We Were On a Break: The hilarious and romantic top ten bestseller

At least that part wasn’t a lie.

‘Well, let me know, twatfink,’ Chris said. ‘Cass was going to cook some ridiculously complicated Chinese thing that takes ten years to make. If you’re not going to come, for fuck’s sake text me tonight or I’ll never hear the end of it.’

‘Tell her we’d be just as happy with a takeaway,’ I replied, scanning one of half a dozen emails from Pablo the restaurant manager who seemed dead set on screwing me out of all my money for the non-event of a proposal. How could not showing up and eating dinner be costing me more money than actually going to the restaurant? I definitely hadn’t told him to organize a firework display. Had I? ‘I’ll bring a pizza or something, the woman just had a baby.’

‘Yeah, but you know how she is,’ he said with half a sigh. ‘She wants to do something nice and, you know, I thought we’d be celebrating.’

I did know how she was, and I thought we’d be celebrating too. The ring box was not supposed to be in my hand right now, or at least the contents weren’t. Actually, I wasn’t sure where the box went once the ring was on her finger. Did she keep the box? Did I? Did we throw it in the sea in a glorious celebration of love and the giddy assumption that it would never, ever come off her hand ever again?

‘Don’t let her mess about cooking.’ I stuck my left big toe into the ankle of my left sock, wriggling it down over my heel. ‘I’ll text you later, but right now I feel like shite. I really don’t think we’ll be coming over.’

‘OK, let me know, I’ve got to go, almost at work.’

‘Yeah, I get it,’ I said, tackling the second sock, so much easier now the first one was off. ‘I’m honoured you found the time to call to ask me to do you a favour in the first place.’

‘You should be,’ he said. ‘Now go and get Dad before he eats one of the dogs. Love to Liv.’

Kicking my socks across the wooden floor, I let my phone slip between the sofa cushions and held the ring box in the palm of my hand. Such an inconspicuous little thing. For something so small, it felt very heavy.

‘Adam, what did you do?’ I wondered aloud while Jim Beam tap-danced on my temples. My mouth was dry and my eyes were sore and every part of me ached. ‘What did you do?’

It was all a bit of a blur and for that I was thankful. I remembered losing it on the plane, driving home in silence and then an argument at her front door although exactly what had been said was a mystery. And after that … nothing. I couldn’t hold my ale at the best of times but Jim Beam and jet lag were an evil combination and I knew I wasn’t in a rush to call her for the details.

Very carefully, I stood up and placed the ring box carefully inside a tall ceramic vase on the mantelpiece. Somewhere it couldn’t escape, somewhere I couldn’t see it.

Stretching, I picked up the almost-empty whiskey bottle and set it on the coffee table, gagging at the stench of booze coming from the rug. I was a mess.

‘Shower first, Dad second,’ I told my greyish-green reflection. ‘Grovel to Liv third.’

I had a feeling the last one could take a while.

‘You’re shitting me?’

‘I shit you not.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Because I’d make this up? Can you hand me the thermometer?’

David, my nurse and work-husband, picked up the requested instrument without taking his narrowed brown eyes off me. Bruiser, a French bulldog who couldn’t stop passing foul gas, kept his huge green eyes on the thermometer.

I really hadn’t slept after Adam dropped me off and, instead, I tossed and turned for a couple of hours before changing out of my pyjamas and into my scrubs. I’d done the rounds, checked on our overnight patients and called all their owners before David even got to work. As far as I could tell, nothing majorly dramatic had happened while I was away, other than my dad being called out to tend to an epileptic guinea pig in the middle of the night a week last Friday.

‘Adam didn’t propose?’ David wrapped his rubber-gloved hands around the unwilling pup. ‘Hold still, Bruiser, it’ll all be over in a minute.’

‘That’s what he says to all the boys,’ I whispered to Bruiser as I lubed up the probe.

‘Honestly, I’m not telling you anything ever again,’ he replied with an affected toss of his head. ‘It was one time and I didn’t care for it one bit. I went to public school, Liv – everyone was doing it.’

Even when I was sleep-deprived, jet-lagged and desperately trying to convince myself nothing was wrong, David could still make me smile.

‘Don’t change the subject. What the cocking hell happened?’

‘Not only did Adam not propose,’ I said, watching the numbers jump around on the little digital monitor while Bruiser the Farting Dog made a horrible high-pitched noise I had not missed in the slightest. ‘He went completely mental on the last evening, we had this really weird fight on the plane, then he dropped me off at mine at three o’clock this morning and announced he needed a break.’

He lowered his chin and raised an eyebrow. ‘A break?’

‘Temperature’s normal,’ I nodded. ‘A break. Isn’t that weird?’

‘Let me get this straight …’ David gave Bruiser a well-earned scratch behind the ear before turning his full attentions to me. ‘You went all the way to Mexico to get engaged and instead you came home dumped?’

I looked up sharply to see a confused look on my friend’s face.

‘He didn’t dump me, he said he needed a break,’ I said, nudging my wonky blonde topknot with my wrist. ‘That’s not what I said.’

‘OK, then what happened to the proposal?’ He swabbed Bruiser’s behind before carefully carrying him back into the blanket-lined cage behind him. ‘I thought this was a done deal? I missed out on so many pastry-eating opportunities so you could look skinny in the engagement pictures.’

‘And for that I apologize,’ I said, peeling off my latex gloves. ‘I have no explanation. Maybe he never was going to propose. It’s nearly three months since Cass told me about the ring. The ring I’m not even supposed to know about, remember?’

‘You mean, maybe he bought the ring then realized he didn’t want to marry you but he didn’t want to break up with you before the holiday because he’d already paid for it, so he waited for you to get back?’

Both Bruiser and I gasped in unison.

‘You are a very mean man,’ I told him as the idea squirrelled itself away into my brain. What had been said could never be unsaid. ‘This is why you haven’t got a girlfriend.’

David, resplendent in Dalmatian print scrubs he had ordered in from the States, stared at me from across the room. ‘I haven’t got a girlfriend because I’m too awesome for one woman,’ he assured me. ‘And because Abi still won’t put out.’

‘Abi will never put out for you,’ I tossed my gloves into the bin but felt nothing as they swished into the basket the first time. Things were really bad. ‘And Adam did not break up with me. We had an argument, he needed a good night’s sleep. That’s all that happened.’

He fixed me with a sympathetic smile.

‘As a man and as your friend,’ he replied. ‘It’s my duty to tell you you’re being really stupid right now.’

A wave of jet lag and nausea washed over me. I probably should have eaten something other than half a packet of Jammy Dodgers before coming down to work.

‘And you’re being really unpleasant,’ I said. ‘You’re not getting your present now. Shut up.’

‘I’m only trying to help,’ he said, shrugging as though I was the one who was being unreasonable. ‘I mean, you’re not engaged, are you?’

I turned on the cold tap and held my hands under the water, trying to wake myself up. He had said he was tired and that we’d talk later and that he needed a break from us. Did he really mean he wanted to break up?

I turned off the tap slowly, waiting for another, more rational explanation to present itself.

‘You really think he’s dumped me?’ I asked, the prospect hitting me like a sound slap. ‘He meant a break-up break?’

‘This is going to come as something of a shock given that I constantly anticipate your every need,’ David replied, ‘but I’m not actually a mind reader. I don’t know what he’s thinking, Liv, any more than you do. I thought this proposal was a done deal; I was just waiting for you to ask me to be your bridesdude.’

‘So did I,’ I replied, still reeling from the possibility I might have been dumped without even realizing it. ‘But just so you know, I wasn’t planning on bridesdudes.’