Page 116 of So Now You're Back

In some ways, it might seem stupid and juvenile, a layover from their past. A tit-for-tat form of one-upmanship. But that was the way she felt. He’d told her he wanted more. But if he had really meant that, if he had really wanted to try, surely he could have contacted her and asked her again, properly.

Unfortunately, the only problem with Halle’s Last Stand was that it required Luke to make the first move. And, after two whole weeks of virtually no contact, she was beginning to believe that she would be waiting around forever. Much as she had done once before.

As they shot the final set-up and Halle waxed lyrical about the magical quality of family Christmases, whatever type of family you had, the melancholy of the past fortnight began to overwhelm her. Would she be wrapping presents alone again this Christmas Eve while her kids were in bed? Why did that make her feel bereft, when it never had before?

The director called it a wrap, and she thanked everyone before slipping away as the sound technician, Jeff, started to chop up the three different roulades they’d had baked for the taping to share among the salivating crew.

Clare, the wardrobe girl, ha

nded her a change of clothes as she headed out to the trailer they’d set up for her round the back of the farmhouse in Cambridgeshire. Sweat gathered under the armpits of the heavy velvet dress she’d worn for the Christmas Special as she walked through the farmhouse’s kitchen gardens, the sunshine blazing through the orchard of pear and apple trees.

She closed the trailer door and dropped the summer dress wrapped in dry-cleaner’s plastic on the small daybed, then crossed to the dressing table. After firing up the kettle, she clicked on her laptop and checked her emails.

Her heart bobbed into her throat as she scrolled through everything that had come in since yesterday and spotted the subject line ‘Monroe Article for Review’.

But the flash of hope, of anticipation, died when she realised the email didn’t come from Luke, but from his agent, Stan Chalmers.

She opened the email, scanned the contents. The article Luke had written was attached. The article on their couples’ retreat in Tennessee. The one he’d promised her he’d give her a chance to review.

The melancholy, which had been sitting like a lump of unleavened dough in her belly for a fortnight, swelled to epic proportions. She grabbed a couple of tissues from the dispenser and blotted the thick camera-friendly mascara to stop it running down her cheeks in rivulets and making her look like a victim of the Black Death.

Bloody hell. How come he can still turn me into a gibbering wreck with one careless act?

She sniffed. But she knew this act wasn’t careless. It was deliberate.

It wasn’t an act of betrayal. She’d always known he would write this article. That this had been a job for him, first and foremost, not an excuse to take a soggy, fraught trip down memory lane. And end up having too much make-up sex.

But somewhere along the way she’d hoped, stupidly hoped, that what he’d blurted out two weeks ago meant he had become as invested in their future as she had. But, obviously, all that talk about taking things further, doing more than just bonking each other senseless for old times’ sake had been just that. Talk. Said on the spur of the moment so she’d let him stay.

And here was the evidence, sitting in an email attachment. An email attachment that he hadn’t even been thoughtful enough to send to her himself.

Slowly and methodically, she used the eye make-up remover and then her cleansing creams to remove the pancake foundation and eye gunk that Della had applied four hours ago. She peeled out of her Christmas dress, stepped into the trailer’s tiny shower cubicle and had as long a shower as was possible standing under the feeble, lukewarm spray.

After changing into the muslin dress, she brewed herself a cup of mint tea. Then took the laptop, settled on the trailer’s narrow plaid upholstered couch and pressed the download button on the email attachment.

The blue monitor line filled as the article downloaded.

So this was finally the end? Not just of her and Luke and their chances for a future together, but the end of all those foolish hopes that had once burned so brightly between them and, despite all the mistakes, all the hurt, all the anger and all the misconceptions over the past sixteen years, had come out of hiding in Tennessee.

She felt an odd sense of detachment, the melancholy dulled to the low persistent ache of a loss too huge to really comprehend as she clicked on the attachment.

Then she read the opening lines of Luke’s article:

When you trash the one relationship in your life that means everything to you, it’s human nature to try to find a way to justify that. To make excuses, to push the blame elsewhere, to persuade yourself this relationship was never as important as you thought. Pride, past mistakes, bad luck and even recreational sex can all be brought into play to keep you from acknowledging the incontrovertible truth: that you were the one who trashed it, and you need to be the one to fix it. This is the story of how, during eleven days in Tennessee this summer—with some extreme help from Jackson Monroe’s Couples’ Resolution Retreat—I finally figured that out …

Twenty minutes later, Halle snorted dramatically into the last of her tissues as she read the final lines.

Monroe’s retreat is based on what appears to be a simplistic, completely unscientific and apparently entirely intuitive method. And obviously there’s no guarantee it will work for everyone. But if it can make someone like myself realise the magnitude of what he’s chucked away not once, but quite possibly twice, and bare all in an article in Vanity Fair, it’s got a lot to offer those of us who are dumb as a rock.

I just hope to hell it didn’t work its magic on me too late.

Wiping her eyes with the wadded-up tissue, Halle grabbed blindly for her mobile phone and keyed in a message to her PA.

Mel, I need to get from Cambridge to Paris, TODAY.

Then she texted her daughter.

Lizzie, can u & Trey hold the fort this evening? I’m making a flying visit 2 Paris 2 proposition ur father!!

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