Page 20 of If I Never Met You

‘Yes.’

‘You’vesleptwith 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 whenexactlydid 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.

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