The Road Trip by Beth O'Leary (grave mercy .txt) 📕

a shipment of chairs in the back of his lorry, and that she’d been able to fulfil two of her favourite activities simultaneously: having sex and having a nice sit-down.

‘Don’t answer,’ I call, just as Addie says,

‘Don’t pick up!’

Everyone watches the phone ringing out in Deb’s hand.

‘We’re going to have to tell her eventually,’ Deb says as the call goes to voicemail. ‘We’ll never make it there to set up for the barbecue now.’

She opens Maps on her phone.

‘We’ve travelled one hundred and twenty miles in five and a half hours. There’s still . . . three hundred miles to go.’

Addie throws her head back and groans up at the sky. ‘How has this gone so wrong?’

‘Let’s just drive faster,’ Marcus says.

‘It’s five hours of solid driving,’ Deb says. ‘And it’s . . . almost eleven right now.’

‘What time did we say we’d be there?’

‘Three o’clock,’ Addie says, pulling a face. ‘And I’m not speeding. I’ve already got three points on my licence.’

I stare at her, mouth open. She scrupulously avoids my gaze.

‘Me neither,’ Deb says. ‘I have a son. I’m not allowed to die these days.’

‘I’ll text her,’ Addie says, chewing her lip. ‘That’s . . . that’ll be fine.’

Everyone makes supportive noises, as though this is an ingenious idea, when we all know it’s a cop-out.

‘Right – back in the car, everyone. Oh! Kevin,’ Addie says, stopping short. ‘Sorry. I forgot you weren’t part of the gang.’

This seems to please Kevin. Then his grimace-smile wavers. ‘You’re going? Already?’

‘Car’s fixed,’ Addie says, gesturing to the breakdown guys and shooting them a smile.

The Spanish one definitely just checked out her arse. I absolutely must not look like I mind. But I do, a lot. God, she’s so beautiful.

I catch Marcus watching me again, his eyebrows raised, and I try to studiously look at something other than Addie.

‘You don’t want to stick around, have lunch? See the inside of the lorry cab? Eh?’ Kevin says.

All of this is directed at Deb, who is busy packing food into plastic bags and seems to have written Kevin out of her reality altogether. Since their return from Tesco she’s regarded him with the same absent-minded blankness with which Addie looks at Rodney. The Gilbert family’s ability to focus on what matters to them and ignore everything else is truly remarkable.

‘Well,’ Kevin says, grimace-smile fading. He rubs his chin. ‘Goodbye.’

‘So long, Kevin,’ Marcus says, climbing into the front seat of the car. His friendliness has ebbed since Deb went to Tesco with Kevin; Marcus doesn’t like to lose, even if he didn’t particularly care about winning.

The rest of us say our goodbyes, which just leaves Deb. She finishes tidying the litter and half-eaten food we’ve all discarded on the verge-side, touching her hand to her lower back as she straightens up.

‘Oh. Bye, Kevin. Thanks,’ she says, focusing on him at last.

‘Perhaps we’ll cross paths again!’ Kevin tries.

‘Seems unlikely,’ Deb says, opening the car boot and chucking in the rubbish bag.

‘Call me!’ he yells as she slams the car door.

It takes a while for Deb to pull out into the slow lane – the traffic shoots by, gleaming bonnets catching the sun – and Kevin waits on the verge to wave us off. I watch him shrinking away in the mirror and feel Addie’s leg pressed against mine in the back seat, and I wonder why we all find it so very hard to let the Gilbert women go.

We drive for an hour or so without any incident. Well, technically speaking, without incident – as far as I’m concerned, every slight shift of Addie’s leg against mine is worth a whole poem.

Having her so close is making me dizzy. I’ve thought about seeing her again more times than I could possibly count, but it’s nothing like I expected. In my mind she’d looked exactly as she had when I left her – tired, sad eyes and dark hair to her waist – but she’s different now. She’s warmer; less guarded, oddly enough; she knows herself better. The edges of her nails aren’t bitten down raw, and there’s a stillness to her that’s completely new.

And then there’s the hair, of course, and the glasses, both of which I’m finding impossibly sexy.

‘So, Rodney,’ Deb says over her shoulder, as she moves the car out into the fast lane. ‘What’s your story?’

‘Oh, I don’t have a story,’ Rodney says.

Marcus huffs a laugh. He’s been gazing out the window from the front seat, suspiciously quiet. It’s too hot in the car; there’s a nasty sort of stickiness to the air, like the stale fug of a room that’s not been aired since somebody slept there.

‘Everyone has a story,’ Addie says.

She glances at me, but it brings our faces so close – a kiss away from one another – that she turns to the front again within half a second, a blush colouring her cheeks.

‘Rodney?’ she prompts.

Rodney squirms. ‘Oh, really, nothing to tell!’

I look at him with a pang of pity, then realise – as Addie just did – how close our faces are now we’re turned towards one another. I can see every pore on his nose.

‘Come on, Rodney – what is it you do, for instance?’ I say, quickly returning my gaze to the road ahead. The middle seat is unequivocally the worst. There’s nowhere to put my feet, for starters, and my arms feel very inconvenient, like a couple of extra limbs I really should have had the decency to leave in the boot.

‘I work with Cherry,’ Rodney says. ‘I’m in the sales team.’

I can tell without looking that Addie is as surprised as I am. I don’t know why none of us had thought to ask how exactly Rodney knew Cherry, but this wasn’t the answer I’d been expecting. Since moving to live with Krishna in Chichester, Cherry works for a luxury travel company, selling ten-thousand-pound holidays to people who are far too busy to organise them for themselves. Not one of those hideous package sites that’s always shouting at