The Family Friend by C. MacDonald (love story novels in english txt) 📕

was near the end of January. She checks on her phone to see when the digital detox weekend was and, yes, it was the 25th.

Can that be a coincidence? Is it possible that she got her passport just for this trip? If so, that makes her claim that she saw the pink painting and just got on the plane even more preposterous.

Then she reads something that makes her sit down on the edge of the sofa. Amanda’s date of birth. 15 November 1985. She’s a few months younger than Erin. She’d always assumed Amanda was at least five or six years older than her. Why? Because she was friends with Raf when they were kids so it seemed they must have been similar in age but Raf’s seven years older than Erin.

She blinks three, four times, and swallows the lump in her throat. Seven years’ age difference. Raf left Australia when he was around twenty-one, so when they were friends, close friends, a formative friendship as she put it on that first night Erin met her, Amanda was, at most, fourteen.

44

‘You OK?’ An attractive twenty-five-year-old with skeletal arms and floral tattoos around her neck comes up to the desk at the front of Raf’s co-working space. Erin hasn’t seen her before.

‘Is Raf not here?’ Erin points over to his double monitors.

‘He was.’ She turns to the scrum of freelancers beavering away at laptops. A burly man with a huge beard looks up from his desk that’s littered with expensive-looking camera equipment. Sev, Erin’s been introduced to him in town by Raf, a photographer who joined the space at the same time as her fiancé, stands up, acknowledges her shyly.

‘I think he had a meeting,’ he says, a mild hint of an Italian accent, ‘at Marine Gallery.’ Erin pinches her brows. Why is he having meetings here, in town? All his clients are in London. She sees the girl glancing down at the pyjama bottoms that protrude from her big Puffa sleeping-bag coat. Sev’s giving her a strange look as well, something furtive in his eyes. She catches herself in the screen of a huge iMac on the reception desk, and Erin sees why: she looks like she’s just escaped from an institution. Her skin looks drawn, red spots around her chin and her hair looks like a pile of straw a farm animal’s made a bed in. God, Erin thinks, she must follow my feed. She knows that Sev does, Raf’s explained in the past that he’s seen this or that post because Sev has mentioned it. She’d ditched her dressing gown and changed her slippers for shoes, but that aside she’d come straight down here from her supposed sickbed. Raf wasn’t answering his phone and she was so desperate for some answers, to try and understand why the hell he was such close childhood friends with someone seven years younger than him, that she ran down here without much thought, but now she feels self-conscious.

She thanks them and leaves to walk down on the seafront, away from the main traffic of people, towards the harbour and Marine Gallery. She’s been trying to go over the timeline of Raf’s childhood, as she knows it, in her head. His mum left them when he was eleven. They moved from Melbourne when he was still a teenager. She can’t remember him ever saying an exact age but she’s pretty sure that he said he was in his teens. Even if by teenager Raf meant nineteen, that would make Amanda twelve. Erin thinks back to when she was in her late teens, she wasn’t the most popular girl in school but she had a good group of friends and they would barely allow a twelve-year-old sibling to hang around with them let alone choose to be close friends with one.

As she walks through the piss-stinking tunnel underneath the promenade above her, she sees Marine Gallery, an asymmetrical modernist building overlooking the harbour. It’s not huge, about the width of two shops, but its architecture makes it stand out from the rest of the Victorian terrace across the road from it and marks it out as a destination for all the London day trippers.

Through the window she sees Raf talking to a serious-looking young woman with a sharp Joan of Arc hairstyle wearing what looks like a black smock. Erin walks into the gallery and both of them turn to face her. The woman’s face transforms into an amused grin while Raf’s falls into chagrin.

‘Erin, hi, we were just talking about you.’ The woman walks over to Erin and shakes her hand. There’s something of the countryside about her despite her chic attire. ‘You feeling better?’ She holds Erin’s eye as if trying not to make a point of looking at her dishevelment. ‘Sorry, Carmel, I run the gallery.’

‘I know, yeh. Great to meet you. Could I borrow Raf for a minute?’

‘You can have him,’ she says, a joke but does Erin sense a note of unkindness? ‘I’ve got a thing to be at. I’ll let you know,’ she says to Raf. ‘So, so wonderful to meet you, Erin, and please come in and see us more and bring that gorgeous boy of yours. We could always do with a bit of free promotion.’ She squeezes Erin’s shoulder and sweeps off.

Raf shakes his head in irritation and sighs before moving past her and out onto the stone terrace outside the gallery. Erin stops at the glass door before she ventures out into the cold and looks at him as he stares out to sea. He’s put his maroon hat on and wears the heavy orange waterproof coat, expensive for someone who always claims money is tight, the one he’s worn every day in the winter since they first met, that she knows so well, and she wonders if that’s all she really knows about him.

‘Amanda was born in 1985,’ Erin says,