Page 107 of You Belong With Me

‘If you think this isn’t working as things stand, I could move to New York,’ Edie said.

There was an ugly, strained pause before Elliot replied: ‘I don’t want you to.’

Time stopped. They were words Edie realised she’d spent their whole time together fearing she’d hear.

‘You don’t?’ she said. It was like he’d kicked her in the stomach.

‘I don’t want to take you away from your dad, your sister, Nick and Hannah. A job you enjoy and that you’re great at. A life that’s right for you and makes you happy. For what – to sit alone in an apartment, waiting for me to get back late from a very long day? Me keeping you like some kind of pedigree house cat through my own entitled inability to recognise or accept what’s best for you, not best for me? The guilt would kill me. And probably kill us.’

They were doing this again, with roles reversed? Now that she was all in: heart, body, and soul? Edie was light-headed.

Elliot couching it in concern for her made it deadeningly real – like management going into HR-friendly speak about what a great effort you’d made in your time at the company,and they’d truly appreciated it, because the decision had been taken and the ink was dry.

‘You’re now saying that this is impossible?’ Edie asked. ‘The distance? That you knew about on Christmas Day?’

‘It’s not only distance, it’s context. I didn’t knowYour Tablewas the highlight of my career, and how it would feel that so many people’s jobs would depend on me keeping it. I didn’t fully appreciate how much I was asking you to give up in England until I spent time with you there. All I could think about was how much I wanted you back. It was selfish.’

‘Loving someone that much isn’t selfish,’ Edie said.

‘Actually, I’ve found out it can be.’

‘I wasn’t a princess in a tower and you a knight climbing up to rescue me, you know,’ Edie said. ‘If you don’t think what we have is worth the trouble any more, then you have to say as much. Don’t do this patronisingwhat’s best for youstuff, because I know what’s best for me, and it’s you.’

There was a perilous dead quiet where Edie feared he would take her up on this. She was bluffing; his thinking was clearly somewhere else.

From the first time they separated, Edie had been anticipating and avoiding this very showdown. He’d awakened from the desire stupor, the thrill expired, and he thought:God this is alotof work.

Don’t try to outrun your destiny: it would come and find you after you’d peeled the price stickers off new shoes in a country house hotel in Suffolk.

Soon, they’d need to have their happiest faces ready forhours on end. They shouldn’t be doing this now, but unfortunately, they were.

‘I’m not patronising you. I’m admitting that I’m trying to be somebody to you that I can’t be,’ Elliot said. ‘I’m trying to have something with you that I can’t have.’

‘You can only have – what, a geographically mobile, rich, famous girlfriend? Would’ve been better for me if you’d worked that preference out a lot faster. Even the newspapers have been telling you I was the wrong fit for you.’

‘Fuck’s sake, Edie, that’s low. That’s not what I mean, and don’t pretend to think it’s what I mean, given it’s a character assassination.’

‘If this isn’t working, whocanyou have, then?’

Edie wasn’t at all sure this was her wisest or logical line of attack – how will Elliot Owen ever find another suitable female companion? – but she was panicking and floundering.

Had he and Ines got closer still? Enough to make him daydream about something different? It was so painful that Edie couldn’t even contemplate it.

‘What’s the other conclusion from you saying my being normal and your lifestyle don’t mix?’ Edie said.

‘Normal?’ Elliot said, and there was the handbrake release sensation of a proper, no holds barred fight breaking out.‘You know what, I have never, not once, raised my job up at you as if it means I automatically deserve you or as if I have the upper hand. Yet you’ve thrown it at me endlessly – it always comes back to how I hold all the cards, how I can’t possibly find anything as hard as you do.’

‘I’m trying to work out how we got froma man I workwith hit on metolet’s not bother with this ruinously important love affair I persuaded you into, after all? Am I being punished for something somebody else did? Do you know how much Buddhist calm I’ve had to find about a co-star you’ve very literally got off with?’

‘It’s not a competition.’

‘What is this, then? Tell me.’

Elliot simply glowered.

There were many connections to be made, but Edie had no time to make them. She’d been careless in her management of this situation with Declan and was confronting the terrifying possibility she had awoken to its damage too late.

Unless, even worse: Declan was the excuse, not the reason.

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