If I Never Met You: A Novel

Laurie suppressed her homicidal impulses and tried to summon every ounce of someone who thought strategy for a living to handle this, to not let Dan off the hook by putting her feelings first.

“So you were obviously really fucking heartbroken. How long did you wait to climb into bed, after the Pickfords van left here? Days? Hours?”

“I was. I am. She has nothing to do with us, with what happened.”

“Oh, what SHIT! You’d fallen for someone else, you dumped me for her, but you’ve convinced yourself she is incidental?! This is beyond insulting. It’s downright fucking ludicrous.”

“Laurie, if we were right, if things had been OK, Megan wouldn’t have happened. The cause and effect is the wrong way ’round if you think Megan split us up.”

Laurie gasped. “These are mental gymnastics, contortions, so you don’t have to feel guilty. Basically it’s my fault for not making you happy enough?”

“No! Relationships fail all the time, I’m not saying it’s your fault. This is what has happened, that’s all, and I know it’s shitty for you, I know that.”

“Yeah, relationships are especially likely to fail when one person has started an affair. You know, that thing we promised we’d never ever do to one another. Remember that?”

“It wasn’t an affair,” Dan said grimly, but, to Laurie’s ears, without the necessary conviction.

“Being on a promise with someone is an affair, Dan.”

He said nothing, because she had nailed it. The utter emptiness of this argumentative victory. In fact “victory” was the wrong word. Sour satisfaction at best, except she felt no satisfaction whatsoever.

“You had an affair and you won’t even do the decent thing and say as much, call it what it is, in case it makes you feel bad.”

“I feel awful.”

Laurie had to tell herself to breathe before she could speak again.

“I begged you to tell me what was going on, I begged you. And you gave me a load of WANK about finding yourself. You had met some other woman you wanted to bang, and you spun me this line about your existential angst?!”

“All of that was true!” Dan said, more vehement now, but Laurie knew he was only vehement in the way anyone in a corner was, with a near-hyperventilating woman shouting unwanted truths at him.

“Was it too obvious, too LAMESTREAM, to admit you’d found a better option, like a million other boring aging men who can’t keep it in their pants? Is she twenty-five, this mysterious someone who doesn’t make you feel trapped and like there’s nothing worthwhile between here and death?”

“Thirty-five.”

Instantly, despite her fury and humiliation at the idea some lissome ingenue had stolen Dan’s affections, this was worse—Laurie hadn’t been traded for a younger model. She’d lost to a woman of her own age, or thereabouts. It was a fair fight, this boxing match, they were in the same weight category with similar length of training. Laurie was simply too boring.

That fear was lurking behind it all, she knew that. Domesticated, exemplary employee, devoted to Dan, ticked so many boxes—but dull. Someone who could make you feel like life held no surprises anymore. Right now, she wanted to surprise the shit out of him, but the only ways she could think of involved petrol and matches.

“I promise you, that’s not how it was. I was already unhappy, the thing with Megan came right out of the blue . . .”

“This is such bullshit!” Laurie shouted, reacting to hearing her name again like she’d been Tasered. “Your whole thing was oh no I hate this conventional, being-tied-down, settled monogamy, it’s not for me, maybe I will go backpacking. And your first big gesture of freedom is getting another girlfriend?! Another lawyer, at that?”

Laurie had to pause for breath but she knew she was dying for Dan to say, She’s not my girlfriend, it’s a fling. He didn’t of course—if she was a fling, why would he be here? Which meant Laurie was still gambling, even now, they could come back from this.

Being confronted with how little you could accept from someone, when your heart was on the line and you were being tortured, was awful. Laurie hated herself too in that very moment.

“I don’t know what you expect me to say, Dan. Great, crack on, hope the sex is amazing,” Laurie spat. “Why even tell me?”

There was a pause, as this had been a rhetorical question, and yet Laurie realized she’d hit on a very good point. Why had he told her? Fear of Salter & Rowson’s Stasi seeing them, perhaps? Except . . . this was a very ballsy move, nevertheless. Dan was the man who even after ten weeks had yet to tell his parents they’d separated (Laurie had stopped answering the house phone in case it was his mother calling); he didn’t go looking for trouble or difficulty, to put it mildly.

Dan said haltingly, “Because . . .”

“Because . . . ?”

Another silence. “Because you deserved to hear from me” or some other platitude wouldn’t warrant this hesitation, and the advocate in Laurie asked: Why has he told you now? Why not wait a few months and look less of a bastard? Her whole body was coated in a thin layer of freezing sweat.

“Oh, fuck . . . I have absolutely no idea how to say this and it’s still not real to me. I have no idea how to say this, no idea . . .”

He was gabbling.

Through a cascade of her tears, Laurie said, “What the fuck? What more is there? Are you getting married or something?” Her heart was racing.

“She’s pregnant,” Dan heaved out. He buried his face in his hands, almost as a defensive move, as if he thought Laurie might physically attack him.

Time stood still for a moment, time in this world that Laurie didn’t understand or want to live in anymore. Pregnant. Pregnant. It echoed through their thoughtfully decorated, tasteful, affluent Chorltonite couldn’t-stand-it-for-a-day-longer-could-you-Dan living room.

“She’s . . . ? What? It’s yours?”

Dan nodded and Laurie couldn’t absorb what he was saying.

If she’d been shocked before, it didn’t compare to this state of total standstill. Laurie simply stared. She couldn’t be. What? What?

“It was an accident, she said she was on the pill. But she wants to keep it. Fuck, Laurie, I didn’t plan for this, I promise you, it’s happened out of nowhere.”

“How . . . ?” No, not how, she knew how. Don’t be sick, not yet. “When?”

“Two months.”

“You’ve only been moved out a little over two months. You jumped right into her bed?”

Dan stared at her levelly and emptily, and Laurie snorted, a watery snort of horror and disgust and disbelief.

“You’re staying with her, and you’re having a baby?” Laurie said. Dan nodded and she saw his tears and she wanted to punch him in the face. “You told me you didn’t want kids?”

He was gray-white. “I didn’t. I don’t. It’s an accident.”

Enough. Laurie stood up, grabbed Dan by the shoulders, and manhandled him out of the room and into the hallway, shrieking, “Get out! Get the fuck out!” while Dan made useless vague noises of objection.

“You do this to me, you tell me you don’t want kids, and you do this?!”

She pushed Dan out the door so hard he stumbled and nearly fell over. Laurie didn’t care if the whole street heard, or saw.

She slammed the door with much force and noisily slid the bolt. It wasn’t exactly likely he’d risk his life by using his key to get back in, but it felt the right thing to do all the same. Final.

She leaned her head on the glass for just a moment and then turned and raced up to the bathroom, vomiting into the loo, retching again and again until there was nothing left, then slumped back down on the floor. She had a good view of the underside of the bowl and the whiskers that coated it—Dan was gone forever, but still here recently enough she’d still be cleaning up his mess. Mess? Devastation.

Baby. He was having a child, with someone called Megan. He had been having an affair for some time, that was certain, emotionally if not physically. He’d celebrated his first nights of freedom by impregnating someone else. Laurie was going to have to recite these utterly harrowing, bizarre facts until they sank in for her.

He was going to be a dad. But not with her. An image sprung into her head, a pink turnip-faced newborn with froggy eyes, wrapped in a cocoon of white crochet blanket eyes, Dan cradling it, looking up at the camera with the shell-shocked, cloud-nine expression of an hours-old parent. He would do this, without her. She would not be the mother of his children. He would not be the father of hers.

Hers. Hah.

Laurie made a noise that sounded peculiar to her, in the quiet of the house, a kind of strangled whimper, shading into an animalistic howl. It echoed, unanswered, in her empty house.