More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Dan looked at her with a stunned expression and Laurie froze, because again, she could read it. He wasn’t stunned she’d agreed. It wasn’t a gambit. He wanted to split up. She finally understood. Understood that he meant it, that this was it. Absolutely everything else was completely beyond her comprehension.
“The thought of it is brutal, Laurie. Like missing a limb,” Dan said, tears starting. “I love you. I don’t love our relationship anymore.”
“Yes. I wouldn’t presume to think I could ever ask that of you.” Laurie left the room, knowing that she’d lied, and he probably did too.
Not that love or happiness was stuff, but Laurie had made them a great home and it still wasn’t enough. Or, she wasn’t.
At some point, you have to give up wishing for your parents to be who you wanted them to be and accept them as they are,
Yes, staying together out of love, not paperwork, was romantic. But if you flipped it around, he was also saying marrying made it too difficult to leave.
Laurie knew that most people were murdered by someone they knew; she’d stood up in court and argued for the killers’ bail applications while they wept not only about their fate, but about their loss. In this moment, she understood why.
That was the promise you made when you fell head over heels in love, really, she thought. Not that you wouldn’t have problems, but that no problem would be the sort where you couldn’t find the solution together.
Laurie hated how powerless she was, the mask she had to wear that ate her face. Dan had done so much to her, and she could do nothing.
She stared out at the streetlights, chin propped on palm, morose. Rain streaked the fogged-up office windows, which were forbidding, ink-black panels by half four. The precious daylight was over well before the working day was.
I’ll delete my Tinder. No, no need to thank me for this extraordinary sacrifice. <3
“I’m not some suggestible fifteen-year-old! Seriously! You think we’ll hold hands for two minutes and I’ll start humming Taylor Swift songs and browsing Elle Wedding? Looolll.” “You may laugh at me, Watkinson, you often do. Doesn’t make me wrong.”
“How do I prepare for the unknown?” “You can’t. That’s my point.” This seemed excessive caution to Laurie, and she was the queen of caution. On paper, the crime was perfect.
Laurie was coping, only in ways that made other people feel comfortable. It was a performance, going through the motions. She was as empty and as fragile as an Easter egg. The truth lay in moments like the Thursday evening where she found the box of photo albums under the bed in the spare room. She leafed through a packet of photos from 2005 and ended up crouching, sobbing, feeling as if she’d been stabbed.
She’d never grieved for anyone close to her, but she guessed this must be similar: times when the tide went out and she felt almost normal, and times when it came rushing in and she felt like she was drowning.
She limped downstairs and lay on the sofa and let the sadness and desolation wash over her for the thousandth time.
“You’re a survivor,” Jamie said. “Of some difficult things. What needs explaining or apologizing for about that?”
Your closest family returned you to whence you’d came, when you were still a work in progress. They weren’t fooled for a second. Older you was a construct.
“Oh, I like her, Jamie, I really like her,” his mum said, putting her hand on Laurie’s wrist. Laurie squeezed her hand in return and met Jamie’s awestruck gaze of gratitude, and it was in some ways, the most unexpectedly rewarding split second of Laurie’s life.
As Laurie sipped her wine, she realized this was what had slipped away in the last few years with Dan—his seeing her. She became scenery, a prop.
When you’re his friend, he will go to the ends of the earth for you, and he won’t tolerate anyone being damaging toward you. Whatsoever.” “Right.” “Maybe that’s why he doesn’t make many friends—looking after people that much is a burden.”
“I try not to think about it for the most part. That’s what living life is, isn’t it? Coping,” Jamie said. “Yes.” God, yes.
“How do you know, when you’ve fallen for someone in a long-term, could marry, settle-down-forever sort of way? Please don’t say you can’t imagine life without them or similar, because I can’t imagine life without Hattie but I don’t want to marry her. Something that might give me real insight.” “Oh . . . er . . .” This was a role reversal, Laurie feeling like the knowledgeable one. “Hmmm. It feels like a conversation that you never want to end, I suppose. A renewable energy source. You know how with some people you can’t get chatting off the ground? They’re hard work? Falling in love is the
...more
They put on music and Laurie made coffee and they did the kind of low-key chatting and pottering you could only really do with a very close, very long-term friend. Laurie felt there was a secret of how to live life buried in this unusual Sunday: they had turned a negative into a positive reason to spend time together, to remind themselves of how valuable they were to each other. Laurie had thought Dan was the source of the unconditional love in her life, but actually it was Emily: she wasn’t going to turn around and say sorry, she’d found a new Laurie.
But when she was with Dan, he’d have felt like an anchor. Jamie Carter was like holding on to a balloon.
“I guess that solves the mystery of why I wasn’t needed for maneuvers, then,” Jamie said. “Hardly! My dad talks a lot of rubbish.” “Mmmm. Harry best not try anything.” Laurie laughed.
“There was no right or wrong answer. Whatever you did had a cost. There was only survival.”
“One of the things those sessions taught me is, you need to speak up, ask for help. If you don’t tell people why you’re suffering, or even that you’re suffering, they can’t help you.”
Well—shoulder shrug—that was something and nothing. Why bother opening old wounds like that in return for nothing? She stopped herself: this was the cynic in her, the lawyer in her, the impatient child. Laurie had pushed this away for three decades; what if listening to it was the most her mum could manage right now?
I think women spend a lot of time beating themselves up about how they caused or deserved male behavior, and it doesn’t happen anything like the same way in reverse. They get on with doing what they wanna do.”
She held her mum tightly. Laurie hadn’t realized that in asking for help, she was also offering it.
Whatever miscommunications, whatever differences, your mum was your mum. She was the earthing cable in your circuitry. There were still things you could say to her you couldn’t say to anyone else. The connection with someone who had changed your nappies and was trusted with Dundee the badger went deep. You couldn’t deny the power of history, and genetics.
“Sooner or later, Daniel stopped realizing it was you who gave him the strength, the foundation,” Peggy continued. “He thought life could be only adventure, without you. When he realizes what he has done, he will regret it very much. But first he’ll need to recognize the value of what he had in order to mourn it.”
Laurie smiled at them. Her mum might not have had settled relationships, but she had rock-solid friendships. Laurie hoped she could say the same.
Back at her desk, Laurie had a feeling of missing him before he’d left her life.
Those who said family mattered above all else were wrong. People you love, who love you back, matter above all. Crap people you happen to be related to: you need to stop thinking you owe them a limitless number of chances to hurt you.
Jamie If you’re a mistake you’re the greatest one ever made. I’m really proud to know you. xx
Megan didn’t appear to be interacting much with anyone, inclining her head to say something to Dan every so often. Then someone spoke to them, and she saw Megan place her hand on Dan’s knee in a proprietorial fashion. Laurie flinched, but after a moment’s analysis, realized it was a flinch at the strangeness of seeing this, not Megan’s rights over Dan. It felt disorientating and peculiar, like selling a piece of family furniture and seeing it in someone else’s house. But you knew it didn’t fit in your place anymore.
“I told you when you started to believe in yourself, you’d be unstoppable.” Jamie Carter, what an unlikely hero. In that second, she wondered if she loved him.
What would success feel like to you? She could finally answer that: self-respect. It felt like not caring anymore.
“When we were dancing together, it felt like two people who are much more than friends.” He paused. “It’s the closest I’ve felt to anyone in my entire life.” That, in a nutshell, was what Laurie felt. A silence developed. Laurie didn’t trust her voice. “When the song finished, you gave me this look, this look like we were . . . actually in bed together, or something, this total intimacy that I felt too, and then you bolted.
“Yes, and I was wrong. I was ignorant, and arrogant. I thought because I’d never experienced it, it didn’t exist. It’s not being out of your mind. It’s being in it, it’s complete certainty. When I’m with you, I know I’m where I belong. I want this to be real, Laurie. I want you to be mine. I want to be yours.”
“I get why you want guarantees,” Jamie said. “I can only make you a promise.” “Which is?” “Whatever happens next . . . you’re my soul mate.”
This was a category error that too many people made Laurie thought—thinking untruths that didn’t add up were better than a hard truth.
“Emily? I’ve realized something. Ever since Dan and I split up, there was something I couldn’t make sense of. You said Dan and I were hit by lightning, in Bar CaVa, that it was fate, that it was a once-in-a-lifetime chance and it changed everything forever. I knew it was true, I could feel in my water that it was true, so I couldn’t reconcile it with Dan having gone. Well, I’ve figured it out. I did meet the love of my life that day. Only it wasn’t Dan. You are the love of my life. Are you still there?” “Yes, I’m crying, you soft shite.”
Laurie’s mum had once said to her, keep a close eye on the worst things that happened to you, they could turn out to be a doorway, a route to someplace else entirely, a map you couldn’t yet read.
The sangfroid with which you’ve dealt with this, despite your mistakes, has convinced me. We don’t only divine character in how people handle wins. You see more in the disasters.”
“Emily. You know how we said we had to define what happiness looks like for ourselves? Without fear of judgment? Now, there’s been no eggnog, but. Please remain as calm as possible.”
