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
