It’s there, a message from Tom in ‘Rachel’s’ inbox. The stomach flip that seeing it there gives me makes me miss dating, romance. I bask in that feeling before I open it.
Here’s the email address, he says. Let me know how you get on.
Brilliant; it requires feedback. Except that I can’t apply for work experience with his friend because I’m not me and I don’t work in his industry. Ah.
I decide to deal with that detail later and enjoy this, for now. I’m relieved, too, to be distracted from the email from my parents.
I know what happened last year was wrong – drilled into me through three months in a psychiatric unit and the reaction of my shamed family – but how could they not excuse it? How could they not see that when you follow all the rules, then the person you have done everything for changes their mind anyway, that that’s not a normal thing to experience? If anyone would listen, I would like to explain just once how that altered me.
I’d woken up late, to Luke sitting up in bed, staring at me with an expression that I had never seen on the face that was more familiar to me than any other. It was a few months since we had started trying for a baby; less than a year since we had got engaged.
‘I’ve been having these thoughts,’ he’d said, earnestly, like he was auditioning for an arthouse film, not ruining my life. I had known, even if I never would have acknowledged that thought then, that Luke loved the drama. Heavy pause. ‘That maybe this isn’t right.’
I could see brochures for wedding venues on the bedside table.
‘Forever’s a big thing,’ he had gone on, sighing, auditioning. ‘It’s made me question everything.’
I had tried to zone out. Tried to block out a memory of my mom, after I had gushed to her once just before Luke and I moved to the UK about how smart Luke was, how inspiring.
‘You do know that you’re just as smart as he is, don’t you, Harriet?’ she’d said, focusing her eye contact on the tea towel.
I’d looked up from the suds. Dried my hands.
‘Why are you saying that to me?’ I had snapped.
‘I just wanted to make sure you knew,’ she’d said and then walked away.
Perhaps, I thought for the first time as he wheeled out these clichés, she had been right. Had I placed Luke on too much of a pedestal? But the thoughts had disappeared quickly, as the reality of what was happening hit me.
Luke had hugged me like a lame apology and I’d thought of my phone and how the last ten messages had to do with our wedding – appointments with potential photographers, messages to Luke himself just a day earlier about what kind of bloody cake we would have.
A massive doughnut ring, I had suggested, only half kidding. A nod to our American roots?
Luke had dismissed it.
Traditional afternoon tea platter, he’d told me. A nod to our British future.
I knew, as a bland statement of fact, that I would always love him and need him and had wondered – practically – how that worked. I knew I should fight it, reason with him, show him why he was wrong, and I had tried, but I was too desperate to sound appealing.
And yet, Luke did change his mind. In retrospect, probably another way to toy with me, since Luke never normally changed his mind on anything. But he went out and I sat in a ball on the floor, already knowing the loneliness of my new life. I had seen the photo of us at Land’s End in Cornwall, wrapped up in long woollen scarves, out of the corner of my vision in the living room, and had made my hands cover as much of my face as I could, to block out as much of the world as it was possible to block.
And then Luke had put his key in the door and climbed down onto the floor with me.
‘I don’t know what I was thinking!’ he’d said, a huge grin on his face. ‘Let’s forget it.’
Forget it? I’d thought of how twenty minutes earlier I had felt like I was dying. How I had looked at what else there was in my life and saw that aside from work, there was nothing. My family had become increasingly distant every time they criticised or questioned Luke so that by now, we were hanging on by a thread. I no longer had friends; even Frances was barely in touch. Luke didn’t like me seeing people without him. But I had been all right with that: I had only needed Luke.
‘Okay,’ I’d said. ‘Thank you.’
The relief had felt physical, zooming through my insides.
‘That’s okay,’ he’d said, magnanimous. But not sorry, never sorry.
‘Did I tell you about that exhibition I wanted to see at the National Portrait Gallery?’ he’d then said suddenly. What?
Then he sighed like he was in love. ‘God! I adore this city.’
He had moved on. This one might have been particularly extreme, but I was used to these turnarounds, used to flipping my emotions back and forth and being ready to do happiness, even when it followed so closely behind sadness. Used to playing whatever role he needed me to.
Once you start breaking up, though, you can’t stop breaking up, not any more than temporarily, and it had happened properly two weeks later as we watched a film in bed.
‘I’m moving out, Harriet,’ he’d said and if the last version of Break-Up Luke had been drama school over-actor, this one was robot. No emotion, no flicker of doubt. ‘It’s not been right for a while.’
I’d sat in shock as he slung clothes in a bag and made toast to take with him, carefully spreading his Marmite for what felt like hours.
And while some break-ups might knock someone left field for a few weeks or propel them into a trip around Asia, I’d known for me that it was done. That life would grind to a halt that day he left our bed. How the hell would I start again? Who would want me? My life was over and he was asking for the phone number of our reception venue so he could cancel our wedding, as though it were a pizza we’d waited too long for. We’re pissed off. The pepperoni was due at 7 p.m. and now it’s eight thirty. We’ve had to have beans on bloody toast.
I’d stayed in bed until the evening. I watched bad TV and I didn’t cry until finally, I did and I couldn’t stop, and I sobbed myself to sleep. And this time, Luke didn’t reverse out of it; didn’t change his mind.
I’m jolted out of this familiar trip down memory dead end with a booming noise from next door. Movie night at Tom and Lexie’s. I kick the wall then wince. Tom and Lexie and their eternal fucking togetherness.
The noise brings me back into the present, reminds me to act. I open up my laptop and slam my fingers on the keyboard. This time I am not Harriet, and I am not Rachel, but I am … Leo. Why not?
Hi Lexie, I begin, listening to the noise of the film through the wall and feeling the rage again, that swell. You have no idea what I’m capable of, I think. You have no idea what I did.
I work for a media agency and might have some copywriting work to send your way. Good rate and regular hours. Let me know if you’d be interested.
The address is gmail but I don’t think she’ll care. From that list on her iPad? Lexie is kind of desperate.
After that, there doesn’t seem much point waiting up, so I get an early night, going to sleep dreaming of a Tom–Luke hybrid lying with his feet in the cold, cold sea on a beach in Norfolk and laughing, like Lexie did, in my face.