Truly Madly Guilty

by Liane Moriarty

She quite liked this aspect of her personality: the way her mood could change from melancholy to euphoric because of a breeze or a flavour or a beautiful chord progression. It meant she never had to feel too down about feeling down.

Clementine’s family wasn’t particularly wealthy, but privilege was measured on a different scale when you saw what Pam did. Life was a lottery and Clementine knew from a very early age that she had apparently won it.

It was a habit left over from her childhood, when her family had sniffed at wealthy people as if there were something unsavoury and immoral about them.

Resilience. What crap. No kid was going to go to school in a place that looked like freaking Buckingham Palace and come out of it resilient.

Elderly women were as tough as nails but it seemed that men got softer as they aged; their emotions caught them off guard, as if some protective barrier had been worn away by time.

It was interesting that fury and fear could look so much the same.

It was strange, because she always felt that she hid herself from Erika, that she was more ‘herself’ with her ‘true’ friends, where the friendship flowed in an ordinary, uncomplicated, grown-up fashion (emails, phone calls, drinks, dinners, banter and jokes that everyone got), but right now it felt like none of those friends knew her the raw, ugly, childish, basic way that Erika did.

Each time he told himself, I have no expectations, but with each new failure it hurt so much he understood the hope had been there after all, flitting seductively around his subconscious.

‘Or it might be great,’ she said. ‘Yeah,’ said Oliver. He smiled. ‘I think it might be great.’

You could jump so much higher when you had somewhere safe to fall.