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“Look, Kate, when you love someone you have to make sacrifices sometimes.”
“Well, I’m sorry, but no matter how good the sex is I wouldn’t put up with sharing a man.”
“I know you wouldn’t, Kate. But that’s because you don’t have to – you’ve got Ben. Do you have any idea of how hard it is to meet a man without any form of baggage today?” Her tone was defensive.
“No, I suppose I don’t.” I had met Ben when I was twenty-seven. I never had to endure the carnage that Nat told me was the London dating scene past the age of thirty.
“Well, please don’t lecture me then.” She turned on her heel and walked back down the stairs, then turned around again. “Oh, and Kate?”
“Yeah?”
“It’s not just about the sex!”

Chapter 7
Things were tense between Nat and me over the next few days. Although we were talking to each other, I could tell that she was annoyed with me, but we had an exhibition coming up soon so we both knew we had to leave our differences aside and get on with the organisation for it. We needed to brainstorm for ideas so I suggested that we treat ourselves to cakes in the bakery down the street. We sat down inside the bay window and ordered – well, I did – Nat was trying to be good – she was on a healthy eating buzz although Lord knows she didn’t need to lose any weight.
“Here, give me a bite of that.” She finally gave in to temptation and dug her fork into my sticky toffee pudding. A river of toffee sauce came oozing out. It ran down the side before pooling thickly onto the white plate in front of me. “It doesn’t count when it’s on someone else’s plate.”
“Right,” I said, opening my notepad and flipping it over onto a clean sheet. I wrote the words ‘ To Do ’ at the top of the page and underlined them twice. I loved lists. There was no better feeling in this world than crossing things off a to-do list. Sometimes I even wrote down tasks that I had already done just so that I could put a line through them. I knew it was silly.
Nat had come up with the exhibition title of Silence . She had a good eye so she always curated our exhibitions while I organised the admin end of things such as the invites and the food and wine. She had always had an interest in photography herself. She was forever clicking away with her SLR whenever we were out somewhere.
“Your photos belong on these walls too, you know,” I would say to her whenever she showed me some of them.
But she would shake her head in disagreement. “Not yet.”
She had been saying this for years. I wasn’t sure what she was waiting for. Maybe confidence that might never come?
I made a note that I needed to order more vinyl to put the names of the artists in the gallery window because we were nearly out of it. I also had to get booklets printed with a small biography for each artist and a price list for their work. I needed to draft up the press release and update the website, plus I needed to find someone to launch the exhibition for us. There was a lot of behind-the-scenes work that went into the exhibitions. The bigger galleries around town would use a PR person to do the majority of that work but we weren’t in that league so it was up to just me. We had only four exhibitions a year but most of our sales for the year took place on these four evenings so they were important for the bottom line. My notebook was littered with scribbled reminders. I had underlined some with thick blue lines so that I wouldn’t forget them – other tasks were linked together by arrows. There was so much to be done and my head was spinning just thinking about it all. I sat back, closed the notepad and let out a heavy sigh.
“Any plans for the weekend?” I asked Nat.
“Well, Will will be with his family for most of it but he’s promised me that we’ll do something on Saturday night,” Nat said through another mouthful of cake.
“I see.” Things had been awkward between us since our argument last week, so I