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faith in me. After a brief show of sisterly support, I guess it’s back to business as usual in the Schuster household.

Chapter 3
     
    Six o’clock, closing time can’t come quickly enough. Because the more I think about it, the more convinced I become that I have to have the Faith Farenze. It’s not rational or logical, I just have this feeling in the pit of my stomach that if the dress is mine not only will I be able to attend the wedding with my head held high, but my whole life will change, will be magically transformed overnight, like Cinderella’s. The dress will hang in my wardrobe, no, on the wall, like a valuable Impressionist painting, so I can gaze at it all the time; and the very same day I’ll win the lotto, meaning I’ll never have to get up early for work ever again. Then I’ll meet Prince Charming, or else I’ll manage to convince Ed that Lainey is all wrong for him and that he should marry me instead.
    As soon as the final customers have left – there are always one or two stragglers – I leave Pandora and Bird to close up, grab my bike and cycle home slowly, feeling completely out of energy. Once inside the house, I dump my bag on the floor at the bottom of the stairs. It’s strangely quiet. Then I remember that Dad’s away working in Kilkenny, and Iris is staying overnight with one of her little friends. Iris is Pandora’s eight-year-old daughter, very bright and a right little chatterbox. And as Pandora and Bird are off to some sort of boring choral thing tonight, I have the place to myself for a change – perfect. Once Jamie arrives I’ll crack open a bottle of wine, grab some beers for him and we can settle down on the sofa in the living room. After a few drinks we’ll be able to talk about the past without any recrimination or regrets, clear the air properly. I feel warm just thinking about it. Now that Jamie’s back everything will be different, I just know it.
    I wander into the living room and slump down on the sofa to wait for him. I switch on the telly and flick through the programmes I’ve saved on the Sky box.
America’s Next Top Model
, that will do, nice and mindless, and the idiocy of some of the girls always makes me laugh. They make walking up and down a room without falling over your own two feet sound as difficult as brain surgery sometimes. I sit back and start watching.
    Every few minutes I check the time, wondering when Jamie will appear. I miss having someone to confide in so much at times it physically stings. Before the whole Ed and Lainey debacle, I talked to Lainey several times a day, especially when I was feeling a bit low. She understood me better than anyone, always knew exactly what to say to make me feel better. In turn I was able to cheer her up when one of her sisters – Karen usually – had been teasing her or picking on her. Lainey is the quietest of the sisters and the most easy-going, but sometimes this means they take advantage of her good nature. I used to pull them up on this, but she has nobody to stick up for her now. I hope they aren’t bossing her around too much. I shouldn’t care, not after everything that’s happened, but she was part of my life for so many years it’s hard not to worry about her, even now.
    It’s amazing we ever became close. She’s the polar opposite of me – calm, patient, always sees things through. At school she always handed in her essays and projects on time and made sure I remembered too. While I was off travelling, Lainey was plodding through her accountancy exams, steady as she goes.
    She was brilliant at keeping in touch – always dropping me newsy emails about her course and what all her sisters were up to. There’s five of them in total and they’re all pretty close. There’s Karen of course, at thirty she’s the eldest, with a ‘going places’ barrister husband and two straight-out-of-a-Ralph Lauren-catalogue children; Tilly, twenty-nine, who runs her own company, Hot Cakes, making bespoke