An exclusive tale by bestselling author Jane Fallon

She arrives way too early. Thankfully the table is free so she sits nibbling on a breadstick, trying – and failing – not to watch the door. She knows what he looks like these days, of course. She’s seen the selfies on his Facebook page, and they’ve exchanged recent photos twice. She would know him anywhere. He still has the same swept-back, almost black hair, the same broad athletic frame. The startling deep blue eyes were, of course, still as startling. Twenty three years was a long time but also, somehow, no time at all. 

They’ve only spoken on the phone once. She’d called him on a whim from the bus on the way home from work. She’d just wanted to hear his voice, to see if it was the voice she remembered. He’d been at the gym so he couldn’t really talk, but even the few words they’d exchanged had transported her back to their 18-year-old selves: the king and queen of their school, the golden couple. The ones everyone had envied. Adam and Eva. Even their names had marked them out as special. Later they had messaged reminiscences back and forth. Remember when. .? He’d said. What about that time. .? She’d felt she was right back there. Eighteen years old. All those people she hadn’t thought about for years. Adam had a way of bringing them to life like it was yesterday. That was the night he’d sent the message asking if she wanted to meet up. She’d said yes immediately, Stuart at the other end of the sofa, asleep with a book in his lap. 

She doesn’t want to think about Stu tonight. Her husband. He’s a good man. He’s funny, he’s kind, he works hard. He’s just… Stuart. Ordinary. Unexciting. All she’s doing is meeting an old friend, she tells herself. But if that’s all then why has she told Stu she’s with colleagues from the office? She knows why. 

She checks the time on her phone. Five minutes to go. She switches to camera, flips the screen around and checks her face. I’d have recognised you anywhere, Adam had said when she’d sent over a recent picture – her on a wintry beach, with her hair blowing across her face in salty strands. Stu had taken it on a weekend in Ilfracombe. Stu loved wintry beaches. He loved nature. Eva, if she were being honest, would have preferred to go somewhere with a bit more life. 

‘There you are,’ a familiar voice says. She drops her phone into her lap, embarrassed at being caught checking herself out. She looks up. That square jaw, his teeth still gleaming white. He holds his arms wide and she stands up to accept the hug. Stuart has never been a hugger. Eva has forgotten how it feels to be enveloped in someone’s arms. Especially arms that feel as if they could crush a rhino. The sheer basic primal feeling it evokes in her. 

He peels off his coat. He’s wearing a tight T-shirt and skinny jeans. Eva almost laughs. It’s so familiar. She half expects him to flex his muscles and strike a pose the way he always used to, to make her laugh. 

They sit, smiling at one another. A waiter hovers and they order drinks. They start talking, overlapping stories from their shared past. Eva hadn’t made the effort to keep in touch with any of her friends once she eventually moved away to uni. Adam had long gone – up to London to follow his acting dreams, shattering her heart. Older, she had understood. He’d done the right thing by trying to pursue his ambitions. They’d been too young. It could never have worked.

‘So, when did you move back?’ she asks. 

‘About eight years ago,’ he says, surprising her. Her parents had left their old home not long after she had, so she’d had no reason to return. She couldn’t imagine him back in the little grey, suburban town of their youth. 

‘Doesn’t that make it harder to, you know, go for auditions and stuff?’ She had googled him, obviously, over the years. More so lately. She hadn’t found much, if she were being honest. There was an episode of Waterloo Road, a couple of Emmerdales. She had once seen an advert for a food delivery company where she had been sure it was him sitting on a sofa with his pretend family smiling as he handed round pizza. Then she’d heard a rumour from an old schoolfriend she’d randomly bumped into in Manchester that he’d moved to LA and had changed his surname to something the friend couldn’t remember. ‘He has a regular part in a series apparently,’ the friend had said, wide-eyed. ‘God, what’s it’s called?’ Even without the details it had seemed an impossibly glamorous life. Stu was a youth worker. Dedicated, overworked and underpaid. 

The story ends with the woman realising that all she really wants in life is in fact her own life that she has been living 

Adam waves the waiter over. 

‘We should order something.’ 

Eva chooses a tricolore salad and ricotta-stuffed ravioli. She knows without asking that Adam will pick the bruschetta and spaghetti bolognese. 

‘Tell me about LA,’ she says, leaning on her elbows. 

His face lights up and he regales her with stories about his fabulous lifestyle, the famous names he rubbed shoulders with. 

What was that series you were in?’

‘Which one?’ He says, raising his eyebrows. 

‘Jacqui said you were a regular.’ 

He tops up both their water. ‘Oh, you probably won’t have heard of it. I don’t think they showed it over here.’ 

‘Ha!’ she says. ‘You’re not getting off that lightly.’ 

‘Sunset Beach,’ he says. She’s about to ask him more – what it was about, who he played, she’s hungry for the details of his life – when he interrupts. ‘Remember when Jax and Mo broke into the science wing in the middle of the night and sat the skeleton on Mrs Peters’ chair?’ 

Eva smiles. ‘I thought she was going to have a heart attack.’ 

‘Classic,’ he says, chuckling. ‘Classic’, she remembers, was practically Adam’s catchphrase aged 18. 

When he excuses himself to go to the bathroom she can’t resist looking up Sunset Beach on her phone. She forgot to ask him about his stage name, she realises, but there’s a site with thumbnail photos of the cast. She scrolls down and down. Eventually there he is. Adam Power. He’d always hated his real surname, Johnson. Too dull. Too unmemorable. She clicks on his photo and looks at the details. Seven episodes. She flicks up and down the page. That’s it. Seven episodes in the 12-plus years the show ran. She googles his new name. There are a few Sunset Beach Wiki pages but other than that his CV seems to consist of ‘man at bus stop’ or ‘ passerby’ in a sparse variety of productions. It hardly adds up to a glittering career. 

‘Where are you living?’ She asks once he returns, trying to steer the conversation to more adult topics. She realises she knows almost nothing about his life now. 

‘I’m staying with Mum and Dad,’ he says. 

‘Oh. Not ever since you’ve been back, though?’ He flashes her a smile. His gleaming white teeth. They’re veneers, she thinks. And the too-black hair is just that: too black to be natural. ’Why pay rent if you don’t have to? Plus I get my washing done.’ 

‘Right. So… What? Are you working?’ 

‘In a gym. Just for a few hours a week, you know. I can work and work out at the same time. What’s not to love?’ 

She thinks of Stu coming home exhausted. How his work follows him home at night and preys on his mind. She thinks about him falling asleep on the sofa every evening because he pours his heart and soul into what he does and it leaves him shattered. How he asks about her day without fail, and how he always makes her laugh. 

It strikes her that Adam hasn’t asked her a single question. He knows nothing about her. Her mind-numbing job in an office, her frustrations with Stu’s lack of ambition, her sadness that they couldn’t have kids. Her life hasn’t turned out how she imagined it would. She starts to tell him, but he interrupts with a memory of their joint 18th birthday party. He’s stuck there, she realises. Back in the glory days when he was the biggest, shiniest fish in a tiny pond. The best years of his life firmly in the past. It’s sad, she thinks, that he feels he has to keep up a lie.

She thinks how Stu always jokes about the way his life has panned out, his shortcomings, his disappointments. How he can laugh at himself so easily, so honestly. She pictures him waiting up for her, eager to hear about her evening even though he’s dead on his feet. Suddenly she’s shrugging her coat over her shoulders. She just wants her real life. She wants to go home. 

• Just Got Real by Jane Fallon is published by Penguin, £8.99*