Then She Was Gone

by Lisa Jewell

“You didn’t lose me, Laurel. I’m still yours. I’ll always be yours.” “Well, that’s not strictly true, is it?” He sighs again. “Where it counts,” he says. “As the father of your children, as a friend, as someone who shared a journey with you and as someone who loves you and cares about you. I don’t need to be married to you to be all those things. Those things are deeper than marriage. Those things are forever.”

“I mean,” says Blue, “that a man who can’t love but desperately needs to be loved is a dangerous thing indeed. And I think Floyd is dangerous because he’s pretending to be someone he’s not in order to get you to love him.”

You know, Laurel, all my life all I ever wanted was to feel like everyone else. I’d turn up in some different country at some new school and I’d see all the kids who’d grown up together, whose mums and dads all drank wine together at the weekends, all these laid-back kids with their in-jokes and their basement dens and their nicknames. And I’d look at them and think, How do you do that? How does that even work? I was never anywhere long enough to get a nickname. I was just “the new boy.” Every couple of years. “Hey, you, new boy.” And being a virtual fucking genius didn’t really do me any favors either. Nobody likes a clever clogs. And I was a terrible clever clogs. My cleverness oozed out of me like goo.

I had a girlfriend there. Mathilde. She was French. Quite pretty. We kissed a few times and maybe if my parents hadn’t dragged me away by the scruff of my neck at that precise moment and dropped me down in the next place, maybe I’d have had a chance to develop that normality, become a guy with a core and a soul.