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.
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,
