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If there was one thing that Sarah knew about her best friend, it was that she was both very, very good, and very, very bad, at keeping secrets. Trisha was very, very good at keeping secrets that were not her own. Any confidential information that was entrusted to her would go no further. Even if it was something relatively minor, like what Sarah was planning to get Yuriy for his birthday, Sarah could guarantee that Trisha would remain completely and utterly silent on the topic and never give away anything. She had all of the poise and composure of a champion poker player when she was keeping someone else’s secret.
Keeping her own, on the other hand…
Trisha was absolutely terrible at keeping her own secrets. If there was something that she wanted to keep hidden from people, it was inevitable that everyone would know about it within about three hours. Sarah didn’t mind that; after all, it was only Trisha’s own secrets that were getting spread about, and it wasn’t as if anyone else was getting hurt. Trisha did sometimes despair of her own impulsiveness when it came to sharing good news and other things.
“If I ever get pregnant,” she lamented one day, “I swear that the entire village will know before I get the chance to tell the father. I just can’t keep my mouth shut.” Indeed, Sarah was always the first to know all the details of Trisha’s life, and she tried to make sure that she kept Trisha’s secrets as closely guarded as Trisha kept Sarah’s secrets, but there wasn’t a lot of point in keeping quiet when Trisha herself would spread the word around of her own accord.
It was for this reason that Sarah did not for one moment suspect that Trisha had a boyfriend until a very large bouquet of flowers was delivered for her on Valentine’s Day. Indeed, Sarah was so completely in the dark as to Trisha’s romantic life that she had blithely assumed that the flowers were from Yuriy and had been on the verge of thanking him for them when he called around, until she saw that he was carrying a bouquet and it would have been a bit silly for him to send one when he was bringing some anyway.
“They must be for Trisha.” Yuriy came in and examined the display of peonies and lilacs whilst Sarah found another vase for her own flowers. “Yes, the card says they’re for Trisha. You didn’t even look at the card? You just accepted that they were for you?”
“Well, Trisha doesn’t have any admirers, so naturally I thought they were for me.” Sarah came over and looked at the card. There was no mistaking it; the flowers were definitely for Trisha. Of course, Trisha herself wasn’t actually in the house at the moment, so she couldn’t be grilled for information on her mysterious admirer. She shook her head. “This is ridiculous. Trisha can’t have a boyfriend. Or a girlfriend. Or a more-than-friend of any persuasion, for that matter. I would know!”
“Maybe she’s just been keeping it a secret?” Yuriy suggested. Sarah looked at him. “Yeah, you’re right, this is Trisha. We’d know the moment they started dating.” He eyed up the flowers as if they were suddenly going to jump up and bite him, and Sarah couldn’t say that she felt any easier about them herself.
“This is weird. I don’t like it. We need to get to the bottom of this.” Sarah grabbed the flowers, vase and all, and marched through the house with them, Yuriy following her with a yelp.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going to find Trisha and work out what’s going on. If she has a strange stalker sending her valentines’ flowers then that’s definitely a cause for concern!”
Yuriy seemed to accept this with good grace, and came along beside her as she made her way out of the house and down the main street towards the town, where Trisha was supposedly out getting groceries. If anyone in Resembool was alarmed by them striding along with the flower vase, then they didn’t show it. To be fair, it would take quite a lot to alarm the general population of Resembool; they were a laid-back bunch on the whole.
Trisha was not at the market, nor was she in the bakery, and it was at this point that Sarah began to get slightly worried, either that the stalker who had sent her the bouquet had managed to kidnap her, or that Trisha was far, far better at keeping secrets than she’d always made out to be and she was in fact some kind of superspy on a secret mission.
The truth, it turned out, was neither of those things. Well, the part about Trisha being better and keeping secrets seemed to be true, because Trisha was coming out of the train station hand in hand with a man who seemed vaguely familiar, although Sarah couldn’t recall ever actually meeting him in person.
“Holy… Hohenheim? ” Yuriy exclaimed. “And Trisha ?” He stood there opening and closing his mouth like a fish out of water for a while. “I didn’t even know that they’d met , let alone that they were, well…” He indicated the couple as Trisha went up on her toes to peck a kiss to Hohenheim’s lips.
Sarah could only gawp. There were no words.
Luckily - or unluckily, depending on whose point of view one took - it was at that moment that Trisha happened to glance in their direction and see them standing there with the vase and the gobsmacked expressions, and her face ran the full gamut of emotions from shock to embarrassment to anger and back again, a pink flush rising in her cheeks before she straightened up and shook her shoulders, pulling Hohenheim over towards Sarah and Yuriy. Yuriy, for his part, continued to open and close his mouth without forming any sensible words, pointing and Trisha and then at Hohenheim, before finally just shaking his head in bewilderment and disbelief.
“I guess the cat’s out of the bag now,” Trisha said. “And I’d been so good about keeping this a secret as well!” She sighed. “Van, this is my best friend Sarah, and you already know Yuriy. Sarah, Yuriy, this is Van Hohenheim.”
“How long has this been going on?” Sarah asked faintly. She couldn’t remember the last time that Hohenheim had been in the village; when on earth had Trisha found time to start a relationship with him.
“A few months.” Trisha shrugged. “We met at the bonfire and we’ve been together ever since.”
Well, that at least explained away one of the questions - Yuriy and Sarah had been in Eastern City on the last bonfire night and would not have witnessed the meeting - but there were so, so many more things to be explained.
“Have you really been carrying on a long distance relationship for three months? And you managed not to say anything?”
“Well, it wasn’t just my secret,” Trisha said. “We didn’t want anyone to know just yet. Not when Van’s so… unusual.”
Sarah would give her that; it was definitely not the most orthodox of relationships, but whatever misgivings she might have had about it, she couldn’t deny that the two of them looked very happy together.
Yuriy was still looking from Trisha to Hohenheim to the flowers and back again.
“Why did you send flowers if you were going to be coming anyway?” he asked; as if that was the most pressing concern in all of this.
“I didn’t know whether I would be able to get here today, and I wanted Trisha to have flowers even if I couldn’t bring them in person. It was a risk, I know, but…”
“It’s all right.” Trisha squeezed his hand. “It’s better that it’s all out in the open now, I think. I was going mad trying to keep it a secret.”
With curiosity finally sated, the four of them made their way back towards Sarah’s house, still carrying the vase. Although she would forever be astonished at how well Trisha had kept it all under wraps, ultimately Sarah was simply happy that her best friend had found love and could now shout about it from the rooftops if she so wished.