Overlap

Eponine

✨2021🧨

The house, though mum had tried desperately to make it not so, smelt of smoke, like garden where a bonfire had been blazing since the early evening when the sun had been setting.

Dad had been over the moon when Johnny and Mia had suggested they use bonfire night as an excuse to have a quiet little gathering in celebration of their engagement.

They'd surprised us all with that, well, almost all of us.

I'd seen it in her eyes the day she'd come back to the ward after her cig break with an excitable little smile, "all, I've got someone who wants to talk to you Miss Bond..."

I liked Mia, she was sweet, I'd liked her when we were in school together though we'd only been vague friends. Only know eachother through other people.

He'd taken her out for a drink to say thank you for how lovely she'd been to us when I was in the hospital, helping me to facetime him in my state of delirium, but one drink had turned into two had turned into staying out for dinner and then staying out all evening too.

The whole time Johnny was living at home with mum dad me and Grace, he'd spent hours at a time on the phone to her, her falling asleep on the phone to him some mornings after one of her night shifts.

At first he'd tried to deny it, how much he liked her, how wrapped up in her he really was but he'd quickly given up on that and by the time we'd gone into another lockdown he'd moved in with her. They were starry eyed for one another and it was sweet, she was nicer than Sarah, they were better matched than Sarah, but Johnny had had a hard time convincing everyone else that.

I'd recognised it quickly enough but others were wary, they remembered how Sarah had broken his heart, remembered how she'd dropped him. They just didn't want him to jump in and get hurt, I understood that, I didn't want him to get hurt either, I just knew that sometimes waiting too long is what gets you hurt.

Like me and Van. We'd waited too long and now it hurt more than any heartbreak ever had. Now I was nervous to see him somewhere in my parents house because I hadn't seen him in over a year and Id spent the whole time missing him, wondering if he'd missed me too.

Now I was nervous because I was a different girl to the girl he'd lived with over lockdown and I was worried that he might notice. Worried that he might look at me wearing that locket he'd given me last Christmas and wonder why he'd done it.

It was a busy party, a good party actually, the kind of party we'd all needed. They weren't but it felt like everyone I'd ever known was there, so many faces I recognised from school and from gigs and nights down the local.

Sam with Laura and Ed, Louis and his lass the two of them joined at the hip as everybody seemed to be these days. Content in their cute little couples. Even Sam had bought a girl with him tonight - April, who was sweet and shy and who smiled at the ground more often than she managed to smile at anyone else.
The house was warm and gleeful, everyone seemed content and as I drifted from the kitchen where my mum was making baileys hot chocolates, to the living room where Roxy Music sparkled through the speakers and out through the patio doors to the garden which was lit up with sparklers and fairy lights and the glow of dad's bonfire, I felt a little lost among the crowd.

I bounced Gracie in my arms, she was all wrapped up in the blanket Van had given her - mum had been right, Mary had crocheted it for her - and wandered back to the back door watching my sisters kids trying to write their names in the light of their sparklers.

Grace was growing quickly and though it was difficult to imagine she'd ever be that big I knew the day would come round sooner than I was ready for it to. The day I looked at her and thought God, you've grown.