour later, Amanda went out to the little gravel yard at the back of the pub to get away from the noise because her head was spinning, and it was absolutely freezing out there, but she just needed to breathe.

The door banged open, and Meg walked out, wrapped in a giant wool blanket with a fresh glass of wine.

"Freezing your tits off out here, aren't you?" Meg said, leaning her back against the wall.

"I am just enjoying the silence, Meg," Amanda said stiffly.

Meg took a drink and looked out at the dark road, not wasting any time because she always just said whatever she wanted, and she was sick of the tiptoeing. "You know everybody thinks you're together, right?"

Amanda went completely rigid, and her chin went up immediately, her voice dropping into a panicked whisper. "If Julia has been talking to you, Meg, I swear to God-"

Meg rolled her eyes. "Oh, give it a rest, Amanda, Julia hasn't said a word, and I don't care if you're shagging, nobody cares about that." She shifted the blanket around her shoulders. "I’m talking about the fact that you act like an old married couple, you’ve been in that kitchen for three hours passing plates and moving around each other without even looking, it’s ridiculous. Kevin doesn't see it because he’s Kevin, but it's blindingly obvious."

Amanda hated hearing it because it was completely true, and she couldn't even argue with it.

"It’s just easy," Amanda muttered, looking down at her shoes.

"Whatever you say, love," Meg said, tapping her glass against Amanda’s hand before she walked back inside. "But you look pretty miserable for someone who’s finally got a proper family."

Through the pub window, Amanda could see into the back room where the kids were playing a wild game of football with a pair of rolled-up socks, and Georgie was right in the middle of it with her hair falling down and her face bright red, shouting at James to pass the ball.

Nobody had forced them to play together, and nobody had explained anything to them; they didn't care about the school gates or what Johnny would say or whose house was bigger, they had just decided they were a family, and they’d done it without asking Amanda at all.

Later that night, long after they had gotten back from the pub, the cottage finally went quiet. Meg and Kevin had gone to bed hours ago after Kevin spent twenty minutes looking for his toothbrush, and Julia had finally stopped pacing the floor upstairs, though the old floorboards still gave a little creak every time she rolled over.

Downstairs, the television was still humming quietly on the mantelpiece, playing some terrible, low-budget late-night action film about a diamond heist in Chicago that neither of them was actually watching. The screen flickered blue and gray across the cramped living room, casting long shadows over the mismatched furniture and the empty glasses left on the side table.

Amanda and Liz were sharing the lumpy cottage sofa under a scratchy green wool blanket that smelled like it had been sitting in a cupboard since 1994. Liz was sitting sideways, her back propped against the wooden armrest, and she had her bare feet tucked right into Amanda’s lap to keep them warm.

She was mindlessly tracing a slow, repetitive pattern on the stiff fabric of Amanda’s trousers with her big toe, her eyes fixed on the screen where a car was currently exploding in a shower of very bad digital sparks.

"He wouldn't have survived that," Amanda whispered, her voice low and raspy from the pub smoke and the wine. "The laws of physics alone."

"Shut up, Amanda," Liz murmured back, her toe digging slightly into Amanda’s thigh. "He’s the main bloke. He can survive a bomb if he wants to."

"He didn't even lose his sunglasses, Liz. It’s insulting to the audience."

"You're the only person in Derbyshire analysing the realism of a film called Mission Impossible, just drink your tea."

"It’s gone cold," Amanda said, but she didn't move to put the mug down. She just tightened her fingers around it, letting the last bit of lukewarm porcelain warm her palms.

"Well, whose fault is that? You spend too much time complaining." Liz shifted her weight, the springs in the old sofa groaning loudly in the quiet room. "Move your leg up a bit, my ankles are freezing."

Amanda grumbled under her breath, but she adjusted her position anyway, pulling the rough blanket up over Liz’s shins and tucking it in at the side. "If you had worn proper socks instead of those ridiculous thin ones, we wouldn't be having this conversation."

"They're my lucky socks."

"They have holes in the heels, Liz."

"Gives them character."

They went on like that for a while, having a quiet, whispery argument about the film and the draft coming from the window, the kind of boring, pointless bickering that didn't have any real anger in it. It was just noise to fill the space, an excuse to keep talking so they didn't have to go upstairs to their separate rooms.

Amanda leaned her head back against the flat cushion, her eyes getting incredibly heavy from the four glasses of pub wine and the dry, ticking heat of the small electric fire on the hearth. The dialogue from the television started to blur into a low drone, something about a helicopter and a ransom note.

For a few minutes, her eyes closed completely, and she drifted off, her body relaxing into the dip of the sofa. Her head fell sideways, sliding down an inch at a time until it rested firmly against the meat of Liz’s shoulder.

Liz didn't move, she didn't make a joke about it, she didn't stiffen up, and she didn't try to push her away. She just reached down and took the cold mug out of Amanda’s hand so it wouldn't spill, setting it quietly on the carpet, and then she shifted her arm slightly so Amanda’s neck wasn't bent at a weird angle. She just let her stay there, her chin resting right against the collar of Liz’s oversized shirt.

It felt totally safe. There was nothing intense about it, no rushing or hiding or looking at the clock to see how many minutes they had left before Amanda had to leave, and no worrying about who was looking through the curtains or whether Julia was listening at the door. It just felt like being home.

Amanda woke up after ten minutes when the loud, generic rock music of the film credits started to roll, the blue light flashing rapidly across her eyelids. She sat up slowly, blinking against the dim light and rubbing her face with the back of her hand, feeling a bit dazed.

Liz stretched her legs out straight, letting out a soft grunt as she swung her feet off the couch and onto the cold floorboards.

"Right," Liz muttered, letting out a big yawn that made her shoulders shake as she stood up and hitched her tracksuit bottoms up. "I'm going to finish the mugs before the morning, or Kevin will try to do them at six AM and flood the entire place as he did at the caravan site."

Amanda stayed on the sofa for a moment, the spot where her head had been resting still feeling warm against her cheek. She watched Liz walk into the small kitchen, her bare feet padding softly across the linoleum. The kitchen was tiny, lit only by a single, bare yellow light bulb over the sink that made everything look a bit faded and sad.

Liz was still wearing that massive gray t-shirt from some local mechanics' garage with her hair piled up in a messy, lopsided bun, and she didn't look glamorous at all. She just looked tired.

She stood at the counter, casually scraping the leftover stew from Kevin’s pot into three mismatched plastic tubs she’d brought from home, her movements slow and practiced. She rinsed the spoons under the tap, checked the heavy iron bolts on the back door twice to make sure the wind wouldn't blow it open, and began stacking the mugs into the drying rack with a series of dull, ceramic clinks.

Amanda stood up, her joints cracking, and walked over to the kitchen doorway, leaning her shoulder against the wooden frame with her hands tucked into the pockets of her silk dressing gown.

Liz looked up over her shoulder, a wet mug in her hand. "You going up?"

"In a minute," Amanda said softly.

She just stood there watching Liz wipe down the counter with a damp sponge. Liz’s thumb was stained slightly from the red wine, and there was a bit of flour on the sleeve of her shirt from when she’d helped Kevin with the dumplings hours ago.

As Amanda watched her, her chest suddenly felt incredibly tight, like she couldn't get enough air into her lungs.

She didn't see the cottage anymore, she didn't see the peeling wallpaper behind the kettle or the greasy frying pan soaking in the sink, she just saw this same thing happening next year and the year after that. She saw ten years from now, she saw the normal, boring mornings where they argued about who forgot to buy milk, and the rainy Tuesdays where they had to sort out the kids' school uniforms, and the evenings where they just sat on a sofa that belonged to both of them. A whole, real life, stretching out into the dark.

I could do this forever, she thought.

The words came into her head so clearly that it was like someone had spoken them aloud in the quiet kitchen. Not a secret affair where she had to hide her car round the corner on Thursdays while Georgie was at dance class, or make up excuses about why she was late getting home from the shops.

Not a five-minute conversation through a rolled-down car window in a dark car park. Just a real life, lived in the daylight, right in front of Julia and Meg and the whole bloody world.

She wanted it, she wanted the mess of it, and the noise of four kids shouting over breakfast, and the sticky counters that she would usually complain about. She wanted it so badly that it made her stomach hurt, a sharp, physical ache right under her ribs.

And as she stood there in her expensive silk gown, looking at the dirty dishwasher, the absolute certainty of that want terrified her more than anything else ever had.

The next morning, Amanda was completely different, she was sitting at the breakfast table with her makeup perfectly done and her armour back on, talking in her loudest, most annoying voice about the proper way to store bread and completely ignoring Liz.

Liz didn't say anything to her, she just ate her eggs and went to pack the cars, but later on, she caught Amanda standing by the window watching the kids run around the muddy field behind the house one last time.

The second Amanda realised Liz was looking, she snapped her head away and started aggressively looking at her phone like she was very busy. Liz didn't get angry or shout, she just stood there by the boot of her van holding a box of dirty wellies and gave Amanda a long, slow look.

It was just that look that meant here we go again, the look of someone who was just getting really tired of waiting for Amanda to stop running away.

An hour later, the cars were all packed, and Amanda was standing in the stone doorway of the cottage with the cold wind hitting her face, watching Georgie and Manus race across the grass with Charlie and Max shouting ahead of her.

The whole future was right there in front of her, and nobody was stopping her from just walking out into the mud and taking it, and somehow that was the most frightening thing of all.

Notes:

dont @ me idk england

Chapter 19: How Much Time?

Summary:

Amanda has spent years afraid of losing everything.

She doesn't realize she's already losing Liz.

Chapter Text

It was mid-January before the last of the cheap tinsel finally came down, mostly because Charlie had managed to throw a damp football at the living room ceiling and brought a whole string of plastic silver stars down with it.

Amanda was over at Liz’s terrace house on a Tuesday night, which had somehow become a regular habit over the last few weeks without either of them actually discussing it. It was a miserable, wet evening, the kind of freezing rain that rattled hard against the thin windowpanes, but inside it just felt warm and completely normal.

Earlier in the evening, the house had been loud and full of the usual chaos. Georgie had been sitting at the small wooden dining table, patiently helping Charlie and Manus with their long-division homework while Max crawled all over Amanda’s lap, trying to show her a half-broken plastic dinosaur he’d found under the radiator.

Amanda hadn't even minded the grease smudges he left on her good gray trousers; she’d just wiped them off with a tissue without a word.

Now, the kids were all upstairs. Max was fast asleep, Charlie was listening to something on his tablet with his headphones on, and Georgie and Manus had gone back to Amanda’s house with Amanda’s mother, who had agreed to watch them for the night so Amanda could "sort out some paperwork."

Downstairs, the house was completely still. The only light came from a single lamp in the corner and the tiny, colored bulbs of the Christmas tree that Liz hadn't bothered to unplug yet.

Amanda was sitting at the kitchen table, her fingers wrapped around a glass of cheap white wine that Liz had bought in a box from the corner shop. She looked down at the table, noticing a small basket on the counter. Inside it sat her expensive facial moisturiser, a spare toothbrush, and a crumpled pair of her silk pajamas tucked behind the bread bin.

She’d started leaving them there by accident at first, but now they were just a permanent fixture. It felt settled, so settled that it gave Amanda the nice, warm illusion that they could just keep going like this forever without ever having to make a proper decision.

Liz walked back into the kitchen, carrying two fresh mugs of tea even though they were already drinking wine. She wore her usual oversized fleece and a pair of faded leggings, her hair pushed back with a plastic clip. She sat down opposite Amanda, letting out a long sigh as she pulled her chair in close to the table.

"Charlie’s finally stopped banging about upstairs," Liz said, taking a sip of her wine first, then her tea. "Honestly, that lad’s got the energy of a stray dog. I don't know how Georgie sits there and handles him for two hours without hitting him."

"Georgie likes being helpful," Amanda said, a soft, easy smile touching her lips. "She told me yesterday that she thinks Charlie is hilarious. Though she did ask why he keeps his dirty socks in the biscuit tin."

"He says it keeps them fresh," Liz muttered, a short laugh slipping out. "Don't ask. I’ve given up trying to figure out how his brain works. If they aren't on fire, I'm counting it as a win."

Amanda laughed, leaning her elbows on the table. She reached out across the scratched wood, her fingers brushing against the back of Liz’s hand. For the first time in months, she didn't look toward the window to see if the neighbors were watching through the blinds.

She didn't feel that sharp, cold stab of panic that usually came whenever they were too close in the light; she just felt safe. The rain was coming down hard outside, the house was warm, and she felt closer to being a normal human being than she ever did at the school gates with Julia or Kevin hovering around her.

Liz looked down at Amanda’s hand, her thumb casually rubbing against Amanda’s knuckles. She didn't look angry or stressed; she just looked at their fingers joined together on the table under the glow of the fairy lights.

"Amanda," Liz said quietly.

"Mmm?"

"Do you think we'll ever tell them?"

The kitchen seemed to go completely silent, the low hum of the fridge suddenly sounding very loud. Amanda’s fingers went perfectly still against Liz’s skin.

"Tell who?" Amanda asked, though she knew the answer before the words even left her mouth.

Liz looked up, her blue eyes steady and calm. "The kids."

Amanda didn't move; she didn't pull her hand away, but her chest tightened up instantly. "Liz, we’ve talked about this. It's complicated with Johnny, and even though the divorce is done, there's still the house, and-"

"I'm not talking about Johnny," Liz interrupted, her voice still very soft, very level. "I'm talking about the kids. Georgie already knows something's up. She isn't daft, Amanda, she sees how often you're here, and Charlie definitely does, even if he doesn't have the words for it yet." A tiny, faint smile touched the corner of Liz's mouth, but it didn't reach her eyes. "Max would probably just announce it to the checkout lady in Tesco, to be fair."

Amanda tried to let out a dry chuckle to keep the joke going, to keep the mood light and easy, but the sound died in her throat.

"Do you think we'll ever stop hiding?" Liz asked.

That was the real question; it wasn't about the children at all, and Amanda knew it. It was about walking down the high street together without Amanda suddenly stepping two paces away whenever she saw someone from the parish council. It was about the school runs, and Julia’s frantic gossip, and the looks they’d get from the other mothers at the gates.

Amanda opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out. She genuinely tried to think of an answer, she looked at the spare toothbrush by the sink, and she tried to picture herself telling her mother, or standing in the playground next to Liz while Kevin asked them about their weekend plans.

She saw the headlines running inside her own head, the whispers, the exclusions, the sudden silence that would fall over the PTA meetings the moment she walked into the room. She thought about Johnny’s face, and the smug, vindictive look he’d have when he realised what everyone was whispering about, the perfect excuse he'd use to justify exactly why he had packed his bag and left her.

She wanted to say yes, she wanted to tell Liz that next month, or next term, they would just do it. But as she sat there staring at the red wine in her glass, the silence stretched out between them, heavy and cold.

She didn't know; even after the cottage, even after everything she’d felt watching the kids play in the mud in Derbyshire, she still didn't actually know if she dared to do it.

"I just..." Amanda swallowed hard, her voice sounding small and weak in the quiet room. "I just need a bit more time, Liz. Just until things settle down with the house and the kids get through this term."

Liz looked at her for a long moment. She didn't cry, she didn't storm out or slam her glass down on the table, she just gave a tiny, slow nod. She just looked incredibly tired, the lines around her eyes looking deeper under the yellow light.

"Right," Liz said quietly.

The word felt much worse than a proper row; Amanda had heard Liz shout before; she’d seen her furious and blunt and ready to fight the world. This wasn't that; this was the sound of someone who had heard the same excuse three dozen times before and had stopped expecting anything else.

"How much?" Liz asked.

Amanda froze, her hand growing cold against the table. "What?"

"How much time?" Liz wasn't being aggressive, she was genuinely asking, her voice flat and curious. "A year? Five years? When Charlie’s eighteen? When Georgie moves out and goes to uni? Give me a rough idea, Amanda, because I'm forty-two and I'd quite like to know when I'm allowed to hold your hand in the pub."

Amanda couldn't look her in the eye; she stared down at the scratched wood of the kitchen table, her throat burning. "I don't know, Liz. I can't give you a date, it’s not that simple for me."

"Yeah," Liz murmured, her voice dropping until it was barely a whisper. "I know it isn't."

She pulled her hand gently out from under Amanda’s fingers; she didn't snatch it away; she just took it back, reaching for her wine glass and taking a small, slow sip.

Amanda looked up then, and the expression on Liz’s face made her stomach drop.

Liz wasn't angry, her face wasn't red, and there were no tears in her eyes. She just looked completely disappointed. It was a dull, heavy kind of look, the expression of someone who had been holding onto a very small, fragile hope for a long time and had just felt it finally slip through her fingers.

Amanda could handle arguments, she knew how to survive a fight, but she didn't know what to do with this. The complete lack of anger from Liz was terrifying because anger meant there was still something left to fight about, disappointment meant the hope was dying.

"Liz, please," Amanda whispered. She reached across the scratched wood again, her hand trembling as she tried to catch Liz’s fingers. It was a desperate, clumsy movement, a frantic attempt to grab the thread before the whole tapestry unraveled. "Don't look at me like that. I do want this. You know I do. I just... I have so much to lose."

She was talking about the house, she was talking about the school run, and the silent judgment of women she didn't even like, she was talking about the fragile, polished glass of the life she had spent years building, even if it was a life she’d only ever been a guest in.

But as the words hung in the air, they sounded thin and selfish.

Liz didn't move, she didn't pull away this time, but she didn't meet the touch either. Her hand remained limp, a piece of deadwood on the table, the silence in the kitchen felt heavy, pressurised by the ticking of the clock on the wall and the low, industrial hum of the fridge.

"Sorry," Amanda whispered, the word sounding small and pathetic. She was waiting for the absolution, she was waiting for Liz to sigh, to squeeze her hand, and to tell her it was alright, that they’d figure it out, that she understood why it was hard, he was waiting for the safety net.

Liz looked down at her glass. A single drop of condensation rolled down the side, leaving a clear streak through the dull film of the box wine.

"Yeah," Liz said flatly.

She stood up from the table. Usually, Liz moved with a kind of restless, frantic energy, constantly wiping counters, tidying stray toys, or reaching for a kettle. Tonight, her movements were slow, weighted down by a profound exhaustion that Amanda couldn't reach.

She didn't look at Amanda, she didn't even look at the table, she just looked through it.

"Come on," Liz muttered, her voice devoid of its usual gravelly warmth. She turned toward the doorway, her back a wall of faded fleece. "Let's get these lights off before the bill goes through the roof."

It was a mundane sentence, the kind of thing Liz said every night, but tonight it felt like a closing curtain.

Amanda waited for the explosion. She almost craved it, she wanted Liz to turn around and scream, to tell her she was a coward, to tell her to leave. An argument was a bridge; it was a way to connect, even if it hurt.

But there was no dramatic scene, no shouting through the thin bedroom walls, no mention of a breakup. They brushed their teeth side-by-side in the cramped bathroom, the only sound the scrub of bristles and the splashing of water. They even said goodnight to each other once the lamp was clicked off, their voices polite and careful, like strangers sharing a compartment on a long-distance train.

When they got into bed, the shift was physical.

Usually, the small double bed felt like a sanctuary, a place where they bled into one another. Tonight, it felt like a vast, cold geography. Liz turned onto her side immediately, facing away from Amanda toward the window where the freezing rain was still lashing against the glass. She didn't pull the covers away in a huff, and she didn't move to the very edge of the mattress to make a point. She simply stayed entirely still.

It was the stillness of someone who had stopped trying to stay warm.

Amanda lay on her back, her eyes wide and stinging, staring up at the dark plaster ceiling. She watched the faint, sickly red glow of the streetlamp slice through the gap in the curtains, casting a jagged line of light across the wardrobe.

The room felt freezing, despite the duvet. Amanda lay there perfectly rigid, her heart thumping a slow, heavy rhythm in her chest that felt out of sync with the rest of the world. She listened to the steady sound of Liz’s breathing in the dark, the familiar, comforting sound that usually acted as her lullaby.

But tonight, it sounded different. It sounded like a clock ticking down, it sounded like a door being locked from the other side. And for the first time, lying in the silence of the house she had grown to love, Amanda found herself wondering whether love could simply get tired.

Chapter 20: Enough (Part I)

Summary:

Two years after asking Amanda how long she needs before they're allowed to be real, Liz finally gets her answer.

It's not the one she wanted.

Chapter Text

The house felt like it was made of glass. It was late January, and two whole years had slipped away since that miserable night when the tinsel finally came down, but on the surface, everything looked perfectly fine, and in fact, it looked better than fine because Amanda was trying so hard it was becoming a grueling, full-time job.

She brought over a massive bouquet of lilies that cost forty quid from the boutique florist in town, and since Liz didn't have a vase big enough, she’d ended up sticking them in the same giant, chipped plastic Sports Direct mug on the windowsill where they sat like a forced peace offering.

Amanda was staying over three nights a week, and Liz let her, and they watched television, they ate burnt toast, and they slept in the same bed, while Julia even made a quiet comment at the school gates about how "settled" Amanda seemed lately, assuming the finality of the divorce papers had finally given her some peace.

But underneath it all, both women were utterly exhausted, and every "thank you" for the florist flowers felt heavy and laden with obligation, and every single time Amanda stayed over, it felt like she was performing a meticulous role while Liz was just a silent, tired audience member watching her do it.

The conversation at the table had drifted onto the local council's new recycling bins, but Amanda wasn't really listening as she watched the way Liz's thumb kept tracing the edge of her glass, over and over, until the skin looked raw.

Every few minutes, Amanda would offer another small piece of gossip from the school gates, something Julia had said about the nativity costumes, or a complaint about Kevin’s latest bake sale, trying to throw up a wall of normal, domestic chatter to hide the fact that they hadn't properly looked each other in the eye for weeks.

Friday came around, the silence between them had stretched so thin that even a trip to the corner shop felt like navigating a minefield, and it didn't take a massive betrayal to finally break it; it just took the ordinary, casual cruelty of a standard Friday night.

The community centre smelled exactly as it always did for the annual charity fundraiser, damp wool, floor polish, and the sharp tang of salt-and-vinegar crisps. Julia was already in a state of high-pitched panic by the door, clutching a clipboard to her chest like a shield while she berated an exhausted-looking Anne about the missing raffle tickets, her eyes occasionally darting around the room because she carried the live wire of a secret and knew exactly what was at stake.

Meg was already at the bar, ordering a double gin and watching the room with the detached, sharp amusement of a spectator at a gladiator match.

Amanda had parked her car three streets away to ensure she wouldn't be seen arriving at the same time as the transit van, walking in alone with her cream wool coat immaculate and her posture rigid with the familiar, effortless authority of the Alpha Mum.

Liz came through the double doors ten minutes later, Max’s mud-stained trainer dragging against the lino as she hauled him inside, her big fleece already smelling faintly of the cigarette she’d rushed through in the car park.

They didn't greet each other, and they didn't even exchange a look, immediately drifting into their designated roles on opposite sides of the room in a flawless routine of calculated distance that they had practiced for years.

Julia had cornered Amanda by the raffle table earlier, whispering frantically, "Amanda, Kevin mentioned seeing your car over there at dawn again, people are starting to ask questions, you're being reckless," but Amanda had simply brushed her off with a sharp,

"I'm helping her clear out the boys' old clutter, Julia, it's called being a supportive neighbour." Meg, leaning against the wall, had overheard and let out a dry, barking laugh, murmuring, "Supportive neighbour? Right, babe. Just make sure that glass house of yours doesn't shatter when someone finally throws a stone."

At nine o'clock, the crowd had thinned out around the makeshift bar, forcing everyone into the same narrow corner by the buffet. Kevin, who had clearly had one too many glasses of warm Prosecco, let out a loud, wet chuckle as he shuffled closer to where Amanda and Julia were standing, looking between Amanda and Liz with the desperate excitement of a stay-at-home dad trying to prove he was part of the inner circle.

"I tell you what, Amanda," Kevin brayed, gesturing with a half-eaten sausage roll toward the door. "I saw your car parked outside Liz’s place again at seven this morning. You two practically live together these days, don't you? Is she charging you rent yet, or are you just there for the free tea?"

A couple of the mothers from the Year 4 committee laughed, turning their heads to look, and Julia paused, her pen hovering over her clipboard as she waited for the response, her mouth half-open in a small panic. Meg just raised her eyebrow, taking a slow, deliberate sip of her drink.

The defense mechanism didn't even wait for Amanda's brain to catch up, and the snobbery was out of her mouth before she could stop it, sharp, loud, and perfectly tuned to keep the school gates from looking too closely.

"God, no," Amanda said, her high-pitched laugh ringing out across the trestle tables as she gave Julia a conspiratorial, exhausting roll of her eyes. "Can you imagine the horror? I’d kill her within a week, Kevin. I just prefer a house that doesn't smell like damp football gear and teenagers. Liz is completely overwhelmed with the boys' secondary school schedules, so I’ve just been letting myself in to help her map out some basic life admin. Someone has to keep that family organised, or the whole house would fall apart."

The circle laughed right on cue, and Julia let out a small, strangled noise she tried to turn into a cough, while Meg's eyes went completely cold. Amanda didn't even notice the way Liz’s hand stopped halfway to her mouth, her plastic cup of beer frozen in the air, and she didn't see the way Liz slowly lowered the cup back to the table, her jaw setting into a hard, white line as she looked at the floor between them.

The ride home was terrifyingly quiet.

Amanda followed the van back to the terrace in her own car, the red glow of Liz’s taillights the only thing she could see through the freezing rain. The kids were staying at Amanda’s mother’s house for the night, so when they stepped into the kitchen, the terrace house felt unnervingly empty and cold.

There was no screaming, only the sound of Liz dropping her keys into the bowl and going straight to the kettle.

"What's wrong?" Amanda asked, tossing her silk scarf onto the table and checking her reflection in the dark kitchen window. "You’ve been weird since the raffle."

"Nothing," Liz said, her back to the room, her shoulders hunched under the fleece, rigid as stone.

"Liz. Don't do the 'nothing' thing. It’s exhausting."

"I'm tired, Amanda. That's all. I’m just bloody tired."

Amanda snapped, the fear she’d been carrying for weeks finally curdling into defensive anger. "Can you stop doing this? Acting like I've committed some terrible crime because I don't want Kevin gossiping about my private life."

Liz turned around slowly, not taking her coat off, just standing there with her hands shoved deep into her fleece pockets. "Do you remember that night in the kitchen?"

Amanda froze, her hand still hovering over her handbag. "What?"

"Two years ago. In this exact room," Liz said, her voice flat and hollow, carrying a weight that made the air feel thin. "When I asked you how much more time you needed. Do you remember what you promised me?"

Amanda’s heart gave a sickening thud against her ribs, and she tried to swallow, but her throat was suddenly too dry. "Liz, that was a long time ago, things were complicated with the split-"

"You said just until things settled down with the house and the kids got through the term," Liz interrupted, her eyes fixed so hard on Amanda’s face that it felt like being pinned to the wall. "Then it was after the house sold. Then it was after Georgie’s exams. Then we had to wait for Charlie to settle at secondary school. You always had another term, Amanda. You always had a reason."

Liz let out a short, dry laugh that wasn't a happy sound at all, just an exhausted noise that bounced off the cheap kitchen tiles.

"Two years, Amanda. Two years since I asked you when I'd be allowed to hold your hand in a pub. And tonight, after two whole years of me waiting, I’m still the messy, grease-covered secret you’re 'helping out' so the neighbours don't get the wrong idea."

"You think this is easy for me?" Amanda hissed, her voice rising as she lashed out blindly to defend herself against the sheer weight of the truth. "You think you're the only one dealing with pressure? You have absolutely no idea what my life is like! The expectations of every single person in that village, the scrutiny-"

"And you have no idea what mine is like," Liz shot back, her voice dangerously quiet, "because you've never bothered asking."

"Oh, please!" Amanda threw her hands up, her elegance completely evaporating as she slammed into her own defense, desperate to deflect the shame. "At least nobody expects anything from you, Liz!"

The room went violently still, the sentence hanging between them like a toxic cloud. Amanda heard the words the exact millisecond they left her mouth, a cruel, elitist instinct she’d used on a hundred other people but had never turned on the woman she loved, and she instantly wished she could reach out into the air, grab the sentence, and choke on it rather than let it stand, but it was already done.

Liz didn't yell, she just stood there, her face going completely blank, her brow furrowing slightly as if she were trying to translate a foreign language, looking genuinely confused for a second as though she couldn't quite believe that two years of patience and shared beds could boil down to that one ugly insult. Then, something behind her eyes shifted completely, turning into a cold, dead iron.

"There she is," Liz whispered.

"Liz, I didn't mean-"

"No," Liz shook her head slowly, a small, terribly sad smile appearing on her face, the kind of heavy smile a person gives when a puzzle finally clicks into place, and the picture is exactly as bad as they feared. "You did."

Liz looked down at the kitchen floor for a moment, then back up, her gaze steady and brutal. "Do you know what I realised tonight while you were busy performing for Kevin? If I got hit by a bus tomorrow, you'd come to my funeral as my friend. You'd stand beside Charlie and Max, and you'd tell everyone how close we were, and nobody in that room would know I was the love of your life. You'd let me go into the ground as just another one of your charity projects."

Amanda physically flinched, her chest tightening so hard she could barely breathe, her hands trembling as she reached out blindly toward the faded sleeve of Liz’s fleece. "Liz, please, don't say that, you can’t say that to me, you know how much I love you, you know everything I’ve done to make this work."

"Don't you dare talk to me about what you've done," Liz said, and her voice didn't explode with a shout, but it shook with a violent, white-hot fury that had been compressing inside her chest for seven hundred and thirty days, her fingers curling into tight fists at her sides as she stepped directly into Amanda’s space, forcing Amanda back against the edge of the kitchen table. "Don't you dare stand in my kitchen, after what you just did in that hall, and try to use that word on me. You don't love me, Amanda. You love the way I look after you. You love having a safe, warm little corner where you can drop your bags and be a human being before you put your armour back on and walk out that door to pretend I’m a charity case."

"That's not fair!" Amanda cried, tears finally stinging her eyes, her voice cracking under the pressure of her own panic. "I am here! I give you everything I can give-"

"You give me your scraps!" Liz threw her head back, a harsh, jagged laugh tearing out of her throat, her face flushed red under the fluorescent light as the sheer, agonizing weight of the last two years finally broke through the surface. "You give me Thursday nights when your mother can watch the kids, and you give me forty-quid flowers to make yourself feel better about the fact that you won't even look at me if we pass each other in the aisle at Tesco! I have spent two years checking my phone like a pathetic teenager, waiting to see if the coast is clear, waiting to see if Julia’s left the village, waiting to see if I’m allowed to exist in your world today! I have sat by and watched my boys grow up while the woman I love treats their home like a dirty secret she needs to disinfect before she goes back to her real life!"

"I think we're done," Liz said, the explosion turning instantly into a cold, terrifying flatline.

Amanda froze, but it wasn't because she believed the words, it was because her brain flatly and violently refused to process them; after two years of arguments and tears and reconciliations since they'd first sat at this table and mapped out their futures, the sentence didn't feel real, it couldn't possibly be real because Liz was always there, Liz was the anchor, Liz was the one who always absorbed the blows and came back when the anger cleared.

"You're just angry," Amanda said, forcing a tight, dismissive little smile onto her face, her voice sounding high and brittle as she reached for the familiar script of their old rows, desperately trying to pull them back to safety. "You're just incredibly upset about what Kevin said, and you’re blowing it out of proportion, Liz, you know how he is, he’s an idiot."

"No."

"We'll talk about this tomorrow," Amanda insisted, her words tumbling out faster, her chest heaving as she grabbed her coat from the back of the chair. "I'll come over right after the school run, we’ll send the kids to the park, we’ll talk properly when we’ve both had a night to clear our heads."

"No."

"Liz, look at me-"

"I'm done waiting for you, Amanda."

Liz reached over, her hand incredibly steady as she picked her keys back up from the ceramic bowl by the door, the sharp metal clinking against the pottery with a sound that seemed to echo through the entire terrace house.

She didn't look at Amanda as she tucked them deep into her fleece pocket, her movements deliberate and weighted with a profound, quiet finality that Amanda couldn't reach, a boundary that had never been there before.

"For two years, I’ve been trying to convince myself that one day you’d finally choose me," Liz whispered, her voice cracking just enough to show the hollow ruin inside her, her eyes empty of the gravelly warmth Amanda had spent nearly a decade relying on. "I gave you every single piece of myself, Amanda, and you never did."

Amanda laughed, she actually let out a short, breathless, desperate laugh right into the quiet kitchen, because the alternative was too monstrous to even consider, because the entire architecture of her universe was built on the absolute certainty that Liz would always be waiting in the dark when the curtains were drawn, and she stood there frozen, staring at the empty space where the keys had just been in Liz's hand, waiting for the argument to turn into something she knew how to survive, completely unable to accept that this wasn't another fight.

Chapter 21: Enough (Part II)

Summary:

After two years of promises, excuses, and almosts, Amanda discovers that some doors only close once.

Chapter Text

Amanda laughed.

The sound came out thin and wrong, a dry, brittle rattle that died instantly against the yellowing wallpaper of the kitchen. For a long, suffocating moment, neither of them moved.

The old wall clock, the one with the cracked plastic casing that Johnny had never gotten around to fixing, ticked with a deafening, industrial loudness against the silence.

"Amanda," Liz said quietly.

But Amanda was already shaking her head, her fingers bunching so hard into the fabric of her coat that her knuckles turned white. "No."

Liz closed her eyes, her shoulders dropping an inch. "No, we're not doing this."

"Amanda-"

"We've had rows before, Liz. We have rows all the time," Amanda said, and she laughed again, a desperate, little breathless sound that she forced out to fill the space.

She pushed away from the table, her leather boots scraping sharply against the linoleum as she began to pace the narrow gap between the counter and the fridge. "Jesus Christ, remember Derbyshire? We didn't speak for three whole days after Derbyshire. You wouldn't even look at me in the car on the way back."

Liz didn't answer, she just stood by the kettle, her hands deep in her pockets, watching Amanda with a stillness that was becoming terrifying.

"Or when Johnny found those messages on your old phone?" Amanda’s voice rose, her words tumbling over one another in a frantic rush to construct a wall against the quiet. "We thought the whole world was going to end. We thought everyone in the village would find out. But we fixed it, didn't we? We always work it out."

The sentence hung in the air between them, heavy and exposed.

We always work it out.

Not we love each other, not we belong together. Amanda had built her entire understanding of their life, the secret late-night arrivals, the separate school runs, the hidden toothbrushes, around the absolute, unshakable certainty that no matter how deep the cut, Liz would still be there afterward to help patch it up.

Liz stared at her for a long time, her eyes reflecting the tiny, fading coloured bulbs of the Christmas tree in the corner. Then, she gave a tiny, almost imperceptible nod.

"Yeah," Liz said.

The agreement hit harder than an argument ever could. Amanda stopped pacing, her brow furrowing as she looked at her. "What does that mean?"

"It means you're right," Liz's voice sounded hollowed out, flattened by a profound, multi-year exhaustion that no amount of sleep could fix. "We always work it out." She swallowed, her throat moving with a visible tightness. "And every single time, Amanda... every single time, I'm the one who bends."

Amanda felt something cold and heavy drop straight through her stomach, a physical lurch of vertigo. "Liz-"

"No." For the first time all evening, the white-hot fury was entirely gone from Liz’s face. She didn't look angry anymore, but she looked completely, utterly heartbroken. "I don't think you understand what's actually happened here."

Panic, cold and sharp, finally breached Amanda’s defenses, clawing its way up her throat. She didn't know how to apologise, so she did the only other thing she knew how to do, she started bargaining.

"I'll tell Julia," Amanda said, her voice frantic, her hands coming up in a small, pleading gesture. "I'll tell her tomorrow morning, I'll call her before the school run, I'll tell Meg too. We can... we can go away somewhere, Liz. Just the two of us. We can book that holiday to Cornwall that we kept talking about last summer. I'll stay more nights here, four nights, five, whatever you want."

And with every single offer, the look on Liz’s face only grew heavier, the distance between them widening into a chasm as Liz realized, with a sickening clarity, that Amanda still didn't get it.

"I'll tell people, Liz," Amanda begged, her voice cracking as she took a step closer, desperate to find the right currency to buy her way back into safety. "I'll tell them we're together."

Liz actually laughed. It was a short, disbelieving sound that died before it could even leave her lips.

Amanda seized on it immediately, her eyes widening with a flash of frantic hope. "See? There. That's what you wanted, isn't it? That's what this has all been about."

Liz just stared at her, the silence stretching out until the ticking clock felt like a hammer.

"I wanted that two years ago," Liz said quietly.

The kitchen seemed to drop five degrees.

"I wanted that before Charlie started secondary school," Liz continued, her voice level, unyielding, and completely devastating. "I wanted that before Max lost his first tooth and kept asking why you couldn't stay for breakfast with the tooth fairy."

Amanda felt herself go entirely numb, her breath hitching in her chest as the timeline of her own cowardice was laid out on the scratched kitchen table.

Liz’s eyes finally filled with tears, big and bright under the fluorescent strip light, but her jaw remained set in that hard, white line. "I wanted it before I spent two whole years begging someone to just be proud of me."

The line destroyed Amanda. The realisation hit her like a physical blow to the sternum, this wasn't a negotiation about coming out anymore. It wasn't about the village, or Julia’s clipboard, or Kevin’s gossip. It was about the fact that she was already too late. The time she had begged for had eaten away the very thing she was trying to protect.

"Do you know what the worst part is?" Liz asked.

Amanda couldn't answer.

"I took them." Liz laughed once, a sound that cracked down the middle. "Every single scrap. My eyes shone, Amanda, and I told myself I should be grateful. I told myself that a part-time version of you in the dark was better than nothing at all."

"I think we're done," Liz said flatly.

Amanda waited.

For the rest of it.

For the part where Liz said she just needed some space, or the part where she broke down and cried, or the part where Amanda finally stepped across the linoleum to whisper an apology, and they somehow found their way back upstairs to the safety of the dark bedroom. Because that was how this worked, that was how it had always worked for eight years.

Nothing came.

Liz reached out and picked up her heavy winter coat from the back of the wooden chair.

Amanda’s stomach dropped into a bottomless void. "Liz."

No answer.

"Liz, stop. Please."

Liz didn't look at her. She just shrugged into the fleece, her arms slipping into the worn sleeves with a familiar, fluid motion that felt absolutely unbearable to watch.

Amanda had watched her do that exact movement a thousand times before, for freezing morning school runs, for quick trips to the corner shop for milk, for rainy football practices on Wednesday nights, for ordinary, beautiful Thursdays.

Tonight, it looked completely different. Tonight, it looked permanent.

"Liz." Her voice cracked, turning into a small, broken whisper.

Liz paused by the door, her hand hovering just above the brass handle.

Amanda’s heart surged with a sickening wave of relief. There. There she is. She’s stopping. She’s turning around. She’s going to look at me, and she’s going to see how terrified I am, and she’s going to come back to the table.

Instead, Liz kept her back to the room, her shoulders rigid under the dark fabric.

"I’m tired of being the person you love in private," Liz said, and the words didn't just hang in the air; they seemed to settle into the very foundations of the house, heavy and irreversible, turning the warm, familiar kitchen into a place Amanda no longer recognised.

Amanda stopped breathing, her lungs locking tight as if the air itself had turned to lead, her mind frantically trying to find the witty retort or the sharp, commanding instruction that would snap Liz back into place. She watched with a detached horror as Liz’s hand closed around the brass handle of the front door, the metal catching the light from the hallway, a mundane, everyday action that suddenly felt like a guillotine blade being positioned.

Liz opened the door, and the freezing January night air rushed into the small, cramped hallway like an intruder, instantly killing the lingering warmth of the radiator and bringing with it the sharp, unforgiving smells of the outside world, wet asphalt, woodsmoke, and the distant, metallic tang of car exhaust from the main road.

The draft sent a shiver through Amanda’s silk blouse, but she didn't move; she just stared at the silhouette of the woman who had been her secret center for two years, waiting for the pause, the hesitation, the inevitable moment where Liz would sigh and turn around because she couldn't actually leave.

But for the first time, Liz didn't look back. There was no final, tearful glance, no silent plea for Amanda to stop her, no lingering doubt in the set of her shoulders; there was only the steady, rhythmic sound of her trainers on the concrete step.

The front door clicked shut. It wasn't a slam, a slam would have been an invitation to follow, a scream for attention, a signal of a war that was still being fought, but this was just a quiet, solid thud that sealed the cold air inside the house and left Amanda standing in a tomb of her own making.

Amanda stood perfectly still in the middle of the kitchen, her hands still half-curled as if she were holding an invisible glass, her heart hammering a frantic, uneven rhythm against her ribs that seemed to be the only thing moving in the entire world.

Behind her, the kettle finally clicked off with a sharp snap, the rising steam slowly vanishing into the cold air of the room, and the silence that followed was so absolute it felt like it was pressing against her eardrums.

Somewhere outside, a car drove past, its tires whistling softly against the wet tarmac of the cul-de-sac, the sound fading into the distance until it was gone. Everything sounded perfectly, terrifyingly normal; the fridge continued its low hum, the floorboards settled with their usual midnight creaks, and the streetlights outside continued to cast the same dull, amber glow through the kitchen window, illuminating the dirty tea mugs and the chipped Sports Direct mug on the windowsill.

That was the strangest part, the sheer, mocking stability of the world around her. The sky hadn't fallen, the walls hadn't crumbled, and the earth hadn't opened up to swallow her whole, even though the entire architecture of her life had just been demolished in the space of twenty minutes.

Liz had simply left. She had walked out of the door and into the night, leaving her keys, her scraps, and her decade of patience behind on the counter. And as Amanda stood there, her eyes fixed on the space by the door, she still hadn't realised that this wasn't just another row they would "work out" over coffee in the morning; she hadn't realised that the silence wasn't a pause, but the end.

Chapter 22: Seven Hundred and Thirty Days

Summary:

If Liz got hit by a bus tomorrow, Amanda would stand at her funeral and tell everyone they were close friends.

It takes Amanda far too long to understand why that was the beginning of the end.

Chapter Text

Amanda woke up at six the next morning in her own king-sized bed with the Egyptian cotton sheets, and her phone was already in her hand before she’d even properly opened her eyes because she was entirely convinced there would be a text message waiting for her, a long, rambling, semi-apologetic paragraph from Liz saying she’d gone to her sister’s to cool down but they needed to talk, because that was exactly how the scripts of their rows had always been written.

But when she swiped the screen open, there was absolutely nothing there except a notification about a direct debit and a WhatsApp from Julia about the leftover charity raffle prizes, and the absolute blankness of the screen made a strange, tight knot form right at the bottom of Amanda's stomach.

She sat on the edge of the mattress and typed out a quick, careful message, I’m sorry about what I said, it was a hideous joke and I was just stressed about Kevin, call me when you can, and she hit send, watching the single grey tick turn into two grey ticks, and then she sat there for twenty minutes waiting for them to turn blue, but they stayed resolutely grey while the house around her began to wake up with the heavy, familiar sounds of her children moving down the corridor.

Tuesday came, she had sent four more messages, each one slightly less polished and slightly more frantic, dropping her poise entirely to ask if Liz was alright and if the boys needed anything for school, but the ticks never changed color and the phone never rang, and Amanda spent her evenings sitting in her pristine kitchen with a glass of Pinot Grigio, staring at the small screen until the light timed out and left her in the dark.

The second week of February rolls around the silence had taken on a heavy, physical weight that Amanda couldn't seem to shake off no matter how much she packed her schedule with school committee meetings and parish admin, so she drove out to the boutique florist near the garden center and bought a massive, sprawling bunch of white ranunculus and eucalyptus leaves because they were elegant and expensive and didn't look like an obvious bribe.

She drove past the terrace house on her way back from the secondary school run, her heart thumping against her ribs as she pulled her car into the cul-de-sac and noticed the transit van wasn't in its usual spot on the gravel, but she got out anyway, carrying the heavy paper-wrapped bundle up the concrete path where the frost had turned the small grass patch into stiff, grey needles.

She didn't want to ring the bell and risk facing Max or Charlie if they were home from school early, so she carefully propped the flowers against the red front door right beneath the brass letterbox, tucking a small cream envelope with her name on it into the stems so Liz would know exactly who they were from.

When she drove past again the next afternoon on her way to pick up Max, the bundle was still sitting in the same position, except the freezing sleet had come down overnight and turned the delicate white petals into a mushy, translucent brown pulp that looked like rubbish someone had dumped on the step, and the small cream envelope had dissolved into a soggy grey rag that was stuck to the brickwork.

She found herself pulling into the cul-de-sac at nine o'clock on a Thursday evening without having actually planned the route, her fingers gripping the steering wheel so hard they felt stiff from the cold because she’d forgotten her leather gloves on the passenger seat.

The lights were on upstairs in the boys' bedroom, and there was a faint, yellow glow coming from the kitchen window at the back, the same kitchen where they’d stood two weeks ago, and Amanda got out of the car before she could talk herself out of it, walking up the path with her teeth chattering as the freezing rain started to spot her wool coat.

She knocked on the glass of the front door, three sharp, authoritative raps that sounded far too loud in the quiet street, and she waited, listening to the muffled sound of a television inside and the sudden, heavy thump of someone coming down the stairs.

The curtain in the small window next to the door twitched, and Amanda caught a brief glimpse of Charlie's pale face looking out at her through the glass, his eyes wide and completely blank with the total lack of warmth that only a teenager can manage when they’ve been told exactly what to do.

Amanda offered a small, breathless smile and took a step forward, expecting the lock to click, but the curtain simply dropped back into place, and the heavy wooden door remained completely solid between them while the television noise upstairs suddenly went mute, leaving Amanda standing on the dark step under the dripping gutter until her feet felt completely numb.

She'd been warned by Julia and Meg not to force anything. The confrontation with Julia happened on a Tuesday morning in the school car park right after the bells had rung and the last of the Year 7s had been herded through the double doors into the warmth.

Julia was standing by her boot, trying to untangle a set of plastic clipboards from a high-vis vest for the school gate drop-off, and Amanda walked over with her usual quick, purposeful stride, intending to ask if she’d heard anything about the upcoming district sports day because she knew Liz usually volunteered for the parking duty.

Julia didn't look up when Amanda approached, she just kept pulling at the blue nylon straps with a strange, jerky energy that wasn't like her at all, and when Amanda finally said her name, Julia dropped the clipboards back onto the carpet with a loud, metallic clatter and turned around, her face completely pale and her mouth set in a thin, hard line that made her look ten years older than she was.

"Leave her alone, Amanda," Julia said, her voice dropping into a low, steady register that completely bypassed her usual high-pitched school-gate tone.

Amanda blinked, her hand dropping from her pocket as she let out a short, defensive laugh that felt completely out of place in the grey morning air. "What? Julia, don't be ridiculous, I was just going to ask about the sports day schedules-"

"Leave. Her. Alone," Julia repeated, stepping closer until she was standing right in front of Amanda, her eyes fixed on Amanda’s face with a fierce, protective anger that made Amanda’s breath hitch in her throat.

"I have sat in my car for two years and watched you pull up three streets away so nobody would see you walking into that terrace, and I have listened to you make those hideous, snobbish little jokes at the parish meetings just to keep Kevin and the others from looking too closely at your life, and I didn't say anything because I thought you were just frightened. But she’s done, Amanda. She came to my house on Friday night, and she sat on my sofa, and she didn't even cry, she just looked like she’d been hollowed out from the inside, so if you have even a single ounce of actual decency left in you, you will stop driving past her house, and you will stop knocking on her door."

Amanda spent the next three days in a sort of daze, her mind constantly replaying Julia’s voice until she felt so claustrophobic in her own street she drove three towns over to the big retail park just to get away from the people who knew her name.

She ran into Meg outside the giant Marks & Spencer by the homeware section, and Meg didn't try to avoid her; she just stood there by the shopping trolleys with a grey canvas tote bag over her shoulder and watched Amanda approach with that same detached, unblinking look she always had when she was watching the mothers argue over the PTA budget.

"I suppose you've heard too," Amanda said, her voice sounding thin and ragged as she leaned against the metal railing, her fingers picking at the loose thread on her sleeve because she couldn't bring herself to look Meg in the eye. "Julia screamed at me in the car park. They all think I’m some sort of monster because I wanted to keep my private life to myself, but I was trying, Meg. I was genuinely trying to figure out how to make it work without destroying everything for the children."

"No, you weren't," Meg said quietly, her voice entirely devoid of malice, just heavy with the flat, unvarnished truth of someone who had spent two years watching the clock run down from the sidelines.

Amanda’s head snapped up, her face flushing a dark, hot red under the bright lights of the retail park. "How can you say that? You don't know what we said to each other, you don't know the promises I made her."

"You spent two years asking Liz to wait for you, Amanda, but you weren't trying to find a way to be with her," Meg said, taking a slow breath and looking out toward the rows of parked cars where the rain was starting to bounce off the roofs. "You were deciding. You were weighing up her feelings against your big house and your reputation at the school gates, and you were trying to see if you could get away with keeping her in the dark forever. That's not trying, babe. That's just delaying the funeral because you didn't want to carry the coffin."

The absolute absence of Liz became a daily, grinding punishment that lasted for months, a total vacuum where there were no accidental run-ins at the local shop, no glimpses of the transit van turning the corner by the green, and no quiet sightings at the Saturday football matches, until Amanda began to feel like she was living in a suburb entirely haunted by a person who had vanished off the face of the earth.

The silence finally broke on a bleak, rain-streaked afternoon in late April when Amanda was coming out of the big Tesco on the edge of town, carrying a single brown paper bag with some fruit and a bottle of milk, and she saw the transit van parked right near the recycling bins by the far exit.

Her heart gave a massive, violent leap against her ribs, and she dropped her car keys onto the tarmac, not even bothering to pick them up as she started walking quickly across the lanes of traffic, her eyes locked on the familiar blue fleece moving around the back of the vehicle. It was one glimpse, one solitary chance after months of agonising nothingness.

Liz was lifting a heavy plastic crate of groceries into the boot, her hair pulled back in that same cheap plastic clip she always wore, and Charlie was standing next to her, holding a giant multi-pack of crisps and laughing at something his mother had just said.

Amanda’s throat went completely dry, and she called out Liz’s name, her voice sounding cracked and breathless against the noise of the supermarket trolleys and the revving engines.

Liz froze for a single second, her shoulders going rigid under the fleece, but she didn't turn around to look, and she didn't scream or slam the boot shut in a panic. She just reached out, put a hand on Charlie’s shoulder, and quietly guided him toward the passenger door, her movements perfectly calm and deliberate as she climbed into the driver's seat and pulled the door shut behind her.

Amanda reached the edge of the white parking bay just as the engine roared to life with that familiar, spluttering crank, and she stood there with her shopping bag clutched to her chest while the van reversed out of the space and drove slowly toward the main road, disappearing into the mid-morning traffic without Liz ever once lifting her head to check the rearview mirror, and that was the exact moment Amanda finally understood that the silence wasn't a temporary wall she could climb, but a permanent ending.

By the time the summer holidays drew to a close, the suburb had become entirely uninhabitable for Amanda because every single lane she drove down led past a milestone of their secrets, every parish council flyer reminded her of the winter quiz night, and every single rainy morning at the school gates felt like walking through a gauntlet of whispered judgements.

She couldn't bear the suffocating familiarity of it any longer, nor the reality of her credit card bills now that the boutique shop was quietly bleeding cash. When Georgie and Manus reached the age where a move wouldn't completely disrupt their education, Amanda quietly announced she was relocating to open a new luxury lifestyle and "curated home" consultancy in the north, a desperate, final gamble to rebrand her financial scramble as an exciting new venture.

She packed up the detached house in the middle of a rainy October morning without any leaving parties or tearful goodbyes. The children helped in a strange, disciplined silence; they moved around the rooms taping up boxes and stacking crates with a focused efficiency, never asking why the transit van hadn't been in the drive for months or why Liz hadn't come by to say goodbye.

They had spent years watching Amanda curate her life, and they knew better than to ask about the ghosts she was leaving behind; they simply accepted the new city and the new school as if the two years in the terrace house had been nothing more than a long, unexplained detour.

On her last night in the house, while the removal van sat idling in the lane outside and the children slept at her mother’s down the road, Amanda found herself sitting on the floor of the empty master bedroom, holding a small cardboard box marked IMMEDIATE USE / ACCREDITED DOCUMENTS.

Right at the bottom, jammed beneath the land registry files and the unpaid business invoices, her fingers brushed against a tiny, faded blue plastic toothbrush that was still sealed in its cheap supermarket wrapper.

She held it in her palm for a long, unblinking time, her thumb tracing the faded barcode just as Liz’s thumb used to trace the edge of her glass when she was tired, and then she quietly laid it back into the box, smoothing the heavy brown packing tape over the top until the cardboard was completely sealed.

The move to Manchester didn't look like a defeat; it looked like a brilliant lifestyle pivot. She rented a small, wildly overpriced studio space in a trendy part of the city to launch the new brand, and her mother told everyone how remarkably well Amanda always managed a crisis.

It was during a grueling late-night session at her laptop, while trying to secure a freelance styling contract for a boutique hotel group, that a recruitment consultant reached out regarding a high-level creative partnership role based in Melbourne.

It felt like a sign, a clean, white, sun-drenched slate thousands of miles away from the damp, grey reality of the M6. She applied that night, driven by the seductive promise of a life where nobody knew her name, her history, or the smell of the rain on a terrace house path.

As Amanda later boarded the flight, checking her banking app one last time while trying to maintain her polished composure, she told herself that distance would help.

Distance would give Liz time.

Distance would give them perspective.

Distance would make it easier to have the conversation when neither of them was angry anymore.

Christmas came and went, and Amanda didn't call.

Later became spring, spring became summer, summer became another year, and somewhere along the way, without either of them ever saying it aloud, later became never.

Chapter 23: Fifteen Years Later

Summary:

Amanda spent fifteen years building a beautiful life.The only problem was that the person she wanted to share it with wasn't in it.

Chapter Text

The apartment sat on the twelfth floor of a glass-fronted tower in St Kilda, looking out over the grey-blue expanse of Port Phillip Bay. From her living room, the city skyline was just a smudge of light to the north, but the horizon was infinite, a flat, rhythmic line that didn’t care who watched it.

People told Amanda she was lucky almost every week. The junior associates at the firm, the women she played tennis with on Saturday mornings, the people she met at gallery openings, they saw the floor-to-ceiling windows, the curated collection of mid-century ceramics on the sideboard, and the way the morning light caught the polished concrete floors.

She had stopped correcting them years ago. It was easier to accept the envy than to explain that success was just a very efficient way of insulating yourself from your own life.

She was sixty now. The boutique consultancy she’d started in a cramped Manchester studio had grown into a sleek international lifestyle branding firm, and when the partners offered her a senior role spearheading their visual expansion in Melbourne, she’d accepted before they’d even finished the pitch.

She told herself it was a career move, a prestige play, but she knew the truth, she had spent her life being good at running. Not from Liz anymore, the ghost had long since settled into a quiet, manageable ache, but from the suffocating, relentless memory of who she had been in that terrace house.

Georgie was long finished with university, living somewhere in London with a career of her own. Manus was settled in a life that seemed intentionally quiet. Her mother had passed away in a very neat, expensive care home in Cheshire the previous autumn, closing the final, heavy door on her old life in the North. There was nothing left in England to tether her.

Her home here was a masterclass in restraint. Blonde wood, soft charcoal textiles, a kitchen that looked like it had never actually seen a spill or a stray crumb. It was the kind of life that photographed perfectly for design magazines, full of clean lines and negative space. It was the kind of life nobody actually wants, because it had no room for the messy, uncurated weight of a person.

She had no partner. No great love. There had been a few dates over the years, brief, sterile dinners at seaside bistros with divorced architects or corporate lawyers who talked too much about their portfolios and too little about anything that mattered.

They were safe, polite, and entirely unmemorable; none of them were Liz.

She spent her weekends walking along the beach in crisp, cream linen trousers, shielding her eyes from the sharp Australian sun, staring out at the bay. She would watch the tide pulling away from the sand and tell herself the vast, empty blue of the ocean was peaceful, pretending it didn't look exactly like the space she’d spent fifteen years trying to fill with things that didn't matter.

The call from Georgie had been brief, filled with the clipped, distracted tone of a woman juggling a toddler and a full-time job. A christening, a small, intimate affair at the parish church on the edge of the suburb, the same cold, stone-floored place where Amanda had spent years of Sunday mornings pretending to be someone else.

For a week, Amanda had stared at the invitation propped against her marble kitchen island, debating the logistics. She told herself it was too far, too much upheaval, a disruption to her routine. But the truth was the weight of the silence she’d maintained for fifteen years had started to feel brittle.

She booked the business-class flight, packed a single leather suitcase, and told herself she was going for her grandchild, she didn't tell herself she was going because she had finally run out of places to hide.

The suburb felt smaller upon her return. Shrunken, somehow, like a sweater that had been washed at too high a temperature. The ancient oaks that had lined the high street had been aggressively pollarded, leaving the sky feeling exposed and grey.

Where her boutique shop, the one with the velvet-lined displays and the curated candles, had once stood, there was now a generic estate agent with flickering LED screens advertising properties in the next town over. The people walking past her on the pavement looked tired, their faces etched with the mundane gravity of fifteen years of small-town winters.

She ran into Julia on Thursday morning, outside the artisan bakery that had replaced the old florist. Julia was struggling with a heavy canvas bag of sourdough, her hair now a shock of white-grey, tucked into the same practical, slate-blue quilted jacket she’d worn when the boys were in primary school.

The recognition was instant. Julia stopped dead on the cracked pavement, the sourdough thumping against her leg. She stared at Amanda, at the sharp tailoring of her cream trench coat, the luxury of her oversized designer sunglasses, the polished, untouchable mask of a woman who had mastered the art of moving on.

"Amanda," Julia said. The name wasn't a greeting; it was a flat, heavy statement of fact. "I didn't know you were back."

Amanda felt the familiar muscle memory of her own social armour click into place. She offered her classic, polished smile, the one she used for clients and board meetings, and adjusted her handbag, the leather strap cool against her palm.

"Just for the weekend," Amanda said, her voice bright and clipped. "Georgie’s little boy is being christened. It’s a flying visit, really. I’m heading back on Monday."

Julia didn't return the smile, she didn't even blink, she just stood there, clutching her bag, looking at Amanda with a strange, heavy intensity that made the pavement feel suddenly unsteady.

"Right," Julia said. She shifted her weight, and for a second, the street noise seemed to sharpen into a single, high-pitched ringing. "Are you staying at your house?"

Amanda frowned, a flicker of genuine confusion creasing her brow. She hadn't even thought of the terrace house; she had treated the entire suburb like a restricted zone on a map. "No. I’m staying out by the golf course. It’s quiet there. I haven't really had the time to see anyone."

Julia let out a short, breathy sound, a sharp expulsion of air that had none of the warmth of a laugh. She looked at Amanda, really looked at her, and her expression curdled into something that looked uncomfortably like pity. "You haven't seen Liz?"

Amanda felt a spike of irritation, a defensive wall snapping into place. "No," she said, her voice dropping into a register of cool, corporate finality. "We haven't been in touch, Julia, you know that. It’s been fifteen years."

Julia stepped closer, ignoring the busy flow of people navigating the bakery entrance. Her face, usually so ruddy and animated with PTA gossip, turned a sickly, washed-out shade of grey under the overcast English sky. Her hands trembled, just a little, against the canvas bag. "Christ, Amanda. You genuinely don't know, do you?"

"Know what?" Amanda’s voice came out thinner than she’d intended. A small, cold knot, familiar and sharp, began to tighten in the very bottom of her stomach.

"She's dying," Julia said. She didn't whisper it, but the words carried a weight that made the street noise feel suddenly distant. "It’s pancreatic, stage four. They gave her a few months back at Christmas, but it’s been weeks now, and it’s moved too fast. We’ve all been taking turns, me, Meg, the girls, helping Charlie and Max run the house. Keeping things steady."

Amanda stood completely still on the pavement, and the world tilted slightly on its axis. Weeks. The word sounded like a heavy iron door slamming shut in a dark room.

For one impossible, agonising second, her mind raced, framing the question: Why didn't anyone call me? She felt the phantom urge to reach for her phone, to demand to know why she’d been kept in the dark, why she hadn't been informed.

Then, the memory of her own calculated, clinical erasure hit her with the force of a physical blow. She had changed her number, she had deleted the social media accounts, she had scrubbed her digital and physical footprint from this zip code so thoroughly that she was, for all intents and purposes, a ghost. She hadn't been excluded by them; she had excluded herself with precision.

The silence that followed was total. Julia was watching her, waiting for a breakdown that wasn't coming, because Amanda didn't know how to fall apart in public anymore.

"Where is she?" Amanda whispered. Her throat felt as though she’d swallowed glass.

"She’s at home," Julia said, her voice softening into a weary, defeated cadence. "Though she’s not in the terrace anymore. About five years ago, she finally landed that management role with the housing association, the one she’d been chasing for years. She moved down to London, got a flat in Hackney, and honestly, she thrived. She was finally living the life she’d always talked about."

Julia sighed, looking down at her sourdough bag. "But when the diagnosis came, she wouldn't hear of staying in a London hospital. She fought like hell to get back to the old cul-de-sac. She’s renting the terrace back for the final weeks, said she wanted to be where she started, said that’s where she’s finishing."

Amanda barely heard the directions, her head spinning. She drove there in a daze. The red paint on the front door was peeling at the corners, just like it had been fifteen years ago. She knocked softly, twice.

The door opened. It was Charlie. He was twenty-eight now, tall, with broad shoulders and the same thick, dark hair Liz used to complain about trying to cut. He stared at Amanda, his eyes blankly checking the cut of her expensive coat, before a sudden, sharp flicker of recognition crossed his face. He didn't look angry; he looked profoundly tired.

"She's in the kitchen," Charlie said, his voice flat. He stepped back, moving with the heavy, practiced gait of someone who had been doing a lot of lifting. "Max is out at the chemist. Go on in."

The house smelled of lavender disinfectant and the heavy, sweet, medicinal tang of a sickroom. Liz was sitting in an armchair pulled up to the small kitchen table. She was wearing an oversized grey cardigan, her frame reduced to angles and sharp bones. When Amanda stepped into the doorway, Liz turned her head slowly.

"Alright, Amanda," Liz said. Her voice was thin, rough like sandpaper, but it was exactly her.

"Alright, Liz," Amanda said. She sat down on the mismatched wooden chair, its frame creaking under her. Her hands were shaking violently, so she tucked them deep into her lap, clenching her fists.

"Julia told me," Amanda said, the words feeling heavy and useless.

Liz gave a small, weak shrug. "Aye. Well. Turns out that back pain I kept complaining about all those years... it wasn't just from lifting crates after all."

They sat in silence, the kitchen clock ticking with a rhythmic, mechanical finality. Charlie stood by the counter, his back to them, staring fixedly at the kettle.

"How’s London?" Amanda asked, desperate to steer the conversation away from the hospital bed.

"Loud," Liz said. "But good. Max is finishing his degree at Goldsmiths. He’s doing well. He’s the sensible one, always was."

Charlie didn't turn, but he stiffened slightly at the mention of his brother.

"And Charlie?" Amanda asked, glancing at the broad, rigid back of the boy who had once run through this very kitchen with a toy tractor.

"Still working in the city," Liz said, her eyes drifting toward her son. "He’s been here every day, making sure I eat, making sure I’m comfortable. He’s got a girlfriend now, Bianca. Very sweet, she’s been a godsend, running back and forth to the chemist."

Charlie finally turned, his expression unreadable, his eyes flicking over Amanda with a mixture of grief and cold, protective instinct. He moved to the fridge, clattering bottles to avoid looking at them.

"What about yours?" Liz asked.

"Georgie’s married," Amanda said. "A little boy. Manus is in London, too. Doing corporate law."

"Good," Liz nodded slowly. "They were good kids."

They talked for twenty minutes, running through a performative inventory of the lives they’d built in the shadow of their absence, carefully picking through the safe, dusty history of people they both used to know while avoiding any mention of the wreckage between them or the real reason the air in the kitchen felt so thin.

"Kevin is doing well," Liz said, her voice faint but steady. "He’s a proper businessman now, he finally stopped trying to please everyone at the school gate and started his own consultancy. He’s finally found some peace, and his kids, Rosie and his boy, are doing great. Even Jill is finally home more often; she eased off the corporate travel, so he’s not juggling the household solo anymore."

Amanda nodded, a flicker of phantom bitterness crossing her mind. Kevin, the man who had been needy, anxious, and desperate to fit into the circle she had once presided over. "I’m glad for him. He always did have a knack for the details, even when he was terrified of his own shadow."

"He did," Liz agreed. "He’s stayed in touch with the others. Even Meg, though she’s a world away now."

"Meg?" Amanda asked, a ghost of her old competitive nature surfacing. "I heard she’d finally left the country."

"She did," Liz said, a shadow of a smile playing on her lips. "She took Bill and the whole brood to Italy. You remember the chaos of her household? Well, she decided she’d had enough of the corporate grind and moved them all to that vineyard estate near Siena. She’s finally happy, away from all this."

"And Anne?" Amanda asked, nodding toward Max, who was still pointedly busy at the sink.

"She’s still here," Liz said, her gaze warming as she looked at her son. "She’s been a rock, Amanda. She’s been the one driving Max to the oncology appointments in London when he was too exhausted to drive himself, she’s strong. She doesn't let him hide away, and she’s the only one of us who doesn't treat me like I’m made of glass."

Max paused, his hand stilling on the kettle. He didn't turn around, but he let out a sharp, jagged sigh that cut through the kitchen’s quiet. "Anne is the only reason I’m still standing, Mum. Don't go making me out to be some saint. I’ve been a wreck for months."

"You were always a good lad, Max," Amanda said softly, trying to bridge the chasm.

He finally turned, his face hard, his eyes reflecting the deep-seated resentment of fifteen years of watching his mother wait for a text message that never came. "We were just the kids, Amanda. We were just the ones left in the kitchen while you were deciding if we were worth the effort. Meg and Anne... they were the ones who showed up when you didn't."

The room went cold. Liz reached out and touched Max’s arm, a silent, weary plea for mercy. He softened, his shoulders slumping, and he retreated back into the shadows of the doorway.

They talked about how the whole suburb had eventually moved on from the scandal of the divorce, how the gossip had dried up, how the new families didn't even know the names of the people who had lived in the terrace before them. They talked about everything except the night Liz had walked out of that kitchen, and the fifteen years of silence that had solidified between them like mortar.

The silence in the kitchen stopped being empty; it became a weight, thick and suffocating, pressing against their chests until the air felt too thin to breathe. Amanda stared at Liz’s wrists, so frail they looked like glass, the blue veins tracing a roadmap of a life that had been spent waiting for a turn that never came.

Amanda felt the floorboards beneath her feet shift. The terrifying, jagged realization pierced her, there were no more continents to put between them, no more boardrooms to dominate, no more "new beginnings" that could mask the fact that she had spent fifteen years running away from the only place where she had ever been whole.

"I loved you," Amanda whispered, the words raw, tearing through the quiet.

Liz looked at her, her eyes misting over, a faint, weary ghost of the woman she used to be flickering in her expression. A sad, tired smile touched her mouth. "I know. I never doubted that, Amanda."

Amanda looked down at her own knees, her vision blurring. That had always been the problem, she had loved Liz after 9 PM. She had loved her in borrowed hours, in quiet kitchens, in parked cars, drawn curtains, and stolen nights. She had loved her when it was easy, she had never learned to love her when someone might see.

The injustice of it felt like a physical ache in her throat. "Then why wasn't that enough? We had all this time, we had everything. Why did we waste it?"

Max, braced against the fridge, let out a shaky, jagged breath. He wasn't looking at them; he was staring at the floor, his knuckles white as he gripped the door handle, holding himself together by a thread.

Liz reached across the faded woolen blanket covering her lap, her movements slow and labored. She covered Amanda’s hand with her own, her skin felt parched, burning with the frantic heat of a body giving up.

"It wasn't a matter of love, babe," Liz said, her voice dropping to a rasp. "You loved me enough to want me, but you never loved me enough to let go of who you thought you were supposed to be. That was never the problem, you were just too afraid to choose me. And by the time you were ready, the life you’d built was too big to break."

Amanda’s fingers slid into Liz’s palm, the contact searing. It was the truth, a brutal, final verdict. Liz had known it all those years ago, standing in the doorway of this very kitchen, while Amanda had been busy choosing the life that looked perfect on paper but felt like a tomb.

The heavy thud of the front door broke the spell. Charlie walked in, the white pharmacy bag crinkling loudly in the silence, and he stopped dead. His face hardened, the light in his eyes dimming as he looked from his mother’s fragile form to the woman in the expensive coat who had brought nothing but ghosts back into their house.

He didn't speak. He just walked over, his presence a wall of cold, protective granite, and placed himself between Amanda and his mother.

Amanda stood up, her coat felt heavy, like lead armor. She looked at Liz, clinging to the hope that time could somehow be stretched, folded, or defied.

"I’ll see you tomorrow," Amanda said, her voice barely a whisper, a desperate plea masquerading as a promise. She clung to the words, hoping that by saying them out loud, she could force the universe to bend.

Liz looked up at her, her eyes heavy and unfocused, already drifting into that quiet, irreversible space where the living couldn't reach her. She offered a tired, knowing, and utterly final smile, the same smile she used to give Amanda when she’d stayed late at the terrace, long after the rest of the world had gone to bed. "Alright, babe," Liz murmured, the sound thin and brittle, like dry leaves skittering across pavement.

They both knew tomorrow was a lie. Tomorrow was just another twenty-four hours they wouldn't share.

The phone rang at four o'clock, cutting through the hotel room's stifling stillness like a blade. The air was thin and grey, the pre-dawn light of an English morning leaching the color from the expensive wallpaper. Amanda was already sitting on the edge of the king-sized bed, clutching her phone, staring into the dark. She answered on the first ring.

"Amanda?" Julia’s voice was a shredded thing, caught between a gasp and a sob, the wet, ragged sound of a tissue being crushed in her hand. "She’s gone, love. She... she just slipped away. About an hour ago."

"Right," Amanda said. The word didn't feel like a response; it felt like a collapse. It was a hollow, leaden weight dropped into the dark, bottomless well of her own chest, no splash, no echo, just the sickening, flat thud of everything she had spent fifteen years running from finally catching up to her.

She hung up, but she didn't cry. The fire for tears had been raked out of her long ago, leaving only a parched, sterile void where her heart used to be. She simply sat there, paralysed on the edge of the mattress, her fingers still curled around the cold plastic of the phone.

She stared at the muted, swirling patterns of the hotel carpet until they blurred into a nauseating haze, her ears straining against the muffled, indifferent hum of the city stirring to life below. The world was waking up, traffic was starting to flow, breakfast was being served, and the sun was beginning to bleed over the horizon, all of it completely oblivious to the fact that the gravity of Amanda's entire universe had just vanished.

The line stayed dead against her ear, the silence heavy and suffocating, thick enough to taste. It wasn't just a quiet room; it was the absolute, crushing finality of a chapter being ripped from a book, the stark, terrifying realisation that she had been holding her breath for fifteen years, waiting for a reconciliation that was now forever out of reach.

She hadn't just lost Liz in the last hour; she had been losing her every single day for half a lifetime, and only now, in the deafening quiet of a stranger’s room, did she finally understand that the story she thought she was still writing had actually ended a long, long time ago.

Three months later, Melbourne was sweltering. The sun was an unrelenting, blinding white, pressing against the glass of the floor-to-ceiling windows. The air inside the apartment smelled faintly of ozone, salt, and the dry, metallic heat of a mid-summer afternoon that felt like it would never end.

Amanda stood in the center of her living room, surrounded by the debris of a life curated for an audience that had long since stopped watching. She had finally finished sorting through her mother’s estate, boxes stacked like cold, cardboard monuments to a lifetime of things that didn't matter, china that never felt like home, linens that never warmed her.

She sliced open a heavy box labeled ACCREDITED DOCUMENTS with a sharp, impatient tug of her nails. She shoved aside folders of old passports, dust-moted tax returns, and property deeds, the paper trail of a woman who had never stayed anywhere long enough to put down roots.

And then, her hand brushed against something small, plastic, and sharp.

She pulled it out. It was a tiny, faded blue toothbrush.

The plastic packaging was yellowed, the edges frayed and brittle with age. It was a relic from a weekend that had never happened, a ghost of a trip they had planned, a future that had been forfeited on the floor of a kitchen in Southfield fifteen years ago. It was a pathetic, small object, yet it held the weight of everything they had been too cowardly to claim.

Amanda stood alone in the glare of the Australian sun, the heat pressing against the windows as if trying to force its way in. She finally understood. The tragedy wasn't that Liz had died. The tragedy was that she had lost her fifteen years ago, and had spent every single day since then meticulously constructing a life to pretend the space in her heart wasn't empty.

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atttention_whore, gyoriedes, shesmyscar, perfectlittledeath, cunkupthejam, dreamingofmemo, and popato_chisps as well as 7 guests left kudos on this work!

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st4rsarecrazy on Chapter 1 Mon 25 May 2026 04:16PM UTC

GIVE ME MOREEE RAHH

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1. greenajah on Chapter 1 Tue 26 May 2026 06:24AM UTC
  
  <3333
  
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dreamingofmemo on Chapter 1 Mon 25 May 2026 10:28PM UTC

I love this!! Looking forward to more ;)

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1. greenajah on Chapter 1 Tue 26 May 2026 06:24AM UTC
  
  thank you sm!
  
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perfectlittledeath on Chapter 1 Thu 28 May 2026 06:47PM UTC

omg this is so PERFECT lol u have got every character so accurate im surprised this hasn't already been an episode honestly so excited to read more ty for posting !! x

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1. greenajah on Chapter 1 Fri 29 May 2026 03:53AM UTC
  
  Youre so kind thank you! X
  
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atttention_whore on Chapter 1 Sun 31 May 2026 06:40PM UTC

THIS IS INCREDIBLE OMGGGGG

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popato_chisps on Chapter 4 Tue 26 May 2026 07:30AM UTC

this is amazing so far and also anne's whatsapp message is killing me lol

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st4rsarecrazy on Chapter 6 Tue 26 May 2026 05:52PM UTC

i love how amanda was so against the canoeing and then when the race started she started yelling at people in competitive mode ITS SO ACCURATE

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atttention_whore on Chapter 11 Mon 01 Jun 2026 03:17PM UTC

im OBSESSED with this its amazinggggg

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popato_chisps on Chapter 23 Tue 02 Jun 2026 03:55PM UTC

I already said it on the discord server but this was so so incredible, you characterised everyone and their flaws so well.
AND THE ENDING WHAT I'm so so heartbroken you've made me feel so sorry for the both of them
you're an amazing writer!!!

Last Edited Tue 02 Jun 2026 04:08PM UTC

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starshipsweremeanttocombust (Guest) on Chapter 23 Wed 03 Jun 2026 04:04PM UTC

beautiful but fucking soul destroying

you're an excellent writer

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atttention_whore on Chapter 23 Wed 03 Jun 2026 07:44PM UTC

WHAT THE FUCK.IM VIOLENTLY SOBBING.WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM OMGGG

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