[MissMaria]

Chapter 14

The agreement I had just made was going to end one of two ways, either her friend suspects nothing is up and I finally find out what I want to know or… well I was not sure but I knew it wasn’t good, I had to do everything to make sure this went without a hitch, failure just could not be an option.

“So… how did we meet?” I asked Jess as we left my street,

“What are you jabbering about?” I had to resist the urge to laugh as a flood of memories rushed back, Jess was the only person I had ever meet who would say jabbering and it had stuck with me,

“Well, I am sure your friend, Stella is going to want to know how we meet… isn’t that something a girl pal would ask?”

“Its times like these that I am sure” Jess muttered

“What's that?” I had sort of heard her mutter but not what she had muttered

“Never mind, it's not important now, yes that is something Stella will want to know…”

“Well, then we tell her the truth…” Jess instantly looked to the side
“No that's not what I mean, I don’t mean the whole truth, I just mean we remove the privet parts, so we meet when we were children, you were friends with my sisters and I was always chasing after you all, though you didn’t really notice me, then we meet again in town a week ago and we went for coffee and things began there… that way we won’t be caught out on not knowing much about each other, we only need to know the basics”

"That's….” Jess began as she thought it through “a really good idea”

The entire journey back up north Wales went just like that, we each talked about ourselves so we had some knowledge of each other when we reached Stella's house, Though I was clearly there I also wasn’t, it was difficult to go back to a situation like this again, I was spending a lot of energy fighting habits I had created over the course of 2 days. A lot had happened in those two days though and clearly, it had changed me, so much so that it was as though this person in the car was someone else and I had taken back seat in my brain or something. It is so impossible to describe exactly how I felt at that moment, but I knew that was no longer me.

As we got close to the village something had occurred to me, through everything we had discussed there was one thing that we had not discussed and it would be vital to this whole thing working, this simple fact could be the one card to topple the entire house.

“Uhhh, Jess?” Jess cocked her head slightly so she could keep her eyes on the road “Why are we visiting Stella, I mean I have no idea why we're going here, and I don’t want to be like ‘hey you look amazing’ if she just lost an uncle or something… that could end badly”

Jess just giggled for a moment, “No, no its nothing like that, it's her 2-year-old daughters birthday, her name is Ella and she is a wonderful girl”

“Seriously Ella??? Didn’t put much thought into that did they, if that's the logic why not just stop and naming her baby, hey honey look baby walking, I gues Elala and Stels were taken...” I stopped at that point because Jess was laughing so much that she had to pull over, “Sorry Just Stella and Ella REALLY?”

“Don’t let Stella hear you say that she has a worse temper than mine”

Jess pulled herself together and started driving again,

“Wait I don’t have a gift for a child,” I said just realizing that would be a prerequisite for this kind of event,

“It's in the boot, I grabbed something for you to give Ella yesterday”

I think pulling back into that small town I was more nervous than the first time, but not half as nervous as walking to Stella’s door, all I could think of was all the things that could go wrong.