Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike, #3)

by Robert Galbraith

The first time that Robin had ever entered Strike’s office had been on her first morning as an engaged woman. Unlocking the glass door today, she remembered watching the new sapphire on her finger darken, shortly before Strike had come hurtling out of the office and nearly knocked her down the metal staircase to her death. There was no ring on her finger anymore. The place where it had sat all these months felt hypersensitive, as though it had left her branded.

He had called what he felt for Charlotte love and it remained the most profound feeling he had had for any woman. In the pain it had caused him and its lasting after-effects it had more resembled a virus that, even now, he was not sure he had overcome. Not seeing her, never calling her, never using the new email address she had set up to show him her distraught face on the day of her wedding to an old boyfriend: this was his self-prescribed treatment, which was keeping the symptoms at bay. Yet he knew he had been left impaired, that he no longer had the capacity to feel in the way that he had once felt.

Except that once you had broken up, it was much easier to do so again. He ought to know.