Maggs was so happy to start the rehoming process for Barney that Claire couldn’t help getting caught up in the excitement. He really was a sweet little dog. She just hoped Maggs knew what she was letting herself in for. Once they got back to her house, Claire gathered together her belongings, shoved them in her little red case, then clumped it down the stairs and left it in Maggs’s hallway.
‘Well, that’s me ready then,’ she said to Maggs when she found her in the kitchen.
Maggs, who had been washing up, dried her hands with a tea towel. ‘As much as it’s been lovely to have you here, we both know you need to go back and face things … face him.’
‘Oh, I’m not going to face him,’ Claire said breezily. ‘I’m going to cut him out, not think about him any more. Besides, he said he was going to go and stay at a friend’s.’
‘Did he? That was very nice of him.’
Claire snorted. ‘Who knows whether he was telling the truth. Every word that comes out of his mouth is a lie.’
Maggs looked as if she was going to say something, but in the end she just shook her head and put her tea towel down and followed Claire out of the kitchen and into the hallway, where Claire picked up her case. Maggs stood with her hand on the door jamb as Claire trundled her case down the path. She stopped at the gate and looked back.
‘Just remember,’ Maggs said, her beady eyes boring into Claire, ‘not every man is like your father – or even like that Philip.’
‘Can I just remind you of what you said back at the dogs’ home?’
Maggs gave her a questioning and innocent look.
‘You don’t seem to be too interested in giving men a second chance,’ Claire said. ‘You know, you ought to give practising what you preach a chance some time!’
Then again, maybe she wouldn’t be Maggs if she did.
‘That was different,’ Maggs replied, crossing her arms.
‘How?’
She shook her head. ‘I did give George and I a second chance. We took a good hard look at what was under the surface of our friendship and found there was nothing there. It wouldn’t have been fair to either of us to pretend otherwise.’
‘Well, there’s nothing there for me and Dominic either.’
Dominic. That was the first time she’d said his name out loud. His real name.
Maggs just gave her a disbelieving look and waved her off as she drove away.
When Claire got back to her flat, she stood at the gate, looking up the path. She had that weird ‘familiar but not familiar’ sensation, that feeling you get when you’ve just come back from holiday and you know you’re home, but it takes twenty-four hours or so before it feels that way.
She chose to carry her case up the path, not wanting to announce her arrival any more than necessary. Once on the front step, she pulled her keys from her bag and opened the locks. The old heavy wooden door swung open.
The hallway was bare. Quiet. Everything was perfectly in place, which in itself was odd. Not a stray piece of junk mail, not a takeaway leaflet to be seen. It seemed emptier than usual and Claire fought the feeling that the bike that wasn’t propped up against the wall was missing.
Her flat was just how she left it. There was a magazine on the floor in front of the sofa, some unopened mail she’d dumped on the kitchen table and had forgotten and her peace lily looked in desperate need of a drink. Once she’d attended to that, she put her case on the bed and started to unpack, throwing the contents into different piles – clothes for washing, toiletries to go back in the bathroom, shoes for the wardrobe – and then, when she was finished, she stood in the middle of her flat and listened to the silence.
She sighed and rubbed her hands over her face. How was it possible to miss him when she hated him so much?
It was only as she crossed from the bedroom into the kitchen and glanced down the hallway to her front door – something she’d actively avoided doing since she got back, just in case she was tempted to look out for him – that she realised it hadn’t shut properly, that it had bounced open again. She walked down and pushed it closed and, as she did, she saw a single white envelope on the mat.
A shiver ran up her spine. She recognised that handwriting. And there was no stamp, no postmark. There was only one person it could have come from.
Only this time it wasn’t a scrumpled scrap of paper or a reused envelope that held his note. It was a beautiful envelope in a vintage sage green, long and elegant, the kind of stationery Claire would usually kill to get her hands on.
She bent to pick it up and found her hands were shaking.
She walked, just staring at it, until she got to her kitchen and then she sat on one of the chairs that surrounded her little square table and stared at it some more. Finally, something delicate inside her snapped and she gently tore it open along one edge.
The paper that fell out was just as beautiful, and he’d written in ink, deep indigo ink. The kind of ink that should always fill a fountain pen, because that precise colour made everything that came out of it seem important. She held her breath as she read:
Dear Claire,
This is the last note I will send you. You don’t want to talk and, after what I did, I don’t blame you for that. I was stupid and short-sighted, but I want you to know that I really didn’t set out to deceive you. I know you may not believe that, but it’s the truth.
I have to confess, it would have been easier to come clean if a) I wasn’t so good at letting my big mouth dig me an even deeper hole and b) I hadn’t liked you quite so much. And I did like you, Claire. I still do. And it had nothing to do with your knickers and everything to do with the brave, kind, resourceful woman I’ve come to know you are. You are every bit as captivating and sexy and funny as Doris Day.
She stopped reading at that point, not wanting to spoil his horrible attempts at good penmanship on that lovely paper by making the ink run. She put the letter down on the table and dug the heels of her hands into her eyes to rub away the tears and then she stood up and walked across the room to stare out of the tiny window that looked across the back gardens of the houses in her street and the one beyond.
Had it all been an act?
Probably not, although that’s what she’d thought at first, but there was still this feeling of something tugging her towards him deep inside, something she neither wanted nor understood, that just wouldn’t let her neatly file him away under the heading ‘terrible mistake’, as she had done with all her past relationships.
She was going crazy, wasn’t she? To even think of still liking him.
Even if she did, it didn’t change anything. He’d still lied to her, whatever the reasons. He’d still thought of saving his own skin first before making life easier on her, and she didn’t need that kind of man in her life. Not again. Not ever.
So, without reading the rest of the note, she folded up the lovely green paper, slid it gently back into its envelope and then she walked over to the stove and turned on the gas. She held it there, the blue flames licking it until it caught and blazed yellow, and then she dropped it on the stainless steel hob and watched it burn away until nothing was left but ash and tiny curls of blackened paper.