IF I NEVER MET YOU
Mhairi McFarlane

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London, SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in the UK by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

Copyright © Mhairi McFarlane 2020

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

Cover illustration © Abbey Lossing / Handsome Frank

Mhairi McFarlane asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008169480

Ebook Edition © January 2020 ISBN: 9780008169473

Version: 2020-03-11

Dedication

For my sister, Laura

the human Lisa Simpson

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Acknowledgements

A Q&A with Mhairi McFarlane

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Also by Mhairi McFarlane

About the Publisher

1

Dan

What time you think you’ll be back tonight? Roughly?

Laurie

Dunno. SOON I HOPE.

Dan

You hope?

Laurie

Everyone has raspberries in Proseccos

Dan

I thought you liked Prosecco. And raspberries

Laurie

I do! I’ve got one. But denotes a certain type of Girls Night Out that’s not very me. They’re calling them ‘cheeky bubbles’

Dan

Your problem is other people like it too? Can’t imagine my criticism of a night out being ‘people ordered the same drink’

Laurie

… Except when you said you hate stag dos that ‘start with getting ten pints of wife beater in at 7am in Gatwick Spoons’.

Dan

You can’t take a moment off being a lawyer, can you?

Laurie

HAH. You misspelt ‘you got me bang to rights, Loz’

Dan is typing

…

Dan is typing

…

Last seen today at 9.18pm

Dan must’ve thought better of his reply. Laurie clicked her phone off and pushed it back into her bag.

Obviously she didn’t really mind the cliché, booze was booze, that was trying to be wittily acerbic bravado. It was a distress signal. Laurie was at sea and her phone felt like a connection back to shore. Tonight was an unwelcome flashback to the emotions of lunch breaks at secondary school, when you had a single-parent mum and no money and no cool.

So far, the girls had discussed the benefits of eyebrow microblading (‘Ashley from Stag Communications looks like Eddie Munster’) whether or not Marcus Fairbright-Page at KPMG was a bad arsehole who’d break hearts and bed frames (Laurie thought on what she’d gleaned, that was an emphatic yes, but also gathered that a verdict wasn’t desired). And how many burpees you could manage in HIIT class at Virgin Active (no idea there, none).

They were all so glamorous and feminine, so carefully groomed and produced for public display. Laurie felt like a dishwater-feathered pigeon in an enclosure full of chirruping tropical birds.

Emily really owed her. Tonight was the product of something that happened roughly once every three months – her best friend, and owner of a PR company, begged Laurie to join their team night out and make it ‘less bloody boring, or we’ll spend the whole time discussing the new accounts.’ Emily, as CEO and hostess, was at the head of the table putting everything on the company credit card and handing round the Nocellara olives and salted almonds. Laurie, late arrival, was at the far end.

‘Who was that, then?’ said Suzanne, to her right. Suzanne had a beautiful shoulder-length sheet of custard-coloured hair and the gaze of a customs officer.

Laurie turned and concealed her irritation with a ventriloquist’s dummy smile. ‘Who was what?’

‘On your phone! You looked well intense,’ Suzanne rolled her doe eyes upwards and mimed a sort of chimpanzee-like, vacant trance state, her hands moving across an imaginary handset. She whooped with girlish, alcohol-fuelled laughter, the sort that could sound cruel.

Laurie said: ‘My boyfriend.’

The word ‘boyfriend’ had started to sound a trifle silly, Laurie supposed, but ‘partner’ was so dry and stiff. She had a feeling her present company already thought she was those things.

‘Awww … is it early days?’ Suzanne combed her fairytale princess hair over her ears with her fingers, and put her flute to her lips.

‘Haha! Hardly. We’ve been going out since were eighteen. We met at university.’

‘Oh my GOD,’ Suzanne said, ‘And you’re how old?’

Laurie tensed her stomach muscles and said: ‘Thirty-six.’

‘Oh my GOD!’ Suzanne squawked again, loudly enough that they had the attention of a few others. ‘And you’ve been together all this time? No flings or breaks? Like, he’s your first boyfriend?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I could not have done that. Oh my God. Wow. Was he your …’ she lowered her voice, ‘First-first?’

Laurie cringed inwardly.

‘Bit personal after two drinks, hah?’

Suzanne was not to be deterred.

‘Oh my giddy aunt! Oh no!? Je-SUS!’ she said gaily, as if she was being fun and not judgemental and prurient and generally awful. ‘But you’re not married?’

‘No.’

‘Do you want to be?’

‘Not really,’ Laurie said, shrugging. ‘I’m not madly pro or anti marriage.’

‘Maybe when you have kids?’ Suzanne supplied. Oh, subtle. Piss the piss off.

‘Are you married?’ Laurie said.

‘No!’ Suzanne shook her head and the lovely hair rippled. ‘I want to be married by thirty, for sure. I’ve got four years to find Mr Right.’

‘Why by thirty?’

‘I just kinda feel that I don’t want to be on the shelf.’ She paused. ‘No offence.’

‘Sure.’

Laurie briefly debated saying: you know that this is really rude, right? I mean you know you can’t stick ‘no offence’ on the end like it takes the curse off? And then made the usual British calculations about the ten seconds of triumph not being worth the hours of embarrassment and hostility afterwards.

‘Where are you from, Laurie?’ said Carly in the animal print top, sitting on the other side of Suzanne, and a familiar heavy lead settled in Laurie’s gut.

‘Yorkshire,’ she said, with a bright aw-hell-please-can-we-not smile, which she knew would be lost on the recipient. ‘You can probably tell from the accent.’

‘No, I meant where are you from?’ she said, vaguely gesturing at her own face. Of course you did.

The usual fork in the road opened up: answer the question she knew they were asking, or pretend not to understand and prolong the agony. If you didn’t pander to it you were being ungracious, chippy, making a thing of it. You were the problem.

‘Yorkshire, seriously. I was born at Huddersfield Royal.’

A moment ticked past and Suzanne, to no surprise whatsover, pitched in. ‘She means where are your mum and dad from?’

‘My dad’s from Oldham …’

A fresh tray of cocktails arrived, cucumbers curls inside like ribbons, and Laurie’s genealogy was abruptly demoted in interest.

‘… My Mum is from Martinique,’ she said, but a distracted Carly and Suzanne had already forgotten they’d asked.

‘Y’what?’

‘Martinique! My Mum is from Martinique!’ Laurie said shrilly, above the music, pointing at her face.

‘Your mum’s called MARTINE EEK?’

Fuck it.

‘I’m getting an Old Fashioned,’ Laurie said, standing up abruptly. Make of that name what you will.

Then she saw them, a chance glimpse through the shifting throng. Laurie involuntarily grinned at the ignoble thrill of unexpectedly seeing something she definitely wasn’t supposed to see, huddled in a banquette, twenty feet away.

Her colleague Jamie Carter was out with a gorgeous young woman. So far, so predictable. But, rather than an unknown lovely, Laurie was ninety-nine per cent sure that the woman he was cosying up to was the boss’s niece, Eve, who he was specifically warned off going anywhere near, the day before she arrived. Office gossip dynamite. Possibly employment contract terminating dynamite, depending on just how protective Mr Salter was.

The warning had been the source of much mirth at the office: Jamie really was a ‘Lock Up Your Daughters’ threat.

‘Might as well fit Carter with a GoPro, from what I heard,’ she’d guffawed, ‘The secret life of the neighbourhood tom.’

Laurie was picking at a bag of crimson seedless grapes at the time, and the office junior, Jasmine, unintentionally outed herself as yet another with a crush by blushing the same shade as the fruit.

Well, whatever had been said by his superiors, it obviously had a devastating impact. Jamie had the legal undergraduate and twenty-four-year-old babe out on her own after hours and sipping Havana Club within a week.

Laurie had to admire his balls. And no doubt she wouldn’t be the only one.

The risky choice of companion aside, The Refuge was exactly where she’d expect to see a man like Jamie on a Friday night. Chic’s ‘Good Times’ was blaring and an artwork directly above their heads, a factory chimney skyline picked out in black and white tiles, declared THE GLAMOUR OF MANCHESTER. He and Eve were suited to their subtitles.

A glittering cathedral of a bar inside a nineteenth-century hotel, it was only about fifteen minutes’ walk from their office on Deansgate. It wasn’t as if Jamie was in deep cover. Why take such a risk?

Perhaps he’d simply gambled he wouldn’t be caught here by any of the old sticks or suburban snipes among their colleagues. Yes, that would be it, as what little Laurie knew of Jamie suggested he’d enjoy playing the odds. It was unlikely he’d notice her, for more than one reason, in her vantage point among a gaggle of women at the other end of the room.

She could see Jamie was in his element, handsome face animated in storytelling, a palm theatrically clapped over forehead at one point to emphasise dismay or shame. Eve was visibly falling for him by another degree with each passing moment, her eyes practically star-shaped, like an emoji. (And didn’t he wear glasses, usually? Hah, the vanity.)

Jamie was clearly an expert at this, a completely practised hunter in his natural habitat. Whether Eve knew that she was this weekend’s antelope was another matter.

His hair was short and dark with a curl to it, his cheekbones like shoe moulds. They’d come straight from the office, him still in white shirt sleeves. And Eve … hmmm, Eve knew they’d be doing this, as she was in a navy pinstripe trouser suit, jacket discarded, with a red silk camisole, swinging earrings, matching spiky ketchup-coloured heels. No doubt her nine-to-five practical flats were crushed into that capacious bag (was that a Birkin? Oh to have rich uncles).

Laurie felt a shiver of awe at how well Jamie and Eve fitted in, amid the din and the crush of all these bright young things, their mating rituals, taut stomachs and brash confidence.

Imagine being single, she thought. Imagine being expected to go home and take your clothes off with someone you’d never met before. Horror. Doing it for a hobby, the way Jamie Carter did, felt alien to her. Thank God for Dan. Thank God for going home to someone who was home.

As Laurie waited in the four-person deep rabble at the bar, she pondered The Jamie Carter Phenomenon.

Jamie’s arrival had caused a stir from his first week at her law firm in the way conspicuously good-looking men were wont to do, and in the way anyone was wont to do in offices where people spent a lot of time in zoo captivity, feeding on distraction. The death of the fag break in the modern age, Laurie noticed, had been replaced by snouting round social media profiles for material for discussion. Laurie was constantly thankful her life was far too boring to make a sideshow.

At first there were excitable whispers at the water dispensers in Salter & Rowson solicitors that someone as fine as Jamie was single, wondering if he was an eligible bachelor, as if they were in an Austen novel. And, as Diana said, he was ‘without any baggage’, which Laurie always thought was a harsh way to refer to ex-spouses and children.

Then in time, the excitable whispers were about the fact he wasn’t apparently interested in dating anyone in particular, but that he’d disappeared off into the night with X or Y. (X or Y tended to be, like Eve, a beautiful intern, or a friend of an employee.) Laurie thought this was only a surprising turn of events if you’d never met a man with lots of options and nothing at stake before.

How old was he, thirty? And hungry for not just a plethora of dates but also professional advancement, if the second layer of whispers about him was to be believed.

The only unusual aspect to Jamie’s reputation as a stealth shagger was that he picked his targets cleverly. The interns had always finished their interning, the friend of a friend was never a close friend and what Russians called kompromat was scant. Therefore, while it was known he was a ladies’ man, he never got blamed for ladykilling, or suffered a poor testimonial about his sexual prowess from a scorned woman. Jamie Carter never got into any trouble. Until now, perhaps.

2

‘Hello?’ said a male voice at her elbow.

‘Hi,’ Laurie said, starting as the subject of her reverie appeared, as if she’d summoned him. She felt a stab of irrational guilt, having been thinking about Jamie, spying on him.

‘You out for the night?’ Jamie said. He disguised it well, but Laurie could see he was apprehensive. They’d never spoken at work, knew each other by sight only. He had no measure of her and no goodwill to exploit.

They were both lawyers: she could work backwards through his thought process in approaching her. He’d seen her, therefore there was a fair chance she’d seen him, with Eve. Better to brazen it out and act like he was doing nothing wrong than leave Laurie unattended with a tale to tell.

‘Yeah. Tagging along with my mate’s firm. You?’

‘Just a couple after work.’

Heh heh oh really. She toyed with asking ‘who with?’ but was a shade too drunk to judge whether it’d clang as obvious.

‘What’re you having? In case I get served first,’ he said.

Bribery now, was it.

‘Old Fashioned.’

‘That’s it? You’re queuing for one drink? Where are you sitting?’

Laurie pointed into the dining area.

‘There’s table service through there, you know?’

‘I wanted the change of scenery,’ Laurie said. ‘Where are you sitting?’

Yes, she could play mind games too. Knight to your Rook!

‘Same,’ Jamie said. ‘Last time, the waitress took too long. Mind you, this is carnage.’

Hmmm. He’d spotted her, panicked and made an excuse to follow her out here.

Laurie noticed when he spoke that his incisor teeth were tilted slightly inward, like an uncommitted vampire. She suspected this was the true secret of his incredible appeal, the deliberate flaw in the Navajo rug. Otherwise he was a little too wholesomely, straightforwardly good looking. Somehow, the teeth made you think carnal thoughts.

They suspended conversation to stake elbow space on the bar and catch the barman’s eye. Laurie got served first and volunteered to buy Jamie’s, but he wouldn’t let her.

She was less convinced this was chivalry than unwillingness for her to discover his order of a lager and a Prosecco with a raspberry bobbing in it, which made it clear he was on a date. She heard him tell the barman anyway. Her cocktail took long enough to make that they returned to their seats at the same time, having traded awkwardly shouted staccato remarks about how it was heaving in here. As they neared Laurie’s destination he stopped and leaned in to speak to her, over the Motown decibels.

‘Could I ask a favour?’

Laurie got a waft of light male sweat and classy aftershave. She fought to keep her face straight and look like she didn’t know what was coming.

‘What?’

‘Could you not mention – this – at work. Who I’m with?’ he gestured at Eve at their table, who was studying herself in a compact mirror. She had a feline sort of beauty, hair slicked into a long high ponytail. Like a sexy assassin. Laurie squinted and pretended it had dawned who it was.

‘Oh, why not?’ Laurie said, faux innocent.

‘It would be very much frowned upon by Statler and Waldorf.’

Statler and Waldorf was a longstanding nickname for Misters Salter and Rowson. Laurie knew why he was using matey we’re-in-this-together shop floor nicknames.

‘Why?’

‘I don’t think Salter wants his niece socialising with any of us.’

Laurie smiled. If she wasn’t miserable, wanting to further delay returning to Suzanne, and several drinks to the good, she might not wind him up. As it was …

‘By “socialising”, you mean shagging, and by “any of us”, you mean you?’

‘Well,’ Jamie shrugged, slightly taken aback and evidently at a momentary loss. ‘Who knows what goes through the old goat’s mind. You’d have to ask him.’

‘OK,’ Laurie said.

‘Thank you,’ Jamie exhaled.

‘… I’ll ask him!’

She waited for the punchline to land and enjoyed Jamie’s aghast expression when it did.

‘Hahaha!’

‘For fu—’ Jamie performed a mixture of bashful and still edgy. He was being winsome and acting vulnerable because right now she could choose to do him damage, of that she was sure.

‘I’m not a fan of the office gossip,’ Laurie said. ‘I won’t say anything. Don’t muck her around, OK?’

‘It’s not like that, I promise,’ Jamie said. ‘It’s career talk.’

‘Uh huh,’ Laurie said, casting her eyes back to where Eve was tilting her chin, pouting at her own reflection.

Laurie returned with heavy dread to her seat, only to see with joy that Emily was in it, and everyone else had clustered round the other side of the table to screech at something on one of the girl’s phones. Blessed release. Given the volume of the music, at this distance, they might as well have gone to Iran.

‘I am flying a humanitarian mission. Did you get Suzanne-ed?’ Emily said, as Laurie took Suzanne’s former position next to her.

‘Yep.’

‘She’s a complete fucking twat, isn’t she?’

Laurie’s Old Fashioned went down the wrong way as she coughed in delighted surprise and Emily slapped her heartily on the back.

When Laurie had her voice back, she said: ‘She let me know I was an old maid and weird nun for my uneventful romantic history.’

‘What a bleak cow. Last I heard she was hopping on Marcus from KPMG and he has a community dick, so no one’s taking her advice.’

Laurie coughed on her drink again. ‘A what?’

‘You know, used freely by everyone. Open access. A civic resource.’

Laurie managed to stop laughing long enough to add: ‘And she and Carly asked me where I was from.’

Emily did a grit-teeth face.

‘I said Yorkshire and they said …’

Emily put a hand on Laurie’s arm and tilted her head. ‘No, I meant where are you from?’

Emily had been spectator to this enough times to know how it went. In lairy younger years, it was usually Emily who jumped in with a: ‘First of all, how done you …’ while Laurie shushed her.

Oh Loz, I am sorry. Clients love them, so I’m scunnered. Why do bad people have to be good at their jobs?’

Laurie laughed, and remembered why she so often said yes to Emily. She thought there was a lot of truth in the closest friendships being unconsummated romances. Emily was a high-flying executive, Tinder adventuress and queen of the casual hook up, Laurie was serious and settled and steady, yet their differences only made them endlessly fascinated with the other.

They still had a sense of humour, and a bullshit detector, and priorities in common.

Emily opened a Rizla paper and put it on the table, dainty fingers sprinkling out a slim sausage of tobacco. Emily had smoked roll-ups ever since they met, when she hung out of Laurie’s bedroom window in halls, bottle of Smirnoff Moscow Mule in the other hand.

‘She asked me who did my work,’ Emily said.

‘Work?’ Laurie said.

‘Work,’ Emily took her hands off the cigarette in progress and pulled her cheeks up, while making a pursed-lips trout mouth.

‘What the …? You don’t look like you’ve had anything done!’

This was true, although Emily had always been physically extraordinary to Laurie. She was tiny, golden limbed (which was due to a professional painting) with the face of a Blythe doll, or manga cartoon: eyes floating miles apart, tiny nose, wide full mouth. It all misled you, so you didn’t expect her to have the language of a docker and the appetites of a pirate. Men fell in doomed passions on a near-weekly basis.

‘Mmm, hmm. About a month after she arrived. Was tempted to sack her then and there. Except she’d have gone round the other agencies saying Emily Clarke sacked me for pointing out her cosmetic work and the fact I’d sacked her would seem to prove it and I’m too fucking vain for that sort of mockery.’

‘What a bitch!’

‘Right? She says “oh no, I mean I thought it was very tasteful, very discreet”. At first I thought it was bad manners but I’m coming to suspect she’s a straight-up sociopath.’

‘They walk among us,’ Laurie nodded, twitching at her phone screen. Dan had never replied. He was the one always telling her to go out more and yet he was doing the antsy ‘when you home’ routine? In long-term couple code that was a don’t be late and smashed hint, without wanting the argument that might ensue from actually saying as much.

‘You know that better than anyone, with your job.’

‘Ah well, maybe she’s right and I have missed out. How would I know? That’s what missing out means,’ Laurie said, feeling philosophical in the way you could after five units of alcohol.

‘Trust me, you haven’t. I’m taking a rest from dating apps,’ Emily said, tugging at her hemline where it cut into her thighs. ‘Too many mis-sold PPIs. The last guy I met was Jason Statham in his photos, and I turn up for the date and it’s more like Upstart Crow.’

Laurie roared at this. ‘Are you still Tilda on there? Has anyone figured it out? Do you really never tell them your real name?’

‘Yep. I make sure there’s no bills left out if we go to mine. You don’t want Clive, thirty-seven, personal trainer from Loughborough, who’s into creative bum-plug play, tracking you down on LinkedIn.’

‘Groooooo.’

‘Ignore Suzanne. Everyone here,’ Emily waved her arm at the general bar-dining area, ‘Wants what you have. Everyone.’

Hah, Laurie thought. She was fairly sure she knew at least one person here who didn’t want what she had, but she appreciated the sentiment.

‘You don’t!’ Laurie said.

Emily’s utilitarian approach to sex bewildered Laurie. Perhaps Emily needed to meet Jamie Carter, and they’d explode on contact.

‘I do, though. I’m just realistic it’s probably not out there, so I make do in the meanwhile. It’s not common, what you have, you know. Not every Laurie finds her Dan, and vice versa,’ Emily said. ‘You two were hit by lightning, that night in Bar CaVa.’

‘And there I was thinking it was baked bean flavoured tequila shots.’

As she left, Laurie noticed the now-empty table where Jamie and Eve had sat. No doubt he’d sidled past when she was deep in conversation with Emily, keen for her not to see them leaving together.

Career talk, arf. Like he’d chance a sacking for telling her about his LPC course in Chester. Like he’d chance a sacking if the prize was anything less than taking her home.

He must think Laurie was naïve, or stupid. The trouble with liars, Laurie had decided from much research in the professional field, is they always thought everyone else was less smart than them.

3

Laurie clambered out of the cab into the heavy smog of late summer air and the nice-postcode-quiet of the street, aware that while her senses were muffled by inebriation, neighbours with families would be lying in their beds cursing the cacophony that was someone exiting a hackney.

The throbbing engine, sing-song conversation, slamming of a heavy door, the clattering of your big night out heels on the pavement.

Two weeks back, the sisters next door had managed to have such an involved back and forth for ten minutes about whose puke it was, Laurie had been tempted to march out in her pyjamas and pay the soiling charge herself.

Ah, middle age beckoned. Hah, who was she kidding, Dan called her ‘Mrs Tiggywinkle’. She was the girl in halls who kept a row of basil plants alive in the shared kitchen.

Loud-whispering ‘keep the change,’ to the driver, she ducked under the thick canopy of clematis that hung over the tiled porch, grabbing blindly for her keys in the depths of her handbag, and once again thought: we need a light out here.

She’d been infatuated with this solid bay-fronted Edwardian semi from the first viewing, and knackered their chances of driving a hard bargain by walking around with the estate agent gibbering on about how much she adored it. They bought at the top of what they could afford at the time, and in Laurie’s opinion it was worth every cent.

Their front room, she liked to point out, was the spit of the one on the sleeve of Oasis’ Definitely Maybe, right down to the stained glass, potted palm and half-drunk red wines usually strewn around.

There was a honey-yellow glow from under the blinds, so either Dan had left the lamp on for her or he was having another bout of insomnia, passed out on the sofa in front of BBC News 24 with the sound on low, feet twitching.

Laurie felt a small rush of love for him, and hoped he was up. As much as it was authentic, she knew it was also in some part due to spending a trying evening surrounded by strangers, feeling homesick and out of place. Not belonging.

As a ‘person of ethnic origin’ who grew up in Hebden Bridge, she didn’t care to revisit that feeling often. Even in a cosmopolitan city she got the OH I LOVE YOUR ACCENT? EE BAH GUM jokes. ‘You don’t often hear a black girl sound that northern, except for that one out of the Spice Girls,’ a forthright client had said to her once.

She thought Dan might have waited up for her, but the moment she saw him, she knew something was badly off. He was still dressed, sat on the sofa, feet apart, head bowed, hands clasped. The TV screen was a blank and there wasn’t any music on, no detritus of a takeaway.

‘Hi,’ he said, in an unnatural voice, as Laurie entered the room.

Laurie was an empathetic person. When she was small she once told her mum she thought she might be telepathic, and her amused mother had explained that she was just very intuitive about emotions. Laurie was, as her dad said, born aged forty. Better than being born aged nineteen and staying there, she never said in reply.

The air was thick with a Terrible Unsaid and her antennae picked it up easily enough to feel completely nauseous.

Laurie clutched the jangle of her keys to her chest, with their silly fob of Bagpuss, and said: ‘Oh God, what? Which of our parents is it? Please say it now. Say it quickly.’

‘What?’

‘I know it’s bad news. Please don’t do any build up whatsoever.’

Laurie was about six or seven drinks in the hole and yet in an instant, completely, pin-sharp sober with adrenaline.

Dan looked perturbed. ‘Nothing has happened to anyone?’

‘Oh? Oh! Fuck, you scared me.’

In relief, Laurie flumped down onto the sofa, arms flung out by her sides like a kid.

She looked at Dan as her heart rate slowed to normal. He was regarding her with a strange expression.

Not for the first time, she felt appreciation, a bump of pride in ownership, admiring how much early middle age suited him. He’d been a kind of jolly-looking chubby lad in their youth, puppyish cute but not handsome, as her gran had helpfully noted. And with a slight lisp that he hated, but oddly enough, always had women swooning. Laurie always loved it, right from the first moment he had spoken to her. Now he had a few lines and silver threaded in his light brown hair, the bones of his face had sharpened, he’d grown into himself. He was what the girls at work called a Hot Dad. Or, he would be.

‘You couldn’t sleep again?’ she asked. His insomnia was a recent thing, due to him being made head of department. Three a.m. night sweat terrors.

‘No,’ he said, and she didn’t know if he was saying no, I couldn’t sleep or no, that’s not it.

Laurie peered at him. ‘You alright?’

‘About you coming off the pill next month. I’ve been thinking about it. It’s made me think about a lot of things.’

‘Has it …?’ Laurie suppressed a knowing smile. The atmosphere and anxiety now made sense. Here we go, she thought. This was a clichéd moment in the passage to parenthood. It belonged in a scripted drama, shortly after a couple had seen two blue lines on the wee stick.

Should he trade in the car for something bigger? Would he be a good father? Would they still be the same?

1. Nah. There’s no room out there to park a people carrier anyway.

2. Of course! He could try to be less sulky, perhaps, but that was about it. Kids had a way of automatically curing excess self-pity, from what Laurie could tell. At least for the initial five years.

3. Yes. The same, but better! (Actually, Laurie had no idea about the last answer. If they procreated, it would be the best part of two decades before this household belonged to the two of them again, and inviting a tyrannically needy midget intruder to disturb their privacy and contented status quo was scary.)

But the done thing in a couple was to pretend to be sure about the imponderable things, whenever the other person needed comfort. If necessary, deploy outright lying. Dan could pay her back when she asked tearfully after returning from a failed shopping trip, whether her body would ever look like it did before.

‘I don’t know how to say any of this. I’ve been sitting here since you left trying to think of the right words and I still can’t.’

This was hyperbole, because Laurie left him having a shower with the Roberts radio broadcasting the football game, but she didn’t say so.

‘Look,’ Dan said. ‘I’ve realised. I don’t want kids. At all. Ever.’

The silence lengthened.

Laurie sat up, with some effort, given her foolish shoes – strappy silver slingbacks she fell for in Selfridges, that ‘look good with plum toenails’ according to the sales girl – weren’t anchoring her to the floor very steadily.

‘Dan,’ she said gently. ‘This doubt is totally normal, you know. I feel the same. It’s frightening, when it’s about to become real. But we can do it. We’ve got this. With having a kid, you hold hands, and jump.’

She smiled at him, hoping he’d snap out of it soon. It felt like a role reversal, him demanding a deep talk, her wanting to do enough to make him feel taken seriously so she could go to bed. Dan was flexing his fingers, steepled in his lap, not looking at her.

‘And it’s me who has to push it out,’ Laurie added. ‘Don’t think I haven’t googled “third-degree tearing”.’

He wouldn’t be easily joked out of this, she realised, looking at the depth of his frown lines.

She felt them running at different speeds, her carrying the noise and trivia of the night out with her like a swarm of bees, him evidently having spent a pensive period staring at the shadows in the sombre Edward Hopper print they hung over the fireplace, worrying about the future.

‘It’s not just having kids. I don’t want anything that you want. I don’t want … this.’

He glanced around the room, accusingly.

Stripped floorboards?

‘What do you mean?’

Dan breathed in and out, as if limbering up for a feat of exertion. But no words followed.

‘… You want to put it off for a few years? We talked about this. I’m thirty-six and it could take a while. We don’t want to be mucking about with interventions and wishing we’d got on with it … you know what Claire says. If she knew how great it would be, she’d have started at twenty.’

Invoking this particular member of their social circle was a stupid misstep, and Laurie immediately regretted it.

Claire was both a massive bore about her offspring and a general pain in the hoop. Ironically, if they hadn’t suffered her, they might’ve have reproduced already. Occasions with her often concluded with one or other of them muttering: you’d tell me if I ever got like that, right?

‘You know what they say. There’s never a perfect time to have a baby,’ Laurie added. ‘If you—’

‘Laurie,’ Dan said, interrupting her. ‘I’m trying to tell you that we don’t want the same things and so we can’t be together.’

She gasped. He’d say such an ugly, ridiculous thing to get his point across? Then she did a small empty laugh, as it dawned on her: this was how much men could fear maturity. It ought not to be a revelation to her, given her dad, and yet she was badly disappointed in Dan.

‘Come on, are you really going to turn this into a full-blown emergency and make me say having a family is a deal breaker, or something? So it can all be my fault when it’s had us up five times in a row?’

Dan looked at her.

‘I don’t know how else I can say this. I’m not happy, Laurie.’

Laurie breathed in and out: Dan wasn’t bluffing, he wanted a direct assurance from her she’d not come off the pill. She’d have to hope they revisited the idea in a year. She was aware that it could mean their window of opportunity closed completely. And she could end up resenting Dan. There’d be no playing tricks, pretending to take the pill when she wasn’t and whoops-a-daisy. That was how Laurie was conceived and she knew the consequences were lifelong.

‘Is this purely because I want kids?’

She would take it off the table to stay with him, she knew that in a split second’s consultation with herself. It was unthinkable to do anything else. You didn’t lose someone you loved, over hypothetical love for someone who didn’t yet exist. Who might never exist.

‘That, other things. I’m not … this is not where I want to be any more.’

‘OK,’ she said, rubbing her tired face, feeling appalled by how extreme he’d been prepared to be, in order to get his way.

She felt like she might cry, in fact. They’d had fights before where very occasionally one or the other of them had vaguely threatened to leave, usually when drunk and in their dickhead twenties, and whichever of them had said it felt sick with guilt the next day.

Pulling this now, at their age, was beneath Dan, however much he was bricking it over the responsibilities of fatherhood. It was really unkind.

‘… OK, you win. Regular pill-taking for the time being. Christ, Dan.’

Dan looked at her with a stunned expression and Laurie froze, because again, she could read it.

He wasn’t stunned she’d agreed. It wasn’t a gambit. He wanted to split up.

She finally understood. Understood that he meant it, that this was it.

Absolutely everything else was completely beyond her comprehension.

4

When people did monumentally awful things to you, it seemed they didn’t even have the courtesy of being original, of inflicting some unique war wound, a lightning-bolt-shaped scar. These reasons were prosaic, dull. They were true of people all the time, but they weren’t applicable to Dan and Laurie. They were going to be together forever. They agreed that openly as daft lovestruck teenagers and implicitly confirmed it in every choice they’d made since. No commitment needed checking or second thinking, it was just: of course. You are mine and I am yours.

‘But nothing’s changed?’ Laurie said. ‘We’re like we’ve always been.’

‘I think that’s part of the problem.’

Laurie’s mind was occupying two time zones at once: this surreal nightmare where her partner of eighteen years, her first and only love, her best friend, her ‘other half’, was sitting here, saying things about how he’d sleep in the spare room for the time being and move out to a flat as soon as possible. She had to play along with it, because he was so convinced. It was like colluding with someone who’d become delusional about a dream world. Follow the rabbit.

Then there was the other time zone, where she was desperately trying to make sense of the situation, to manage it and defuse it. He was only using words – no tangible, irreversible change had occurred. Therefore words could change it back again.

She’d always had a special power over Dan, and vice versa, that’s why they fell for each other. If she wanted to pull him back from this brink, she must be able. She only needed to try hard enough, to find the way to persuade him.

But to fix it, she had to grasp what was going on. Laurie prided herself on cold reading people like she was a stage magician, and yet the person closest to her sounded like a stranger.

‘How long have you felt this way?’ she asked.

‘A while,’ Dan said, and although his body showed tension, she could already tell he had relaxed several notches. Announcement made, the worst was over for him. She hated him, for a second. ‘I think I knew for sure at Tom and Pri’s wedding.’

‘Oh, that was why you spent the whole night in a strop, was it?’ Laurie spat. And realised the lunacy of that sort of point scoring, when the whole game had been cancelled. He wouldn’t go through with this. Surely.

Her stomach lurched. It was utterly ridiculous to take him seriously, and wildly reckless not to.

Dan made a hissing noise, shook his head. Whether he was dismayed at Laurie or himself wasn’t clear.

‘I knew none of that wedding fuss was for me. I knew that’s not where I was at, mentally.’

A painful memory came back to Laurie, because it turned out her senses hadn’t entirely failed her.

She recalled that the couples present had been corralled by the DJ for the first-dance-after-the-first-dance. She and a half-cut, sullen Dan were forced into a waltz hold to Adele. She felt a sudden total absence of anything between them, not even a comfortable ease with each other’s touch, in place of a spark. It was like their battery was dead and if you pressed the accelerator it’d only make an empty phut-phut-phut. They shuffled round the floor awkwardly, like brother and sister, not meeting each other’s gaze. Then as soon as the song was over she forgot about it, and put it down to Dan not liking ‘Someone Like You’, or being told to do things.

He’d made a passive-aggressive show of going to sleep in the cab on the way back. Laurie felt she’d committed an unspecified crime all day, but when asked ‘What’s up with you?’ she’d got a belligerent ‘… NOTHING?’

But crap days in a long-term relationship were a given. You no more thought they might spell the end than you feared every cold could be cancer.

‘Is there someone else?’ Laurie said, not because she thought it possible but you were supposed to ask this, weren’t you? In this weird theatre they were playing out, at Dan’s insistence. They worked together – on a practical level alone, this seemed improbable.

‘No, of course not,’ Dan said, sounding genuinely affronted.

‘I don’t think you get to OF COURSE NOT me, do you?’ Laurie shrieked, anger breaking, causing Dan to flinch. ‘I think OF COURSE NOT is pretty much fucking unavailable to you right now, don’t you? We’ve stopped having any shared reality from what I can see so fuck off with your patronising OF COURSE NOTS.’

Dan was completely unused to seeing her this incandescently angry. In fact, the last time she hit these heights, they were twenty-five and he’d lost her car keys in the healing field at Glastonbury. They’d been able to laugh about it later, though, alchemise it as an anecdote. Comedy was tragedy plus time, but there’d never be enough distance to make this amusing.

‘Sorry,’ he said quietly. ‘But no. Like we always said. No cheating, ever.’

‘Ever?’ she said, with a knowing intonation.

‘You know what we agreed. I’d tell you.’

Laurie fumed, her chest tight, and tried to breathe through it. The tactlessness and the tastelessness of Dan using things they’d sincerely pledged to each other a lifetime ago. He was currently trashing that memory, and every other memory for that matter, while asking Laurie to treat it as sacred covenant. What an arsehole.

Was he an arsehole? Had he turned into one, somewhere along the line, and she hadn’t noticed? She studied him, as he stared morosely at his hairy knees in his shorts, face like a baleful Moomin.

It didn’t matter. She loved him. They’d long ago passed the point where her love was negotiable; it wasn’t contingent on him not being an arsehole. He was her arsehole.

Laurie had passed that point, anyway. Dan had reached a parallel one where he could abandon her. That’s what it felt like: desolate abandonment. He wouldn’t care about Laurie, from now on? No, no, he did want her. She knew in her guts that he did, which is why this had to be stopped before he did any more damage.

‘But we’ve got to stay at the same company together? How’s that going to fucking work?’

Dan and Laurie managed a few degrees of separation at Salter & Rowson by being in different departments, but once they were exes that would hardly be enough.

‘I can start looking for other positions. I might jack it all in. I’m not sure yet.’

‘Honestly, Dan, it still sounds like you’re freaked out by having a baby and have decided to go full nuke from orbit to fix it,’ Laurie said, in a final stab at returning them to any sort of normality. ‘You don’t want to go travelling, for fuck’s sake. They wouldn’t let you stay head of the department, either. And you hated a week in Santorini, last year.’

As Laurie said it, she wondered if the missing element in that analysis was that he hated it with her.

‘Having children is only one part of it. The reason it’s made me do something about how I feel is because you can’t go back on that decision, you can’t un-have a baby. It made me decide. I don’t want this life, Laurie, I’m sorry. I know it’s a shock after all this time. It shocks me too. That’s why it took me so long to face up to it. But I don’t. Want it.’

‘You don’t want me?’

A heavy pause, where Laurie felt Dan steel himself to say it.

‘Not like this.’

‘Then how?’

Dan shrugged and blinked through tears.

‘The word you’re looking for is no,’ Laurie said.

Tears flash flooded down her face now and he made to get up and she frantically gestured: don’t come near me.

‘Erm … just you know, one minor objection on my part,’ she said, voice thick and distorted by crying. It was ambitious to try to put on a sarcastic tone. ‘How am I going to have kids with anyone now, Dan? I’m thirty-six.’

‘You still can!’ he said, imploringly, nodding. ‘That’s not old, these days.’

‘With who? When? Am I going to meet someone next week? Get things moving on conceiving a few months after that?’

‘C’mon. You’re you. You’re a massive catch, always have been. You won’t be short of offers. You’ll be inundated.’

Laurie finally accepted in that moment, that this was real, they really might be over.

Dan had always had the healthy, normal amount of male jealousy. If anything, more than average: he’d always been sure if one of them would be stolen away by a rival, it was Laurie. Male friends who complimented her in his presence always got a ‘hey now …’ from Dan that was entirely joking but also not. Male hires at her firm always got an early warning that she might not have a wedding ring but she wasn’t single and also the guy was here on premises, so watch yourself, and she assumed this was by Dan or briefed by his representatives. (She’d never had to tell anyone she was ‘spoken for’, anyway, they always mentioned oh you’re Dan Price’s girlfriend. Funny phrase, that. Why was someone speaking for you?)

If the idea of her having kids with someone else got this shrug of a response, this mediocre auto-response, something had flown.

‘Such a massive catch, you’ll pass me up?’

‘We’ve been together all our lives, Laurie, you’re my only serious girlfriend. It’s not like I’m walking away lightly, or that I never cared.’

Laurie was on the back foot. He’d planned for this. He was a politician who had notes; she’d been ambushed.

She still couldn’t believe he wasn’t exaggerating somehow, but there was a dreadful binary: if he could say all this and not mean it utterly sincerely, that would make it even worse.

There was a huge, bewildering gap in all of this for Laurie. An untold mystery in how Dan had gone from unpacking the Ocado delivery, and complaining about the plain digestives they got as substitutions for Jaffa Cakes, going for musty pints of stout in their local and laughing at dogs with overbites in Beech Road Park on a Sunday morning, to this final, total departure, with nothing in between.

It was as if one minute she’d been running for a bus, and the next she’d woken up in a hospital bed, the quilt flat where her legs used to be, with a doctor explaining they were ever so sorry but there was no saving them.

‘Good to know you used to care,’ she said, hearing how plaintive and bitter her voice sounded, in the darkened sitting room. ‘Small mercies? Or is that meant to be a big mercy?’

‘I do care.’

‘Just not enough to stay.’

Dan stared blankly.

‘Say it,’ Laurie said, with force.

‘No.’

It was the logical conclusion of everything he’d said; and yet that hard monosyllable surprised her so much, he might as well have slapped her.

5

At three in the morning, having been wide awake for hours, Laurie got up, marched into the spare room and stamped on the button to turn the big floor lamp on.

‘Dan? Wake up.’

The human-sized sausage shape under the duvet stirred and Dan’s head emerged, hair askew.

At first he frowned in sleepy confusion. When he focused on Laurie’s face, and visibly remembered the specifics of his existence, his expression changed to a man woken by an FBI flashlight who knew exactly what he had hidden in his crawl space.

‘I need to know why.’

‘What?’

‘I need to know why this is happening. I know you think you’ve given me reasons but you haven’t. Only vague bullshit about us wanting different things. We’ve wanted all kinds of different things in the past but we never had to split up over it. We would’ve talked about it. I offered to hold off on kids, even put it aside, same with getting married. So it’s not that we want different things. That’s like a line you heard in Cold Feet or something.’ Laurie paused. ‘Just tell me the whole truth, however hard it is. This not knowing is worse, Dan. Look at what you’re doing to us, after our whole lives together. You owe me that.’

Dan stared at her and pushed himself up on his elbows. A silence stretched between them and Laurie sensed he was readying himself for honesty. This return ambush had worked, he’d not had time to rehearse.

Dan cleared his throat. Laurie was breaking out in a flop sweat but she still didn’t regret asking.

‘… I started waking up early. While you were still asleep,’ he said. ‘… And I’d see life as a tunnel. I could mark off everything along the way. The wedding at Manchester Town Hall. The honeymoon in Italy. Kid one, kid two. Sunday barbecues, DIY, saving up for an extension. Still hating work, but having to go for partnership because there were mouths to feed.’ His voice was hoarse with sleep and sounded strange. ‘And it was like there was nothing between here and death that left the script. It was planned out for me, every step. I was expected to do it. And I kept asking myself, like a nagging voice, a whisper that got louder and louder: did I want to do it?’

Laurie could interject here that clearly, he wasn’t expected to do several things on that list. She held herself back.

‘… I felt trapped. I’d built this box I didn’t want to live inside any more, but I wasn’t allowed to leave it. I didn’t want to leave it, as I knew how much I’d hurt you. I started being a wanker to you all the time, because I was miserable, but I didn’t want to say so.’

He drew breath. ‘That’s the thing. I kept thinking I had to stay to be kind to you but I wasn’t being kind, so what was the point?’

‘You’ve always been quite grumpy, to be fair,’ Laurie said, with a small smile.

Dan didn’t appear to listen.

‘You know how people always said how could we do it, how could we “settle down” so young?’

‘Yes,’ said Laurie, voice tight.

‘We both said it was the easiest thing we’d ever done, we never even thought of it that way. And I always meant it, Laurie, always. But maybe now, at thirty-six, it’s caught up with me. I don’t feel I’ve lived enough.’

Laurie took a deep breath and tried to get past how much this hurt. She’d stifled him, stopped him from going on expeditions, with his fascinating penis as travel companion. However, she had asked for straight answers.

‘If I’d never met you – if you’d slept around at university, and we’d got together at twenty-five, or thirty, this wouldn’t be happening?’ Laurie deliberately didn’t say this in an accusatory way, she wanted to know.

‘I don’t know. I can’t go back and live a different timeline until I get here again, and do you know what, I promise you, I wouldn’t want to. And it’s not about sex. It’s about … Oh God, I don’t want to say “finding myself”. But life’s big decisions are mainly instinct, right? The same way we both just knew, back at university. Now I know this isn’t right for me anymore. I’ve lost myself.’

‘Is it me, I’m not enough? Or too much? You’re looking at other women or … our friends or their wives, or our colleagues, thinking, “I wish Laurie was more like that”?’ Her throat was tight and she felt as if she was stood here, stark naked. To ask these questions: it was the hardest, most exposing thing. Tell me how you fell out of love with me. Describe it.

‘No! God no. It’s not about you. I know that sounds insulting, but it isn’t.’

A pause.

‘OK. Thanks for being honest,’ Laurie said dully.

She meant it. She didn’t hate this situation any less, but she grasped it a little better. Dan being this open with her reminded her how they used to be able to talk, and the pain hit her stomach again with a physical force. She would never be able to forget how easily you could lose someone’s love. She hadn’t felt it slipping away.

‘Won’t you miss me?’ she said.

This was it, the biggest question. The one that left her feeling ridiculous, pitiable, even, but she knew she had to. The idea Dan would no longer be on the ‘people to contact in an emergency’ space on her passport felt impossible. She needed him to explain how he could do this and not feel how she’d feel, if she did this.

‘The thought of it is brutal, Laurie. Like missing a limb,’ Dan said, tears starting. ‘I love you. I don’t love our relationship anymore.’

‘We could stay together and make the relationship different,’ Laurie said, eyes welling up.

They both sobbed, heads bowed, because Dan didn’t want to say it and she didn’t want to hear it. The sound of it was strange, in the darkened room.

‘Why would you leave me like this? Why would you do this to us?’ Laurie said, and she sounded like someone else. Who was this mournful, begging woman? And who was this merciless person who’d taken Dan’s place? How could eighteen years end in just a few hours?

‘I’m sorry … I’m really sorry …’ Dan gasped.

‘If you were that sorry you wouldn’t do it,’ Laurie said thickly, not even caring how she sounded, almost pleading. This was like a catapult back to the powerlessness of childhood, wondering why grown-ups did the completely arse-about-face cruel things they did.

‘I can’t not do it.’ He looked like he was going to say something else and then thought better of it. Like when they told a client to go No Comment. The more you say, the more you’ll incriminate yourself.

Laurie suspected what he wouldn’t say, was: there came a point where feelings weren’t there to be resuscitated, they had died. That dance, at that wedding. That’s what she’d picked up on. Flatlining.

‘And I want you to be happy. You deserve more than someone who …’

‘OK. Spare me that stuff, Dan,’ Laurie said, briskly, wiping her eyes, squeezing her already folded arms tighter. ‘You’re like the climber who can’t carry their injured mate, so leaves them to die. Do what you need to do but don’t pretend it’s about anything other than your survival.’

‘Hah,’ Dan rubbed his face tiredly. ‘You’re so bloody clever, you are.’

She wasn’t sure, in the tone of his voice, that it was a compliment. It even sounded like a hint at some other part of this. Laurie was too tired and raw to judge.

‘I don’t know who or what I’m meant to trust in,’ Laurie said, tremulous. ‘We spend our whole lives together and one day it’s – nah, not for me? What do I do with that? What’s the lesson I have to learn here?’

‘There isn’t a lesson for you, you haven’t done anything wrong.’

She could feel it now, the grief and enormity of what had been abruptly taken from her. A future. The rest of their lives. A promise, broken. ‘Then how am I going to ever believe this won’t happen again?’

‘I don’t know what to say. It’s taken me … so long to work up the courage because …’

‘Woah, you’re now saying you weren’t happy for so long?’

‘No! Or not in a serious way. Just an underlying doubt. Fuck, Laurie. Working out how to do this without hurting you even more … it’s awful. It’s my mess and confusion but there was no way of it not ending up all over you.’

He was sat up in bed, head hangdog, bare chested, and Laurie couldn’t help but wonder who the next person to see him like this would be, who he was going to find that he wanted more with. Who didn’t make life feel like a tunnel.

‘OK. There’s nothing left to say. It’s happening because it’s happening. Thanks for everything, I guess?’

‘Laurie …’

‘I mean it. Thank you. The fact you’re going doesn’t mean everything before it didn’t matter. Not wanting to be with someone anymore, and admitting it, isn’t doing anything wrong.’

Dan looked taken aback and Laurie surprised herself with this Christian forgiveness that she hadn’t known she was going to dispense, until this moment. It felt unexpectedly powerful. Was it a ploy? She wasn’t sure. She didn’t feel the same way, one moment to the next. Maybe, once again, it was the advocate in her. She only had this left, to make him change his mind. Remember the woman you fell in love with. Well, the girl.

Laurie hesitated, because she didn’t want to issue ultimatums or bluffs, they were pointless. But she still had to say it.

‘One thing, though, Dan. If you think you can do this, and spend three months living in some flat in Ancoats being lonely, with your “man cave” sofa from Gumtree and your Sky Sports package, and then come back to me saying it was some massive midlife crisis … you know you can’t, right? This damage you’re doing, it’s permanent. If you go, that’s it.’

Dan nodded. ‘Yes. I wouldn’t presume to think I could ever ask that of you.’

Laurie left the room, knowing that she’d lied, and he probably did too.

6

Dad

Hello princess. How’s my beautiful clever daughter? Well guess what, me & Nic tied the knot!!! Just because of tax reasons, Visas, all that jazz. Did it out here in Beefa with a couple of witnesses but we’re going to have a proper tear-up in Manchester in a month or so, I’ll give you the details when I have them. Going to spend a few quid on it, need somewhere fancy, no fleapits. Get yourself a nice dress and send me the bill, you’re one of the bridesmaids, as it were. Love you loads my darling. Austin xxx

Laurie blinked at the WhatsApp through the fug of receding sleep on Sunday morning: you could dissect this in a lab as a perfect study of her relationship with her father. All of him was in there, like a nucleus containing the DNA information.

1. Lavish praise, blandishments.

2. Surprise news, the sort that makes it clear his life is, in fact, nothing much to do with her.

3. Material spoiling, bribes.

4. More protestations of how important she is to him. A bridesmaid ‘as it were’. I want you to feel you’re important without going to the trouble of actually treating you that way.

5. Not, despite the performative paternalism, referring to himself ‘Dad’. On the rare occasions she’d seen him when she was little, she’d loved the novelty of having someone to call Dad, but he always used to correct her: ‘You’re making me sound old.’ She was baffled: thirty was old, and he was her dad?

And not forgetting 6. The worst possible timing, as always.

Laurie

Hi, congratulations to you and Nic! Will come to the celebration, just let me know. I have less fun news, Dan and I have separated. I’m keeping the house on and he’s moving out. His decision, no third parties involved. Ah well. Maybe I’ll meet someone at your tear-up. xx

Two blue ticks, immediately. So he’d read it. No reply. More Classic Austin Watkinson.

And to round it all off – and this part she couldn’t blame her dad for, although it felt as if she should be able to – he’d now unwittingly made her phone call to her mum, breaking the news about her and Dan, even more onerous. Her parents didn’t speak, so it was down to Laurie if she was going to be informed, and she should be, really. Laurie knew if she put it off, she’d end up avoiding it altogether; she wouldn’t keep secrets for her dad. Still, her mum wouldn’t thank her for it, and it’d feel like it was Laurie’s fault.

Laurie and Dan had spent all day Saturday slowly and painfully going through it all again, and now Dan was out on a run and Laurie was actually relieved not to have to face him for a few hours, endlessly wondering if she could have said or done something different to change this outcome.

Having told one person, it had started to become real. She could call her mum and practise doing it vocally – and now, in a Dan-less house, was better than later. She sat on the third step of the stairs, heaving the plastic rotary red and blue phone onto her lap. When she bought it a year ago from a website that did ‘vintage things with a modern twist’, Dan had said, ‘More bourgeoise knick-knacks. Behold our thirty-something pile of affluent middle-class tat!’

Did he hate all this stuff? In this home they’d made? Could she not even look at a sodding retro hipster landline in the same way? His belongings were piled into tragic bin bags in the dining room. She’d heard him, before she got up, quietly calling a local restaurant to cancel their reservation. This afternoon, they had been meant to be eating Sunday lunch at a pretentious new place nearby full of squirrel cage light bulbs and ‘Nordic-inspired small plates’.

‘Look at this,’ Dan had said barely a week ago, in another space-time dimension, waving his phone with the website open. ‘This place isn’t a restaurant, it’s a dining space prioritising a thoughtful eating menu with an emphasis on provenance and a curated repertoire of low intervention wines. Fucks saaake.’

‘You wanted to try it!’ Laurie had said, and Dan eye-rolled, shrugged. Back when Dan’s ‘rejection of things he’d nevertheless willingly chosen’ was confined to where they had meals out.

In the cold light of morning, Laurie couldn’t believe he was keeping on with this charade, that he wasn’t going to be standing in some unloved, unfurnished two bed that smelled of plug-in air fresheners with a greasy estate agent and think: ‘what the hell am I doing?’

Not that love or happiness was stuff, but Laurie had made them a great home and it still wasn’t enough. Or, she wasn’t. She felt so foolish: the whole time he’d been growing colder, quietly horrified, hemmed in and alienated by it. It was such a shallow thing, but Laurie felt so damn uncool for being satisfied by a life that Dan wasn’t.

She listened to the ringing on the other end, replaced the receiver, and tried again. Her mum would be in the garden, and thought the first phone call was merely to alert you to the fact someone was trying to call you. She rarely answered until they’d made a second or even third attempt. It was a quirk that used to drive Laurie mad in her teenage years; they had flaming rows about Laurie always having to answer.

Her mum was ‘out of the normal,’ as a plumber once said, surveying the kitsch art collage of Elvis on their pink bathroom wall in the 1990s.

Her mother had very strict, controlling and conventional parents herself, and was determined to do things differently. Laurie admired this, while sometimes feeling she’d overcorrected to the other extreme.

If you’d wanted a mother who was chill with you being out until all hours and your friends accidentally dropping the F-word, Mrs Peggy Watkinson of Cannock Road was the one. Plus, she looked and dressed like Supremes-era Diana Ross. Both Conventional and Unconventional Dads of the neighbourhood were fans. And she wasn’t Mrs Watkinson, either, because she’d never been wed to Laurie’s dad. Laurie chose it as her surname because at the time, her mum was using her stage moniker, Peggy Sunshine. And Laurie was no way going to have a wacky surname on top of being the only black girl in her year.

When Laurie’s mum was addressed as Mrs Watkinson by a teenager, she smiled and did her characteristic hand wave. ‘In a past life, maybe.’ And mentioned there was wine open in the kitchen.

Your mum is the best, her friends said, as they trudged up the stairs, glasses in hand, promises extracted – by Laurie – not to tell their mums.

There were times when Laurie craved mums like everyone else had, who replaced lost PE kits, made chicken nuggets with beans and chips for tea instead of aubergine and pineapple curry, and didn’t have Egyptian birthing stools on display in reception rooms.

She tried ringing her mum again, but was unsuccessful. She’d give it a last try and then give up.

Whenever anything awful happened, no one ever considered the difficulty of the admin, Laurie thought. Someone had to broadcast it, manage the fall-out. How come there were so many services in modern society, and not this one? ‘Relationship Over? Let Us Round Robin!’

‘Working out how to tell everyone’ was a part of her and Dan’s separation that was going to be almost as gruelling a prospect as being left in the first place. It felt so unnecessarily cruel that you didn’t just have to go through the thing, you had to have a dozen conversations with people of varying closeness about the fact you were going through the thing.

Dan did this, Dan should deal with all of it. But he couldn’t, even if she wanted him to.

Some hip friends, a few years back, had posted up a witty archive photo on social media of themselves and made an official announcement to everyone they were divorcing.

Laurie considered it, lying in bed last night, but it only really worked as a ‘ripping the plaster off in one go’ technique if you said it was fine, you were both OK, no hard feelings, no bombshell story to uncover here, move along. Essentially, hinted it was a joint decision. Those euphemisms that publicists deployed when famous people parted: ‘leading different lives’, ‘grown apart’ and Laurie’s favourite, ‘conflicting schedules’.

Dan once said that mutual only ever meant: ‘one person has given up, and the other person concedes they can’t persuade them not to,’ and now that felt astute. Turns out, he was plot foreshadowing their own end. Where did he go, that Dan?

The phone finally connected, third time lucky, ha ha.

‘Hi, Mum … yeah I thought you’d be in the garden. OK to talk? I’ve got some bits of news … No, not that.’ It really did put the tin hat on this that everyone would think she was about to announce the baby. She took a breath to gird her loins.

‘Dan and I have split up. It’s his decision.’

She couldn’t bear to say ‘left me’, with all its sense of passive victimhood but she had to make it clear she wasn’t going to have answers. She recounted Dan’s reasons for going.

‘Oh dear, my darling. Sorry to hear this.’ Her mum had kept the strong Caribbean inflection from the island of her own childhood. ‘I know you will be very hurt but sometimes, paths diverge. He obviously has to do this next part of his journey on his own. Which is very painful for you, but it must be what his heart is telling him.’

Laurie gritted her teeth. Maddening calm was one of her mother’s attributes, that could also feel like a weapon.

She knew her mum, who lived outside society’s conventions in Upper Calder Valley with a fabulous kitchen garden and incense burners, wasn’t going to do the ‘what a bastard’ response, and in many ways, Laurie liked that her mum was an independent thinker.

But right now she didn’t want this stuff about how nothing was good or bad, it was just a different choice. Hippyishness could feel heartless. She wanted her distress to be recognised.

Laurie remembered her mum saying of her cousin Ray, who was in a serious motorbike smash, ‘That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,’ and Laurie asking how someone subsequently living in an adapted bungalow held together with metal pins was stronger. ‘Mentally stronger,’ came the answer. Tenuous, at best. It was uncomfortably close to telling Ray to see the upside. Here was her version of that. Laurie was often struck by how the arc of history was long, but bent towards nothing really changing.

‘Dan will be on his own on his “journey” for a while, and then he’ll be with someone else. I think that’s how this works? He’s not going to become a nomadic shaman monk, Mum. He’s on a good salary at a provincial law firm.’

Unless you bought Dan’s blather about jacking it all in, which Laurie didn’t. Maybe her scathing cynicism was adding fuel to Dan’s theory they were no longer aligned, but still, file it under Believe It When I See It. She’d heard him kvetching about the state of Ryanair’s delays enough times, she couldn’t see him floating in tranquility down the Mekong Delta.

‘Well. So are you.’ That’s alright then. Jeez.

Peggy sort of tutted, in a ‘there there’ way, and Laurie sucked air into her painful rib cage. She’d not eaten more than a few pieces of toast with peanut butter for days. She didn’t expect her mum to be upset on her behalf, and she had feared her mum would insist this was an opportunity in disguise. Not least because Peggy thought Laurie had settled down too young, and her feelings towards Dan had always been polite rather than enthusiastic. Laurie got the feeling that Dan had presented to her as a stereotypical Nice Young Man, but her mum had found him a little dull. Peggy liked characters, eccentrics and oddballs. Speaking of which … her dad’s news.

‘Is there anything I can do?’ her mum said, after listening to the practical arrangements of the dissolution of Dan and Laurie Inc.

‘No. Thanks though,’ Laurie said, refusing to bite at such a lacklustre offer. ‘Oh, also.’ Deep breath. ‘Dad’s got married to Nicola. In Ibiza, but they’re going to have a do back here in Manchester too.’

Her mum was silent for a second. ‘Nicola? Is that the one from before?’

‘The Scouser, yeah.’

Laurie had only met Nicola a few times before but she liked her: a garrulous, handsome woman with her own jewellery business, who wore a lot of animal print and liked a party as much as her dad, which was saying something.

‘He always said marriage was a rotten institution, a place people went to die!’

‘Yeah. Well this is his journey, I guess. What his heart is telling him.’

Laurie was being sarcastic but it evidently didn’t register. She could hear her mum fidgeting on the other end of the phone, and pictured the frown that usually accompanied mentions of her father.

‘I shouldn’t be surprised at your father being a shit by now, and yet somehow I always am.’

‘He says they did it for tax breaks.’

‘Ever the romantic,’ she sniffed.

Of course, had Laurie said he’d done it for love, her mum would’ve scorned that too.

‘Please warn me when he’s having his reception because I do not want any chance of running into him and this woman. Wanda and I were going to come over for an exhibition at the Whitworth.’

‘Mum, I don’t mean to sound mean-spirited …’ Laurie knew she was about to start a fight, even while she intellectually, rationally, wanted a fight with her mum like she wanted a hole in the head. Yet emotionally, it was somehow an inevitability. ‘I tell you my boyfriend of eighteen years dumped me and it was, oh well Dan must have his reasons to follow his lodestar and I’ve told you Dad’s got married, and he left you thirty-seven years ago, and you’re now pissed off and angry. Why can’t I be pissed off and angry at Dan?’

‘You can! When did I say you couldn’t be?’

‘The whole “he must be doing the next part on his own and listening to his heart” stuff wasn’t exactly saying I had a right to be upset.’

‘Of course you do, but he’s not cheating on you, he’s not lied to you? What do you want me to say, Laurie? Do you want me to criticise him?’

‘No!’ She didn’t. Infuriatingly, she still felt defensive of him. ‘It’d just be nice if …’ she trailed off, as what came next was harsh.

‘What?’

‘… As if you sounded like you cared about my break-up anything like as much as you care about Dad’s rubbish.’

‘That’s a dreadful thing to say, I care much more about you than I do about him!’

Hmmm yeah, not what Laurie was saying, but how did Laurie think it would go, pointing out her mum’s hypocrisy in the sting of her dad’s news?

Her mother and father were opposite perils, Laurie realised: her dad said the right things and didn’t mean them and her mum might feel it, but she never said so.

They finished the call with terse politeness so they could go away and boil resentfully on the things the other had said.

As Laurie replaced the receiver she thought: well that was ironic, wasn’t that the ultimate moment to be bonding over similar experiences? You wouldn’t get this on the bloody Gilmore Girls.

Her mum was still heavily marked by what her dad did almost four decades ago; Laurie felt the tremor his name caused. Was that going to be Laurie’s fate where Dan was concerned, too?

‘At some point, you have to give up wishing for your parents to be who you wanted them to be and accept them as they are,’ Dan once said.

Easy for him to say, with his kind, dependable mum and dad who thought he was a prince among men and would drop anything and do anything for him.

As Laurie sat on the stairs, hugging her knees and nursing her bruised emotions, there was muttered cursing in the distance as someone tripped over a step, the scrape of a key in the lock, and Dan came in the door.

‘Hi,’ he said. He was pink from running, and wore the look of apprehensive guilt he always did around Laurie now.

‘Hi. I told my mum.’

‘Ah.’ Dan was obviously at a loss over what to say. ‘I’ve not told mine yet.’

Laurie had guessed that from the lack of call from Dan’s mum, Barbara. They got on very well and Barbara had always, in a benign way, treated Laurie as Dan’s PA and hotline to his psyche, as well as his diary. Yeah, good luck with that from now on.

‘I’ve found a flat,’ he said. ‘Quite central. I can move in next week.’ He gulped and rushed on. ‘I know this sounds really soon and that I’d had it lined up but I honestly didn’t. I was on Rightmove yesterday afternoon and it just came up and when I called the agent they said I could pop round this morning. It’s not great but it’ll do for now.’ He trailed off, his cheeks flushed with the exercise and – hopefully – mortification at being so evidently eager to see the back of her.

‘Oh. Good?’ Laurie said. She didn’t know what note to strike, in the teeth of total rejection. She’d always had this knack with Dan, she could joke him out of any temper, persuade him when no one else could. ‘He’s proper silly for you,’ a friend of his once said.

Now she felt as if anything she said would be either pathetic or annoying; she could hear it become one or the other to him as soon as it left her mouth. All the usual doors, her ways in, had been bricked up.

‘I’m going to keep paying the mortgage here for the time being. Give you a grace period so you can decide … what you want to do.’

‘Thanks,’ Laurie said, flatly, because no way was she going to be more fulsome than that. Dan’s larger salary came with a ton of stress at times, but had its uses. She’d have to remortgage herself up to her eyeballs and eBay everything that wasn’t nailed to the floor. Losing Dan and her home felt insurmountable.

‘I’m going to get fish and chips for dinner tonight, want some?’ Dan added, and Laurie shook her head. The rest of the bottle of red in the kitchen would be more effective on an empty stomach. She noticed Dan’s appetite was fine.

‘When do we tell everyone at work?’ she said. They’d mutually avoided this pressing question yesterday, but Laurie knew her office mate, Bharat, would sniff it out in days.

They’d be a week-long scandal, with the news cycle moving into a different phase day by day. ‘Have you heard?’ on Monday, ‘Was he playing away?’ on Tuesday, ‘Was she playing away?’ on Wednesday, ‘I saw them arguing outside the Arndale last Christmas, the writing was on the wall’ fib dropped in as a lump of red meat to keep it going on Thursday. ‘When is it OK to ask either one on a date?’ nailed on by Friday, because Salter & Rowson was an absolute sin bin. There was a lot of adrenaline involved in their work at times, which was dampened by after hours booze. Add a steady influx of people aged twenty to forty joining or interning, and you had a recipe for a lot of flirting and more.

It was a shame this had happened now, just when the Jamie-Eve gossip could have been a useful distraction. But there was no way a furtive bunk-up, even a specifically verboten one, was going to trump the break-up of the firm’s most prominent couple. And Laurie wouldn’t have dobbed Jamie in either. She wasn’t ruthless.

Dan leaned on the wall and sighed. ‘Shall we not? For the time being? I can’t face all the bullshit. I can’t see how they’d find out otherwise. It’s not like I’m going to put it on Facebook and you’re hardly ever on there.’

‘Yeah. OK,’ Laurie said. They both wanted to wait for a time it’d matter less, though right now Laurie couldn’t imagine when that might be.

‘And my Dad’s got married.’

‘No way!’ Dan’s eyes lit up. He officially disapproved of Laurie’s dad in order to stay on the right side of history – and of Laurie and her mum – but she’d always sensed Dan had a soft spot. ‘To, what was her name, Nicola?’

‘Yeah. Some party happening here. I’m a bridesmaid.’

Barely true, but she wanted Dan to picture her in a dress, in a spotlight, in a glamorous context with scallywag dad, whom he sneakingly admired.

‘Ah. Nice.’ Dan looked briefly sad and ashamed as obviously, he’d not be there. ‘Never thought your dad would settle down.’

‘People surprise you,’ Laurie shrugged, and Dan looked awkward and then blank at this, muttering he needed a shower.

As Dan passed her on the stairs and his bathroom-puttering noises started, Laurie leaned her head against the bannisters, too spent to imagine moving for the moment. When they passed thirty, as far as their peer group were concerned, Dan and Laurie tying the knot was a done deal. If they weren’t thinking about it themselves, they weren’t allowed to forget it.

From acquaintances who’d drunkenly exhort, ‘You next! You next!’ at one of the scores of weddings they attended a year, to the open pleas from Dan’s mum to give her an excuse to go to Cardiff for a day of outfit shopping (the best reason for lifetime commitment: a mint lace Phase Eight shift dress and pheasant feather fascinator), to friends who told them, once they’d seen off bottles of wine over dinner, that Dan and Laurie would have the best wedding ever, come on come ON do it, you selfish sods.

Laurie always deflected with a joke about her not being keen what with being a lawyer, and seeing a lot of divorce paperwork, but eventually that dodge wore thin. Dan referred to Laurie as ‘the missus’ and ‘the wife’, leading newer friends to think they were married.

It had always seemed a case of when, not if. Laurie had vaguely expected a ring box to appear, but it never did: should she have been pushing the issue?

The where’s the wedding??!!! noise hit a peak around thirty-three. Having skirted around it, after news of another friend’s engagement, they discussed it directly over hangover cure fried egg sandwiches of a Saturday morning.

‘Do you not think it’s much more romantic to not be married?’ Dan said. ‘If you’re together when there’s no practical ties, it’s really real.’ He was indistinct through a mouthful of Hovis. ‘Realer than when you’ve locked yourself into a governmental contract. We of all people know that legal stuff means nowt in terms of how much you love each other.’

Laurie made a sceptical face.

‘We have no “ties” … except the joint mortgage, every stick of the furniture, and the car?’

‘I’m saying, married people stay when it’s rough because they made this solemn promise in front of everyone they know, and they don’t want to feel stupid, and divorce is a big deal. A big, expensive, arduous deal. As you say, you end up having the wagon wheel coffee table arguments over stuff for the sake of it, like in When Harry Met Sally. There’s the social shame and failure factor. People like us stay together when it’s rough out of pure love. Our commitment doesn’t need no vicar, baby.’

With his scruffy hair, sweet expression and expensive striped T-shirt, Dan looked the very advertiser’s image of the twenty-first century Guy You Settle Down With. Laurie grinned back.

‘So … what you’re saying is, there will be no weddings for you, Dan Price? Or, by extension, me? The Price-Watkinsons will never be. The Pratkinsons.’

He wiped his mouth with a piece of kitchen towel. ‘Ugh we’d never double barrel no matter what, right?’

Laurie mock wailed. ‘No huge dress for me!’

‘I dunno. Never say never? But not a priority right now?’

Laurie thought on it. She sensed it was there for her if she demanded it. She was neither wedding wild nor wedding averse. They’d been together since they were eighteen, they’d never needed a rush in them. Plus, it’d be nice not to have to find fifteen grand down the back of the sofa, there was plenty needing doing in the house. She smiled, shrugged, nodded.

‘Yeah, see how it goes.’

Emily always told Dan he was lucky to have such an easygoing, un-nagging girlfriend and Dan would roll his eyes and say: ‘You should see her with the pencil dobber in IKEA,’ but at that moment Laurie felt Emily’s praise was justified and she thought, looking at his warm that’s my girl smile, so did Dan.

And it was only now, listening to the shower thundering upstairs, that Laurie realised that she’d missed the giant glaring warning sign in what Dan had said.

Yes, staying together out of love, not paperwork, was romantic. But if you flipped it round, he was also saying marrying made it too difficult to leave.

Three days later, Laurie got a packet of seedlings for colourful hollyhocks in a card with a Renoir painting, and her mum’s unusual sloping script inside, read: ‘To new beginnings. Love, Mum.’ Laurie cried: this meant her mum had fretted on their conversation, it was her way of making amends. Maybe her mum hadn’t trashed Dan, had been upbeat on purpose – to make it clear this wasn’t history repeating, that Dan wasn’t her father and Laurie wouldn’t go through what she did.

Laurie had no faith anymore. As a lifelong believer in The One, in monogamous fidelity to the person who your heart told you was right for you, she was suddenly an atheist. If Dan wasn’t to be trusted, who could be?

In the years ahead, she knew plenty of people would tell her to be open to commitment again, to true love: that fresh starts were possible and it would be different this time. She knew she would smile and nod, and not agree with a word of it.

7

Two months and two weeks later

‘Can I come round?’

Laurie answered Dan’s call while she was walking to the tram after work, as Manchester’s late autumn, early winter temperature felt like it was stripping the skin from her face. She loved her city, but it wasn’t so hospitable in November.

It had not been an easy time. Ten weeks since the split, and Laurie felt almost as distraught as she did the day Dan left. Whenever their paths crossed at work, they had to chat vaguely normally so as not to arouse suspicion, because no one had figured it out yet. And as Laurie couldn’t bear the idea of their relationship being picked apart, she hadn’t done anything about it. It wasn’t a sensible thing to be doing, as grown-ups, not now they were living apart: they needed to face it. They’d also managed to keep it a secret from the rest of their Chorlton friendship group by pleading prior commitments to a few events, or in a couple of cases, attending singularly and lying through their teeth. But she couldn’t – wouldn’t – be the one to break the deadlock, as she hoped against hope they’d simply never need to tell everyone about this blip. She hoped the fact Dan didn’t want it known was a sign.

Laurie was no closer to understanding what the hell had happened. What did she do wrong? She couldn’t stop asking that.

Tracing the steps by which Dan fell out of love with her was excruciating and yet she guessed she had to do it, or be fated to repeat it.

Her only conclusion was that a distance must have developed between them, so slowly as to be imperceptible, so small as to be overlooked. And it had gradually lengthened.

Of course, the one person she had told, next to her mum, was Emily, ten days after the fact, who’d unexpectedly burst into tears for her. They’d been sitting in a cheapo basement dim sum bar under harsh strip lighting, a place that was usually quiet midweek. Laurie had asked for a table right at the back so she could heave and whimper without too many curious looks.

After hearing the details of Emily’s most recent work trip, a jaunt to Miami for a tooth-whitening brand with soulless corporate wonks, Laurie steeled herself and cleared her throat.

‘Em, I have something to tell you.’

Emily’s gaze snapped up from raking over the noodles section. Her hand immediately shot out and grabbed Laurie’s wrist tightly. Then her eyes moved to Laurie’s wine and her expression was more quizzical.

‘Oh God! Not that,’ Laurie said. ‘Nope. I’m safe to drink.’

She took a deep breath. ‘Dan and I have split up. He’s left me. Not really sure why.’

Emily didn’t react. She almost shrugged, and did a small double-take. ‘You’re kidding? This is a wind-up. Why would you do that?’

‘No. One hundred per cent true. It’s over. We’re over.’

‘What? You’re serious?’

‘I’m serious. Over. I am single.’

Laurie was trying that phrase out. It sounded a crazy reach, while being hard fact.

‘He’s finished with you?’

‘Yes. He has finished with me. We are separated.’

Laurie noticed that someone ‘finishing’ with someone else was such savage language. They cancelled you. You are over. Your use has been exhausted.

‘Laurie, are you being serious? Not a break? You’ve split up?’

‘Yes.’

Laurie was holding it together better than she expected. Then Emily’s eyes filled up and Laurie said, ‘oh God, don’t cry,’ her voice cracking, as beige lines streaked rivers through Emily’s foundation.

‘Sorry, sorry,’ Emily gasped, ‘I— can’t believe it. It can’t be real? He’s having a moment or something.’

That immediate understanding from her closest friend had been the straw to break the stoic camel’s back, and Laurie and Emily had wept together until the waitress slapped two large glasses of wine down on their table, muttering, ‘On the house,’ before hastily beating a retreat. Here’s to sisterhood.

‘Why? Has he had some sort of stroke?’ Emily said, when she got her breath back.

Laurie put both palms up in a ‘fuck knows’ gesture and felt what a comfort her best friend was. She’d been there from the start, since Laurie and Dan’s Fresher’s Week meet-cute. She was completely invested; Laurie didn’t have to explain the preceding eight seasons for her to be blown away at the finale. Finale, or mid-season hiatus?

‘He says he doesn’t feel it, us, anymore. The night we’d been out in The Refuge, afterwards he was waiting up for me, and it came out. He’d been thinking about leaving for a while. Which you know, is fantastic to hear.’ She paused. ‘We’d been talking about coming off the pill.’

Emily winced.

‘Ohhhh so it’s fear of fatherhood? Growing up, responsibility?’

‘I asked that, and also said that we could rethink having kids, but no. He’s decided our life makes him feel like he’s on a fast track to death and has to go rediscover himself.’

‘Could it be a trial separation? Putting you two on pause, while he twats about off the grid in Goa, like he’s Jason Bourne? God, whenever I forget why I hate men, one of them reminds me.’

Laurie laughed hollowly.

‘Nope, I doubt it.’ She couldn’t admit to any lingering hope she felt, it was too tragic. Other parties needed to fully accept it, on her behalf. ‘He’s found a flat. We’re going to work out the money in the next few weeks. Then that’s us done, I guess. He’s offered to trade the car for furniture so there will be no wagon wheel coffee table haggling.’ Laurie’s throat seized up again.

‘I don’t know what to say, Loz. He loves you to bits, I know he does. He worships the ground you walk on, he always has done. This is madness. This is an episode.’

Laurie nodded. ‘Yeah. It doesn’t make sense. The Didn’t See It Coming, At All, factor is fucking with my head really badly.’ She lapsed into silence to staunch the tears.

‘Well, tonight just got even drunker,’ Emily said eventually, catching the waitress’s eye to signal another round.

In the end they’d finished the night in an even grottier bar down the street, two bottles of wine down and one heavy tip for the poor waitress who’d had to clear up their snotty tissues. The memory of the morning after still made Laurie wince today. Anyone who moaned about hangovers in their twenties should be forced to suffer a hangover from your late thirties.

The worst of it was, after the fireworks of Dan’s declaration that he was leaving and that first shock of grief, the awful banality of ‘getting on with it’ was its own horror.

‘Never mind the fact I’ll be expected to do monkey sex in swings, like they have in Nine Inch Nails songs, who will I text boring couple stuff to, ever again? Like what shall we have for tea, pre-pay day? Who will I ask if they want “baked potatoes and picky bits” on a cheap Monday?’ Laurie had demanded of Emily. (‘Lots of people like baked potatoes!’ she had promised.)

It was the end of another night of boozy mourning, and as they waited on the corner for their Ubers to appear, Emily had nudged Laurie (probably slightly harder than intended).

‘Laurie, you know you’re going to get the Sad Dads sliding into your DMs any day now.’

Laurie barked a laugh. ‘Doubt it. Don’t assume that how men are with you, is how they are with me.’

‘Seriously, they’re shameless. Absolutely no idea of respectful pause, straight in there: hey I hear you’re back on the market, allow me to place the initial bid. I’ve heard this lament from the girls at work so many times. They all think they’re catches and they’re often still with their wives. They think you’ll be desperately grateful for any cheer up cock they can offer.’ Emily cupped her hands into a bowl shape: ‘Please, sir, can I have some more?’

When they’d finished sniggering, Laurie had said, ‘I don’t get that sort of attention. The attention you do.’

She felt so wholly unprepared to be back out there. As Emily pointed out, she’d never really been there.

‘Because a huge part of getting that sort of attention is signalling you’re up for that sort of attention.’

‘Hah. I can’t even think about it. I can’t imagine ever being any good for anyone ever again. I think Dan’s ruined me.’

‘OK, but don’t rule out the healing power of a purely physical fling. Sometimes, you don’t need face-holding I Love You intense meaningful sex. What you need is some hench dipshit with superior body strength to pin your wrists above your head and pound you with a virile meanness.’

Laurie groaned while Emily grinned triumphantly.

‘Did you briefly forget your pain?’

‘Absolutely,’ Laurie said, leaning her head on Emily’s tiny shoulder. She had the proportions of a malnourished Hardy heroine on a windswept moor. She was definitely a heroine though, never a victim.

This call from Dan was officially the first time he’d reached out to her to ‘talk’ in ten weeks though. Could it be … could he be …? No, squelch that thought.

‘Yeah. What, to pick stuff up? You still have your key?’ she said to Dan, hedging her bets, though she knew ‘picking up some stuff’ was a text, not a phone call.

‘No, I’m coming round to see you.’

‘What for?’

‘I need to talk to you.’

Laurie breathed in and breathed out. Right. She’d known this would happen. Almost from the first moment Dan had said he was going. Yet it coming true so soon still took her aback.

‘What about?’

‘I think it’s best said face to face. Is seven alright?’

Laurie’s heartbeat sped up, because she could hear the strain behind the casual delivery. Dan was scared. She felt oddly scared herself. What did she have to be frightened about? It was for her to weigh her answer.

She already knew what her answer would be. So did he.

They would have to creak through the formalities of his grovelling apologies, his prepared explanations for how he could’ve got it so catastrophically wrong, his vigorous heartfelt promises that he’d never mess her around again. The pledge to live in the dog house at first, to do better, to try harder. (That’s a point, there’d never be a better time to get that Lurcher she’d unsuccessfully campaigned for.) Tentatively working out how penitent he was prepared to be – did they raise the issue of Laurie being on or off the pill? Did Laurie want to proceed directly to parenthood with a man who’d left her on her own, while he worked through his fear of death in a sterile semi-furnished place near Whitworth Street?

No, absolutely not. He could move back into the spare room and they could take it slowly. Laurie was still in love with Dan but she was also realistic enough to know they would have a different relationship after this. It was a large wound. It had left her unable to trust him. It would take years to recover, fully. It would take years before, if he said they needed to talk, she wouldn’t be expecting rejection and a mad flit again.

She got in and put the lights on, tried to figure out what outfit she could change into that would make her look attractive enough to suit her dignity but not like she’d dressed up for him. In the end she went for jeans and a hip-length jersey top she’d not worn in a while that showed off her more prominent collarbones, and a dark shade of lipstick, from a worn down nub of an Estée Lauder matte long-lasting she rummaged for in the bathroom cupboards. Then she rubbed it off with loo roll and grimaced at herself. She wasn’t going to look like she’d been yearning and praying for this moment, even if she had been.

Dan knocked on the door dead on seven p.m. and Laurie felt his nerves in this uncharacteristic punctuality. When you’re so far on the back foot that you don’t want any other single thing counting against you.

He was in a new jacket, a sage green padded puffy thing she’d have told him not to buy, and she vaguely wondered if he’d dressed up for this, too. Him having clothes she’d not seen jangled her. It wasn’t how she pictured him, in the intervening time. She’d been wondering if she could stand to turn him down, to make him spend longer in purgatory. The fact that she felt undermined by his buying winterwear without consulting her told her she didn’t have anything like the strength.

Dan sat down and refused Laurie’s offer a beer – ‘I’m driving’ – which she took to be him signalling that he didn’t expect a yes, wasn’t being complacent.

‘Thanks for seeing me,’ he said, and Laurie frowned.

‘A bit formal? Are we communicating as lawyers now?’

He shifted his weight and coughed and didn’t make any cautious gesture of amusement.

A tiny amount of dread entered Laurie’s body. She couldn’t read him.

‘Was it to say something in particular?’

‘Yes … OK. God. There’s no good way of saying this.’

Using that line again? Jesus. She remained impassive. He didn’t deserve the smallest amount of help and she’d hate herself if she gave it to him. It was bad enough she was taking him back.

‘I wanted you to be the first to know.’

Laurie’s palms were suddenly slick, and she could feel the pulse in her wrist. I wanted you to be the first to know was a REALLY fucking odd introduction to ‘I made a mistake.’ If not that, what?

Was he off to find himself in the Outback, despite her mockery over his poor globetrotter credentials? Was she going to have to grit her teeth through Christmas, desperately hoping he’d not encountered any misfortune while hiking through remote dusty areas of the planet? Desperately scanning his Facebook, hoping he’d post a proof of life photo, looking tanned and craggy?

‘First to know what?’ Laurie said finally, into the agonising silence, during which Dan’s face was etched with grave worry.

‘I’ve met someone.’

The phrase smashed into the living room like a meteorite, taking out the fireplace, leaving a smoking crater. She physically recoiled. He’d come here to say he was with another woman? Already? Laurie had not, for a single second, entertained that this was what happened next. Not this fast. He’d only just moved out? How was this possible?

‘Met someone?’ she repeated incredulously, staring at the pre-faded, pretend-worn knees on his indigo jeans, clothes which she realised she’d not seen before either.

Dan nodded.

‘You’re together, like a couple?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ve slept with someone?’

This was patently a stupid question, a teenager’s question, given he’d called them a couple. Laurie was so far beyond dealing with this that she had no process between the rapid firing in her brain, and her mouth.

Dan twisted his hands together and said:

‘Yes.’

Laurie wanted to scream, or sob. Until now, his leaving was only words, a temporary absence, and a three-month lease. A few patching-up conversations with their parents, and Emily, a year that you ‘put behind you’ when you raised a glass at the New Year bells.

Now it was definitive, he’d done something he couldn’t undo. Laurie steadied herself, with great effort, and asked, ‘But – we’ve barely split up? It’s been weeks?’

Dan didn’t reply to this, but carried on. ‘She’s called Megan. She works at Rawlings.’

Giving her a name made it real. Laurie tried to quell her spinning stomach, and racing mind, to focus. There would be time to fall apart later. Lots of it. Rawlings, a rival firm. Someone he’d met in court.

‘And you started seeing her, when?’ she said, with restrained force.

Dan twisted his hands some more.

‘Few weeks back. A month or so.’

‘But you knew her already?’

‘Yeah. A year, year and a half.’

‘Did I really mean this little? That you could move on this quick?’

He was silent.

‘What the FUCK, Dan? What?! Please explain this because I’m not close to understanding how you could be this ruthless?’

‘It’s not something I planned,’ he said, eventually. ‘I think … the end is more recent for you than for me, in that I wasn’t happy for a while.’

‘Oh God, so we’re back to the idea you’d been miserable for ages?’

‘No, not ages!’

It was over. He was with someone else. Yet Laurie was already asking herself how they came back from this. There is no ‘they’, a voice told her. There is ‘them’ now. Have you gone deaf?

‘You fucking sadist,’ Laurie said, shrill but hoarse. ‘Who are you? I don’t even know. I really don’t even know.’

Don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry, Laurie told herself. Not yet, though it felt like she had psychically collapsed in on herself, like a dying star.

She had an enemy, a nemesis, a rival she never knew about, who had climbed into bed with her long-term partner when, somehow, Laurie wasn’t looking.

Laurie hadn’t for a second considered there was anyone else. When she asked Dan that question, that first night, it was more to embarrass him than anything. To point up the seriousness and the stakes of his actions to him. Laurie was braced to receive Dan back, and now this?

And when exactly did it start?

She held up a trembling hand and counted off on her fingers. ‘You’ve been gone ten weeks, Dan, and you got together with her a few weeks back. And she’s already important enough for you to come round and tell me about? Something’s not quite adding up, is it? This is Concorde speed.’

Dan blew air out. He looked like his jaw had locked, that he was finding it difficult to speak. He couldn’t look at her. ‘Obviously we were friends, before. Only friends though, nothing happened.’

‘But you knew that you were going to get together with her when you left me, didn’t you?’

Dan was vigorously shaking his head but Laurie knew the bones of him, she’d known him half her life. She could see in his eyes that he was lying. Never mind that, she could see on the bare timeline here, he was lying. No intuition needed, that’s how staggeringly obvious his cruelty was.

‘Nothing happened before …’

‘Don’t try to fucking out-lawyer a lawyer, Dan. “Nothing happened” – meaning you waited to have sex until you told me you were leaving me. But she was right there, lined up. You left me for her.’

He shook his head but again Laurie could see he had no words, without completely perjuring himself.

Laurie still loved Dan, deeply, and yet with the excruciating pain he was inflicting on her, she felt the banal truism of there being a fine line between love and hate.

Laurie knew that most people were murdered by someone they knew; she’d stood up in court and argued for the killers’ bail applications, while they wept not only about their fate, but about their loss.

In this moment, she understood why.

8

Laurie suppressed her homicidal impulses and tried to summon every ounce of someone who thought strategy for a living to handle this, to not let Dan off the hook by putting her feelings first.

‘So you were obviously really fucking heartbroken. How long did you wait to climb into bed, after the Pickfords van left here? Days? Hours?’

‘I was. I am. She has nothing to do with us, with what happened.’

‘Oh what SHIT! You’d fallen for someone else, you dumped me for her, but you’ve convinced yourself she is incidental?! This is beyond insulting. It’s downright fucking ludicrous.’

‘Laurie, if we were right, if things had been OK, Megan wouldn’t have happened. The cause and effect is the wrong way round if you think Megan split us up.’

Laurie gasped. ‘These are mental gymnastics, contortions, so you don’t have to feel guilty. Basically it’s my fault, for not making you happy enough?’

‘No! Relationships fail all the time, I’m not saying it’s your fault. This is what has happened, that’s all, and I know it’s shitty for you, I know that.’

‘Yeah relationships are especially likely to fail when one person has started an affair. You know, that thing we promised we’d never ever do to one another. Remember that?’

‘It wasn’t an affair,’ Dan said, grimly, but to Laurie’s ears, without the necessary conviction.

‘Being on a promise with someone is an affair, Dan.’

He said nothing, because she had nailed it. The utter emptiness of this argumentative victory. In fact victory was the wrong word. Sour satisfaction at best, except she felt no satisfaction whatsoever.

‘You had an affair and you won’t even do the decent thing and say as much, call it what it is, in case it makes you feel bad.’

‘I feel awful.’

Laurie had to tell herself to breathe before she could speak again.

‘I begged you to tell me what was going on, I begged you. And you gave me a load of WANK about finding yourself. You had met some other woman you wanted to bang, and you spun me this line about your existential angst?!’

‘All of that was true!’ Dan said, more vehement now, but Laurie knew he was only vehement in the way anyone in a corner was, with a near-hyperventilating woman shouting unwanted truths at him.

‘Was it too obvious, too LAMESTREAM, to admit you’d found a better option, like a million other boring ageing men who can’t keep it in their pants? Is she twenty-five, this mysterious someone who doesn’t make you feel trapped, and like there’s nothing worthwhile between here and death?’

‘Thirty-five.’

Instantly, despite her fury and humiliation at the idea some lissom ingénue had stolen Dan’s affections, this was worse – Laurie hadn’t been traded for a younger model. She’d lost to a woman of her own age, or thereabouts. It was a fair fight, this boxing match, they were in the same weight category with similar length of training. Laurie was simply too boring.

That fear was lurking behind it all, she knew that. Domesticated, exemplary employee, devoted to Dan, ticked so many boxes – but dull. Someone who could make you feel like life held no surprises anymore. Right now, she wanted to surprise the shit out of him, but the only ways she could think of involved petrol and matches.

‘I promise you, that’s not how it was. I was already unhappy, the thing with Megan came right out of the blue …’

‘This is such bullshit!’ Laurie shouted, reacting to hearing her name again like she’d been tasered. ‘Your whole thing was oh no I hate this conventional, being tied down, settled monogamy, it’s not for me, maybe I will go backpacking. And your first big gesture of freedom is getting another girlfriend?! Another lawyer, at that?’

Laurie had to pause for breath but she knew she was dying for Dan to say, she’s not my girlfriend, it’s a fling. He didn’t of course – if she was a fling, why would he be here? Which meant Laurie was still gambling, even now, they could come back from this.

Being confronted with how little you could accept from someone, when your heart was on the line and you were being tortured, was awful. Laurie hated herself too, in that very moment.

‘I don’t know what you expect me to say, Dan. Great, crack on, hope the sex is amazing,’ Laurie spat. ‘Why even tell me?’

There was a pause, as this had been a rhetorical question, and yet Laurie realised she’d hit on a very good point. Why had he told her? Fear of Salter & Rowson’s Stasi seeing them, perhaps? Except … this was a very ballsy move, nevertheless. Dan was the man who even after ten weeks had yet to tell his parents they’d separated (Laurie had stopped answering the house phone in case it was his mother calling); he didn’t go looking for trouble or difficulty, to put it mildly.

Dan said, haltingly, ‘Because …’

‘Because …?’

Another silence. ‘Because you deserved to hear from me’ or some other platitude wouldn’t warrant this hesitation, and the advocate in Laurie asked: why has he told you now? Why not wait a few months and look less of a bastard? Her whole body was coated in a thin layer of freezing sweat.

‘Oh, fuck … I have absolutely no idea how to say this and it’s still not real to me. I have no idea how to say this, no idea …’

He was gabbling.

Through a cascade of her tears, Laurie said, ‘What the fuck? What more is there? Are you getting married or something?’ Her heart was racing.

‘She’s pregnant,’ Dan heaved out. He buried his face in his hands, almost as a defensive move, as if he thought Laurie might physically attack him.

Time stood still for a moment, time in this world that Laurie didn’t understand or want to live in any more. Pregnant. Pregnant. It echoed through their thoughtfully decorated, tasteful, affluent Chorltonite couldn’t-stand-it-for-a-day-longer-could-you-Dan living room.

‘She’s …? What? It’s yours?’

Dan nodded and Laurie couldn’t absorb what he was saying.

If she’d been shocked before, it didn’t compare to this state of total standstill. Laurie simply stared. She couldn’t be. What? What?

‘It was an accident, she said she was on the pill. But she wants to keep it. Fuck, Laurie, I didn’t plan for this, I promise you, it’s happened out of nowhere.’

‘How …?’ No not how, she knew how. Don’t be sick, not yet. ‘When?’

‘Two months.’

‘You’ve only been moved out a little over two months. You jumped right into her bed?’

Dan stared at her levelly, and emptily, and Laurie snorted, a watery snort of horror and disgust and disbelief.

‘You’re staying with her, and you’re having a baby?’ Laurie said. Dan nodded and she saw his tears and she wanted to punch him in the face. ‘You told me you didn’t want kids?’

He was grey-white. ‘I didn’t. I don’t. It’s an accident.’

Enough. Laurie stood up, grabbed Dan by the shoulders and manhandled him out of the room and into the hallway, shrieking, ‘Get out! Get the fuck out!’ while Dan made useless vague noises of objection.

‘You do this to me, you tell me you don’t want kids, and you do this?!’

She pushed Dan out of the door so hard he stumbled and nearly fell over. Laurie didn’t care if the whole street heard, or saw.

She slammed the door with much force and noisily slid the bolt. It wasn’t exactly likely he’d risk his life by using his key to get back in, but it felt the right thing to do all the same. Final.

She leaned her head on the glass for just a moment and then turned and raced up to the bathroom, vomiting into the loo, retching again and again until there was nothing left, then slumped back down on the floor. She had a good view of the underside of the bowl and the whiskers that coated it – Dan was gone forever, but still here recently enough she’d still be cleaning up his mess. Mess? Devastation.

Baby. He was having a child, with someone called Megan. He had been having an affair for some time, that was certain, emotionally if not physically. He’d celebrated his first nights of freedom by impregnating someone else. Laurie was going to have to recite these utterly harrowing, bizarre facts until they sunk in for her.

He was going to be a dad. But not with her. An image sprung into her head, a pink turnip-faced newborn with froggy eyes, wrapped in a cocoon of white crochet blanket eyes, Dan cradling it, looking up at the camera with the shell shocked, Cloud Nine expression of an hours-old parent. He would do this, without her. She would not be the mother of his children. He would not be the father of hers.

Hers. Hah.

Laurie made a noise that sounded peculiar to her, in the quiet of the house, a kind of strangled whimper, shading into an animalistic howl. It echoed, unanswered, in her empty house.

9

Laurie rang in sick the next morning. It helped her voice was barely a croak as she spoke to the receptionist to claim upset stomach and the sweats.

‘Ugh yeah you sound like shit, don’t come in and give it to us,’ said Jan on reception, who no one had ever confused with a bleeding heart liberal.

Laurie crawled back to bed and lay staring at the white star-shaped ceiling lampshade as the hours drifted past.

She felt certain Dan had gone in to the office because 1. he’d have guessed she might not, and they couldn’t both be off without questions and a cover story about food poisoning or something, which was a falsehood too far now, and 2. he wasn’t shattered by what was happening.

The only communication she received was an email from hyper efficient Jamie Carter: Hey sorry to bother when you’re on your sick bed but do you know anything about the adjournment in the Cheetham Hill robbery?

Oh, go swivel. ‘If ambition was hair, he’d be the Yeti,’ as Bharat once said.

Laurie pretended to herself she was ill and therefore allowed herself to doze.

When she rejoined consciousness for a spell in the last afternoon, she had a text from Bharat – WTAF, YOU ARE NEVER ILL! It was Di’s baking day so I saved you a jam tart, but a fly got stuck in it xxx – and another, from Dan.

Hi. Hope you’re OK. Can’t imagine how shit you feel Laurie and I’m so so so sorry, I never meant for any of this to happen. I don’t know what to say. Call me if you want to, even if it’s to shout at me.

When Dan dropped his initial bombshell – she couldn’t think of that partial account of a conversation now without clutching her chest, like she might have a coronary with the rage – she’d wondered if he’d become an arsehole. She now knew the answer to that. Or if he’d not become one, maybe he’d always had this tendency, it had got worse, and somehow Laurie had blinded herself to it.

‘Call me if you want to, even to shout at me’ was revolting – the preening self-regard and false big-hearted performative good guyness of go on, I know I deserve it, once you’d swaggered clear of the blast.

He’d very likely robbed Laurie of her chance of parenthood herself with his indecision, walked out the door and immediately inseminated someone else. She hadn’t even begun the work of working out how upset she was about her odds of motherhood being dramatically slashed, after a lifetime of thinking it was there for her at the time of her choosing.

Dan hadn’t been sure about taking this huge step with the love of his life, but with Megan, it had happened instantly. He gave to her what he’d withheld from the woman who’d washed his socks for the last decade.

Dan had said it wasn’t planned, but Laurie was at the stage where, if Dan said it was raining, she’d go outside to check.

The clock on Laurie’s bedside table hit six. A whole day had floated by and she had barely registered it passing.

Six months or so ago, Dan had taken up running. Laurie had been pleased, even impressed. She was quite good at keeping fit, going to the gym, walking everywhere; Dan had been the one glued to the sofa with his hand stuck in a bag of Tangy Cheese Doritos.

She now saw that hobby for what it was – getting match fit for wrestling with an exciting new prospect. Spending hours pounding the streets, music blaring, not having to interact with his long-term girlfriend, while he plotted a fresh course. Beginning to break away.

They used to talk so openly, it was something they used to privately congratulate themselves on, even boast about to one another. How come they don’t discuss this stuff? they’d say in wonder about friends, shaking their heads. You’re my best friend as well as my girlfriend, why would I not? Dan used to say, at whatever laddish thing a friend had said he’d never tell his other half.

Dan was a great talker, Laurie was a talker and a good listener; when something had bothered one of them, it got dealt with up front.

That had subtly changed in the last couple of years, Laurie realised. What she called Dan’s moodiness – and it was moods, even sulks, certainly extended silences which she couldn’t and wasn’t invited to penetrate – was also a closing off and a closing down, putting up a forbidding wall around what was actually going on in his head.

At some point, he turned away from her, he made the decision that the solution to his problems didn’t lie in Laurie.

That was the promise you made when you fell head over heels in love, really, she thought. Not that you wouldn’t have problems, but that no problem would be the sort where you couldn’t find the solution, together.

On the third day of mourning, Laurie’s utter horror at the thought of knowing anything about Megan – simply saying the name in her head was like repeating a curse, hexing herself – turned on a sixpence.

Laurie suddenly had a gnawing hunger to see everything. It must be some part of the stages of grieving, or the shock receding. Your appetite returning after a sickness.

It was a Saturday, but time had ceased to have much meaning for Laurie, since the Wednesday night of the announcement. She wondered if she could get a doctor’s note to not go in to work next week, too.

With shaky hands and weak body – when did she last eat? She thought she recalled finding half a squashed Twix in her gym bag, yesterday lunchtime – Laurie hauled her laptop onto her knees on the sofa. She opened her rarely used Facebook page, and searched for Megan. The first name, fairly unusual, would surely reveal the likeliest suspect.

Nothing. Not in Dan’s friends, not in the friend’s lists of those she knew at Rawlings. Megan must be one of those rare people who didn’t use social media.

Unless … Laurie lay on her back and stared at the filigree of spider webs along the picture rail, the parts of a house you rarely paused long enough to inspect, when not laid prone, in the twilight land of the unwell. Unless.

Unless Megan had blocked her? It seemed aggressive, unfair – surely it was for Laurie to block Megan, in the proper way of things. But if you knew your new boyfriend had told his very-recent-ex long-term girlfriend you were pregnant, you’d know a very, very scorned woman was coming hurtling your way. Why would you leave any of your business open to it?

Laurie opened a browser again, but this time, set up a fresh Facebook profile using her Gmail address, instead of the old Yahoo one.

Laurie wouldn’t need to add any friends or signal the existence of the second account in any way, she could use it purely as a stalking tool.

Once it was active and she launched her investigations again, Laurie didn’t know what to hope for.

Confirming you’d been blocked was disconcerting enough when it was just someone you didn’t rub along with brilliantly well at work, let alone the woman who stole the love of your life and was pregnant with his child. But if she wasn’t blocked and Megan really was a twenty-first century Greta Garbo, Laurie’s burning need to know more would go unmet.

With a dull thud, as she clicked on Dan Price’s profile – his photo, a throwback picture of himself in fancy dress at university on the night he met Laurie, salt into wounds – and then again in his friends, Megan Mooney sprang up in front of her. Profile photo, a jokey one of Lucille Ball.

She was blocked. The bitch had blocked her, while camping here brazenly in Dan’s friends. Laurie swallowed back bile, literal, physical bile.

She took a deep breath and braced herself before diving in. Megan Mooney. She sounded like a secretary in a 1940s screwball, or the quiet mouse ‘by day’ alter ego of a Marvel superhero.

Laurie checked herself: she could do this without sobbing or screaming, breathed again, and clicked.

Megan had shared some JustGiving links – OH YOU LIKE SUPPORTING CHARITIES, DO YOU, LIKE A GOOD PERSON? – Laurie internally spasmed: she might not be ready for this experience, like a wobbly patient on a ward trying to walk too fast and doing themselves a mischief.

Would she ever be ready?

What was publicly available on Megan’s profile wasn’t very informative, and when Laurie was scrolling birthday wishes from two years ago (was Dan there? Not that she could find) she moved to the photo galleries.

They were generally of groups, but Laurie clicked and clicked until she saw enough of the pictures so she could spot which was Megan, by her ubiquity.

She couldn’t help it; her first response was to compare herself.

Megan was a redhead, nothing like Laurie physically, properly Lucozade ginger. Laurie remembered something about gingerism being a ‘recessive gene’ and couldn’t remember if that meant Dan’s child would be one.

Megan had close-set eyes, a strong nose, and an intimidating, rather than pretty face. Laurie was easily conventionally prettier. Laurie both knew this to be true straight away and yet simultaneously didn’t trust it, doubted it, and hated herself for this being such a necessary measure. Laurie had never been someone who’d traded on her looks. But, as an acerbic female colleague once said to her regards the length of her coupledom, you’ve never needed to.

And much like Megan’s age, Laurie moved from a split second of relief, to confusion and intimidation. If she wasn’t a dazzling beauty, then how could a woman whose powers of attraction she couldn’t immediately see do this to her? Dan wanted her more than he wanted Laurie, so any bargaining and comparing now was futile. Megan was clearly killer sexy to Dan, as she’d killed their relationship. Her powers of attraction had annihilated an eighteen-year history.

Further poking around revealed Megan was sporty and had an incredible figure, a near-concave stomach (that was about to change. Laurie hated herself for expanding the picture with forefinger and thumb, staring morbidly at the space where Dan’s child was) and legs that went on for days.

If she needed to feel physically inferior to understand this, then Megan’s physique could do it. Laurie had a twinge of political outrage – if she’d left Dan for another man, was it likely he’d spend any time studying his rival’s calf muscles for clues as to why she’d strayed? Nope.

Here was Megan at the end of a 10k run for breast cancer research, everyone pink faced in their Lycra gear, linked arms and holding their medals up to the camera. Laurie burned at the grinning women flanking her, the sense of sisterhood in their female cause – some for me would’ve been nice, eh, ‘Megs’? (She was Megs on her tabard.) Hell hath no fury.

She came to the end of what she was able to see. The Add Friend button taunted her and she closed the window, a dampness gathering on her brow. Laurie fantasised the catastrophe of hitting it by mistake, Megan seeing the request.

Hah, Laurie was worried about that gaffe, when Megan had a foetus half made of Dan’s DNA to explain?

She shut her laptop and lay down on the sofa again.

There had been a secretive alternative universe, a budding romance, alongside Laurie’s normal life with Dan, the two timelines eventually to intersect in the most explosive way.

Laurie knew how it must have been steadily built, for them to be ready to leap into bed together as soon as the Getting Rid Of Laurie admin was complete. (Assuming that it was true they waited, of course.)

Shared glances, momentary, supposedly insignificant touching of hands, or knees, under tables. Innocent coffees after court, in which perhaps a little too much was said about their respective private lives. Rueful humour, that suggested maybe it wasn’t a bed of roses. Tiny hints that you might be open to alternatives. Texts at the weekend, only light jokes, but making it clear you were thinking about someone out of hours. Testing responses, plausible deniability always there if you got nothing back.

Knowing this had happened felt to Laurie like thinking you were healthy, going about your normal days, and not knowing a fatal cancer was flowering somewhere, unfelt, in an organ. Had Megan cheated on her partner, too? There was no sign of a significant other, but Laurie could only see a dozen or so images.

When did it start? How did it start? They were questions to which Laurie would very likely never know answers.

In a few short years, or even months, it would be past the point anyone would even think it was her business. A page had turned for Dan, and Laurie was now part of his past tense. Laurie was someone who’d appear fleetingly in shadowy form in dinner party anecdotes. Dan dandling an infant on his lap: Oh Santorini? Yeah I went there with my ex. Eighteen years, and she’d be worth a two-letter descriptor.

While Laurie did some exhausted sobbing in lieu of being willing to throw her nice crockery around the room, a clear thought solidified in her mind: I am not only a sad woman. I am a bloody lawyer. I want to know when it started. I want to get this bastard for provable infidelity, even if not sexual. So there will be evidence. THINK.

Megan was into running. And Dan had taken up running, which Laurie was sure wasn’t a coincidence. When he ran, he listened to music. She was confident he was running and not off on any rendezvous, as he regularly came back a beetroot shade and showed her his route on Runkeeper, before dramatically collapsing and saying Laurie best fetch him a medicinal beer.

Laurie was rarely online, so the place he could interact with Megan was Facebook, and the topic they’d bond over was their stupid jogging. Running groups? Laurie used her old profile to check Dan’s activity. Nothing. He wasn’t the sort of person to be fair, the NIMBYs of Chorlton Community site drove him round the bend.

Music, though. Running. She’d glimpsed a playlist on his phone screen, as he wound the earphones round it.

A combination of her professional cunning and her instincts about Dan meant the answer came to her, in a second: they made running playlists together. She was sure of it. Dan used to give her endless ‘mix tapes’ when they were first going out, it was his kind of courtship. Song choices could covertly yet powerfully declare all kinds of things you’d never dare say outright.

Laurie opened her laptop, logged in to Spotify. She’d only ever had Dan’s user name for that, and she betted he thought she’d never check in, and if she did, wouldn’t know what she was looking at.

Well, she did now.

Laurie’s skin prickled with the successful detective ‘Gotcha!’ sensation, coupled with horror at seeing it laid out, as if she’d torn back the covers on writhing bodies.

Among Dan’s playlists, there was one made six months ago, called I Wanna Run 2 U. Nice wordplay, twat. There it was, halfway down: a song added by a different user, one calling herself meggymoon. Ugh, UGH.

The track was called ‘When Love Takes Over’.

Dan’s next was ‘Go Your Own Way’ by Fleetwood Mac. Another from meggymoon: ‘Not Afraid’. It was straight call and response of two people panting for each other; Laurie hardly needed to be a Bletchley code breaker.

Dan’s next: the Stones’ ‘Start Me Up’. Puke. Laurie was embarrassed for him.

It was a very modern way to transact cheating and yet it was an age-old dynamic – over caffeinated, adolescent excitement, egging each other on by degrees.

And hiding in plain sight, because if Laurie had queried this playlist, they would be a bunch of songs, and – DUH! – loads of songs are about sex and love, dummy. She wondered how Dan would’ve denied it. Or would he have broken down, used it as a chance to tell the truth? She’d never know.

Laurie picked up her phone, not in full control of herself, and texted Dan.

I know you were messing around with her six months back, I have the proof. I have no idea who you are anymore, and I don’t want to know.

Then she turned onto her side and went to sleep. When she briefly awoke, she had three messages in reply, and managed to delete them without reading them.

10

‘Laurie, I’ve had a science fiction film pitch from my cousin Munni. Listen to this …’

As Laurie took her seat on Monday morning, her office mates, Bharat and Di, were shriek-chortling at each other in a way that was both a reminder that life went on, and at the same time seemed to be happening behind a wall of glass.

Bharat’s eccentric cousin Munni in Leamington Spa was a regular source of amusement and delight to Bharat. Munni once tried to get himself nominated for a Pride of Britain award for karate chopping a shoplifter running away with a frozen chicken in Morrisons, and according to a horrified Bharat, dried his willy in the Dyson Airblade after a shower in the gym.

‘It is the year 2030 and scientists have found a cure for death. Good news, you’d think? No. Because now, with no one dying, there are too many people. So there are two choices: kill old people, or sterilise the young. War breaks out between the breeders and the geriatrics. At first, thanks to better strength, bone density and joint mobility, plus understanding smart phones, the youth prevail.’

Bharat paused to hunch double, laughing over his keyboard.

‘Poor Munni! Does he know you share his emails?’ Laurie said.

‘He’s sent it to the head of Paramount film studios! He can stand for a few people in Manchester to hear it too.’

Laurie switched her computer on, slung her bag down, unwound her scarf.

Bharat, a Sikh man of thirty-two with a frenetic social life and love of disco, and Di, a fifty-something divorcee who adored her Maine Coon cats and Ed Sheeran, were unlikely banter partners, and yet they were devoted to each other. It was practically a marriage.

Today, Laurie was painfully grateful for the background hubbub they’d created, as she wanted minimal scrutiny of what she’d done at the weekend. It was easy enough to lie, but harder to keep her emotions totally steady while she did so. It was hard not to appear as she was – hollowed out.

Her mum used to play Paul Simon’s Graceland on a loop, and Laurie kept thinking of the line about losing love being like a window into your heart. She wanted it shuttered. And she had to see him here, interact? The thought made her insides seize up.

It was with intense apprehension, aware that a longer absence would generate more interest, Laurie had come back into work today.

Only to find, thanks to a God with a sick sense of humour, Dan loitering outside at nine a.m., finishing a call with a client. It was harrowing, but better she faced him straight away, and without them being watched.

‘How are you?’ he said, looking, it had to be said, completely shit scared of her.

‘Fine,’ she replied, and marched past. Knowing her half stone weight loss, haunted baggy eyes and near palpable despair said different.

‘Laurie,’ Dan caught her arm, lowered his voice, ‘I said you had a stomach flu. People asked me.’

She gave a curt nod in response, because this wasn’t the time or place to be cutting or contemptuous, then pulled her arm away firmly and marched into the building.

Salter & Rowson was an old-fashioned law firm, a few streets away from Deansgate. It was a looming Victorian building housing criminal, civil and family departments, a brace of legal secretaries and four receptionists. Mr Salter, sixty-ish, and Rowson, fifty-something, had started the firm in the early 1980s when Salter still had hair and Rowson was still on his first wife and family.

A large portion of their business was legal aid. Laurie spent much time in the magistrates’ court defending individuals who Dan categorised as ‘toerags and scallies’. He was in civil, which as the name suggested, offered a slightly more stately pace. Laurie was old enough not to have to do the on call shifts, where she had to hack out at one in the morning.

The criminal department was the largest, and for reasons lost to the mists of time, when Laurie joined over ten years ago she was seated in a crappy adjunct office next to Bharat – litigation, specialising in medical negligence – and Diana, secretary to Bharat and anyone else in the vicinity.

She was eventually offered a move into criminal next door but declined: she’d already struck up a friendship with Bharat and Di.

Climbing the stairs that morning, the idea she and Dan could convincingly feign being on friendly terms had been ambitious before, and was now worthy of cousin Munni’s sci-fi. But Laurie had no fortitude for making major personal announcements. Did they leave the Other Woman and the rogue conception out of it, at first? How long would it take the office’s sleuths to uncover it, once the game was afoot? Even without the weekend’s trauma, it had been – count them – ten weeks now with no one getting a sniff at their break-up, but Laurie knew every day they were a day closer to inevitable discovery.

‘I’m going out on a limb and saying the “cure for death” idea’s probably been done, several times,’ Bharat said. ‘However, this could still hinge on whether Liam Neeson is prepared to play the sexy sexagenarian warrior, Jeremiah Mastadon.’

Laurie forced a laugh. ‘I’m off to defend a Darren Dooley. You don’t get many heroes called Darren Dooley, do you?’

Alliteration, like Megan Mooney.

‘What’s Munni calling this film?’ Diana asked.

‘PROLIFERATION. But with some sort of weird semi-colon between PRO LIFE and RATION,’ Bharat said, scrolling his email. ‘Pro Life, ration. Geddit? No? Let’s hope the head of Paramount and Liam Neeson do. Oh God, he’s cc-ed Liam Neeson!’ Bharat collapsed in mirth again and Diana queried how Munni knew Liam Neeson’s email address – ‘he’ll have guessed it as “Liam Dot Neeson At Hollywood Dot Com”’ – while Laurie collected up her files for court. The world had gone digital but courtrooms still required reams of A4 paper.

Jamie bloody Carter appeared in one of his narrow suits that looked like he was in a menswear advert and should be photographed laughing, sat with his knees apart while holding a tumbler of malt whisky. Or walking down a cobbled street in a European city with a dickhead Rat Pack in tow.

He said, ‘I don’t mean to push,’ – yes you do, Laurie thought, giving him a grit-teeth smile – ‘Could you update me on the Cheetham case?’

Laurie gave him a brusque run down, off the top of her head.

‘You don’t need to check the file?’ he said.

‘No, I have this thing called a memory,’ Laurie said. Patronising git, he was how old, twenty-eight?

‘Ooooh summarily dismissed! Nicely done!’ Bharat said, after Jamie raised his eyebrows, and departed. ‘He’s a self-sucking cock of a man, isn’t he?’ Di and Laurie chortled evilly.

This morning for Laurie held an assault on a kindly shop keeper. Laurie really didn’t want to get her client a reduced sentence due to first time offending and the context of peer pressure, and yet she probably would.

A sheaf of notes had gone missing and Laurie was delayed five minutes, hunting them out. A crucial five minutes, as it turned out.

Diana came back from the loo and stared directly at Laurie, in an unnerving way.

‘When were you going to tell us you and Dan had split up?!’

‘What?’ Laurie said, dully.

‘What?!’ Bharat shrieked.

‘Dan’s talking to Michael and Chris about it. He said that it happened a while back. And he’s having a baby? With someone at Rawlings?’

Laurie suppressed a full-body shiver of despair, a fresh wave of stunned humiliation.

‘Yeah it’s true. All over a while back. I didn’t know how to break it. There it is.’ That bastard. He couldn’t even give her a week to come to terms with it herself. To show her feelings would only inflame the office tattle, so she kept her face impassive and raised and dropped her shoulders. The seconds it took them to say anything lasted an eternity.

‘Wait, how long ago was it that you separated, if he’s with someone else? And having a baby?’ Bharat said; it was fruitless to downplay it.

‘Months back. Don’t really want to discuss it. I’m due in court.’

She got up and strode out quickly, looking neither left nor right, trying to keep a poker face. She could still sense the heads snapping up and whispers from the receptionists’ viewing gallery as she passed.

A WhatsApp from Bharat.

V sorry if that was an insensitive question Loz, I blurted, wasn’t thinking. Are you OK? Xx

Laurie

Yep, thanks, don’t worry. As much as is possible, can you reassure people I’m fine? You & I can talk in private sometime. Can’t face Team Kerry’s gang of lookalike raptors in Charlotte Tilbury descending on me Xx

Bharat

LOL. Perfect description Sure Xxx

Bharat was raucous and silly, but he was good people, and she was deeply grateful for his friendship at that moment. He loved drama, but he was ethical about it: not at the expense of the feelings of those he liked.

Her phone rang with a call from Dan as she neared the mags court. He was breathless and discomposed, as well he might be.

‘Laurie, Laurie, I didn’t decide to tell everyone. Someone at Rawlings saw Louise Hatherley from ours at the cop shop and she came straight back and blabbed it, and I had to face it down as best I could.’

‘Megan’s told people at her place?’

‘She’s got morning sickness and refused a drink at some do last week and apparently someone guessed.’

‘Megan didn’t have to say it was true? Or tell people you were the dad, did she? Fuck, Dan, is this why you only told me this weekend?’

‘She said she panicked, it came tumbling out. I was going to talk to you about how we handled it here … fuck.’

‘Know something about your mistress, and soon-to-be mother of your child, Dan? She’s a fucking lying bitch,’ Laurie said.

As she spoke, she felt a tap on her shoulder, and turned. The pasty pale, grinning face of Darren Dooley was in front of her.

‘Alright, brief? Want me to sort her out for you?’

Trudging back to the office from court that afternoon was the longest walk. Darren Dooley pleaded guilty and got off with community service and a suspended sentence. By contrast to Laurie’s gloom, he was cock-a-hoop.

Coming second in a happiness contest with a boy who’d thumped a newsagent in a row over a resealable pouch of mini Wispas, what even was life? Laurie offered him a wan smile as they parted.

‘Don’t rough up any more pensioners from now on. OK?’

Laurie had never felt the truth of the idea of work being a comfort before, and many people wouldn’t have found hers a comfort. But she was good at her job, and it always felt like an absorbing, necessary thing to be doing.

And she had high standing at Salter & Rowson. Laurie was not only talented, she was diligent, and never rested on her laurels. Usually it was the plodders who were hard-working and careful, and the naturally gifted who did an Icarus. Not Laurie. She quickly learned that the scariness of standing in front of magistrates was directly proportional to how thoroughly you’d done your homework. She was often up against worse-for-wear posh lads for the prosecution, almost proud of winging it, using cut-glass vowels like a scythe. Well, Laurie thought it was way more rock’n’roll to know your case back to front and wipe the floor with them.

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