Page 18 of The Lucky Escape

‘How?’ I said. ‘I feel so humiliated. I can’t ever imaginesmiling, or laughing, or dating – oh God. Do I have to start dating?’

Kezza growled, ‘If he tries to kick you out the house, by the way, I will go after him, I swear.’

‘I’ll have to leave eventually,’ I said. ‘It’s his, after all.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Bri. ‘But you can make that move in your own time. No hurry. We’ll make sure he doesn’t rush you. If he’s abroad …’

‘Do you really think he is?’

‘Maybe. I don’t know.’

‘You should paint a big black mark on my back so everyone knows I’m damaged goods,’ I said. ‘A warning to everyone that, at any moment, I might snap.’

‘We’ve got you, okay? But, honey, I need you to listen really closely when I say this,’ said Kezza.

‘I’m listening,’ I replied.

‘You have to tell us what you need. We’re not mind-readers. We’re good, but we’re not psychic, okay? It’s time to learn to ask for help.’

Ask for help? The thought sent shivers down my spine.

‘I can do that,’ I said nodding. ‘I can’t do the honeymoon, though. That’s too much. I’m still too raw.’

‘And that’s absolutely fine,’ Bri soothed. ‘Whatever you want to do, we’re here. I swear – this is not going to be your undoing. It’s going to be your becoming. We’ll make sure of it. None of us is screwing up like we think we are.’

I took the iPad to bed with me when I got home and used the browser to log into Instagram. I don’t know why I did it. Addiction, I think. Isn’t there some research that says the average person scrolls about three miles a day? That Silicon Valley design their technology to be so dangerously addictivethat most of them won’t even let their kids have phones because it fries the brain? I knew looking online would upset me, but I did it anyway.

I hadn’t uploaded anything since the night before the wedding – a photo of me with Adzo and Freddie, all of us in hotel dressing gowns pulling funny faces. Underneath I’d written:Last night as a single woman, hanging with my best girls.Rereading it made my stomach do a double flip.

I went to the homepage, trembling as I typed in Alexander’s username, but he hadn’t posted since August 2016. I just wanted to make sure his new life, without me, hadn’t yet begun, I suppose. Then I scrolled my feed. Dinners, restaurant trips, date nights out with couples in their outfits and the caption:Dinner with this one,followed by a heart-eyes emoji. I wondered if everyone was as happy as they made it seem. Had I been happy, before now? I once posted a picture of Alexander and I at a fancy pizza restaurant whilst sleeping alone in our spare room. We’d argued over dinner, after the photo had been taken – I think about how to spend the Easter break. The thing is, arguments are never about the thing you’re arguing about, are they, and the fight continued after the bill had come and then all the way home.

Thinking about it now, I’d tried to hint that it would be nice if we could spend some more time together. Sometimes I was on the list after work, and rugby, and his time in the gym, and then his alone time, his ‘chilling out’ time. Only then did I get his full attention. Anyway. I still posted the photo of us, telling the world we’d been out for dinner and ordered extra burrata, even though I barely remembered the food. There was no mention of our fight in the caption, or me thinking I was never enough no matter how many shapes I contorted myself into. In fact, the more shapes I contortedmyself into the more he withheld what I needed. No. Instead, I’d typed exactly what everyone did:Dinner with this one #datenight #extracheese.

Sighing, I was about to exit the app, but found myself typing ‘Patrick Hummingbird’ into the search bar before I realized I was doing so. Nothing came up. I tried Paddy Hummingbird. Nothing came up then, either. It was senseless that I’d even tried. Why had Patrick even crossed my mind?

I idly pushed at buttons, logging in and out of apps without thinking. The news, Pinterest, the health app. When I did that, an alert popped up.

You haven’t logged a period this month. Do you want to do that now?it asked.

Oh God. I hadn’t had a period? I looked at the chart on screen and realized that was true. I should have come on last week. It was probably the stress. Even lying in bed my jaw was so tight it was practically up at my eyebrows.

I tapped through to email and put Alexander’s work address in the ‘to’ box. I left the subject line blank. In the body of the note I typed, deleted, and retyped:Where are you?I lingered over the send button and held my breath as I pressed it. I needed to know.

I got his Out of Office immediately:

Hi there. I am currently working from the Singapore office, so you may experience a delay in my response due to the time difference.

I knew it. Singapore. That can’t have been a last-minute decision, surely. Urgh! He threw a hand grenade into my life and then got on a plane. I was beyond outraged, but strangely, being able to pinpoint down geographically where he was made me breathe deeper. I hated him and everything he’d done, but at least I now had a direction to send my hate in.

9

It was as if Patrick and I had pre-arranged to meet by the smoothie bar after class, because there we both were, and it seemed to be even less of a surprise to him than it was to me.

‘I’ve got something for you,’ he said, smiling from a distance so that we had to hold eye contact as he approached. I was loitering in reception, having spotted him halfway through the class when we were switching between the treadmills and the weights. He’d winked at me, and I’d spent the rest of the session trying not to look over in his direction. I couldn’t say why. I think because he was my new-old friend. I just liked talking to him. I suppose that was the silent agreement that we’d catch up afterwards.

‘Is it a puppy?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said.

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