The No-Show

by Beth O'Leary

‘That’s the difference between a friend and a lover, Jane. A friend doesn’t need the whole of you. If you don’t want to tell me about your life before we met, I don’t give a toss – I’m in it for the Jane that’s here and now, aren’t I? I take you as you come. But if I loved you, I’d want everything. Wouldn’t I? Don’t you want all of him? All his secrets? All the versions of Joseph that exist out there, all the people he is when he’s at work and with his mother and with the lads at the pub?’

‘Just a coping mechanism, right? I wonder if you needed some time to process some stuff, and you needed quiet for that, but now maybe you don’t need quiet any more. Maybe you’re at a point with your process where you need to talk.’

At the very first book club he’d arranged with Jane, he’d told her books were his happy place, and he’d seen her face transform. She relaxed, she smiled; she gave him a hint of the woman under that guarded exterior. Books are my happy place too, she’d told him, and Joseph has often wondered whether that was the moment he fell in love with her.