If I Never Met You: A Novel

Laurie rang in sick the next morning. It helped her voice was barely a croak as she spoke to the receptionist to claim upset stomach and the sweats.

“Ugh, yeah, you sound like shit—don’t come in and give it to us,” said Jan on reception, who no one had ever confused with a bleeding-heart liberal.

Laurie crawled back to bed and lay staring at the white star-shaped ceiling lampshade as the hours drifted past.

She felt certain Dan had gone in to the office because: (1) he’d have guessed she might not, and they couldn’t both be off without questions and a cover story about food poisoning or something, which was a falsehood too far now; and (2) he wasn’t shattered by what was happening.

The only communication she received was an email from hyperefficient Jamie Carter: Hey, sorry to bother when you’re on your sickbed but do you know anything about the adjournment in the Cheetham Hill robbery?

Oh, go swivel. “If ambition was hair, he’d be the yeti,” as Bharat once said.

Laurie pretended to herself she was ill and therefore allowed herself to doze.

When she rejoined consciousness for a spell in the late afternoon, she had a text from Bharat—WTAF, YOU ARE NEVER ILL! It was Di’s baking day so I saved you a jam tart, but a fly got stuck in it xxx—and another, from Dan.

Hi. Hope you’re OK. Can’t imagine how shit you feel, Laurie, and I’m so so so sorry, I never meant for any of this to happen. I don’t know what to say. Call me if you want to, even if it’s to shout at me.

When Dan dropped his initial bombshell—she couldn’t think of that partial account of a conversation now without clutching her chest, like she might have a coronary with the rage—she’d wondered if he’d become an arsehole. She now knew the answer to that. Or if he’d not become one, maybe he’d always had this tendency, it had gotten worse, and somehow Laurie had blinded herself to it.

“Call me if you want to, even if it’s to shout at me” was revolting—the preening self-regard and false bighearted performative good guyness of go on, I know I deserve it, once you’d swaggered clear of the blast.

He’d very likely robbed Laurie of her chance of parenthood with his indecision, walked out the door, and immediately inseminated someone else. She hadn’t even begun the work of working out how upset she was about her odds of motherhood being dramatically slashed, after a lifetime of thinking it was there for her at the time of her choosing.

Dan hadn’t been sure about taking this huge step with the love of his life, but with Megan, it had happened instantly. He gave to her what he’d withheld from the woman who’d washed his socks for the last decade.

Dan had said it wasn’t planned, but Laurie was at the stage where, if Dan said it was raining, she’d go outside to check.

The clock on Laurie’s bedside table hit six. A whole day had floated by and she’d barely registered it passing.

Six months or so ago, Dan had taken up running. Laurie had been pleased, even impressed. She was quite good at keeping fit, going to the gym, walking everywhere; Dan had been the one glued to the sofa with his hand stuck in a bag of Tangy Cheese Doritos.

She now saw that hobby for what it was—getting match fit for wrestling with an exciting new prospect. Spending hours pounding the streets, music blaring, not having to interact with his long-term girlfriend, while he plotted a fresh course. Beginning to break away.

They used to talk so openly—it was something they used to privately congratulate themselves on, even boast about to each other. How come they don’t discuss this stuff? they’d say in wonder about friends, shaking their heads. You’re my best friend as well as my girlfriend, why would I not? Dan used to say, at whatever laddish thing a friend had said he’d never tell his other half.

Dan was a great talker, Laurie was a talker and a good listener; when something had bothered one of them, it got dealt with up front.

That had subtly changed in the last couple of years, Laurie realized. What she called Dan’s moodiness—and it was moods, even sulks, certainly extended silences which she couldn’t and wasn’t invited to penetrate—was also a closing off and a closing down, putting up a forbidding wall around what was actually going on in his head.

At some point, he turned away from her; he made the decision that the solution to his problems didn’t lie in Laurie.

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.

On the third day of mourning, Laurie’s utter horror at the thought of knowing anything about Megan—simply saying the name in her head was like repeating a curse, hexing herself—turned on a sixpence.

Laurie suddenly had a gnawing hunger to see everything. It must be some part of the stages of grieving, or the shock receding. Your appetite returning after a sickness.

It was a Saturday, but time had ceased to have much meaning for Laurie, since the Wednesday night of the announcement. She wondered if she could get a doctor’s note to not go in to work next week too.

With shaky hands and weak body—when did she last eat? She thought she recalled finding half a squashed Twix in her gym bag, yesterday lunchtime—Laurie hauled her laptop onto her knees on the sofa. She opened her rarely used Facebook page, and searched for Megan. The first name would surely reveal the likeliest suspect.

Nothing. Not in Dan’s friends, not in the friend’s lists of those she knew at Rawlings. Megan must be one of those rare people who didn’t use social media.

Unless . . . Laurie lay on her back and stared at the filigree of spiderwebs along the picture rail, the parts of a house you rarely paused long enough to inspect, when not laid flat on your back, in the twilight land of the unwell. Unless.

Unless Megan had blocked her? It seemed aggressive, unfair—surely it was for Laurie to block Megan, in the proper way of things. But if you knew your new boyfriend had told his very-recent-ex-long-term girlfriend you were pregnant, you’d know a very, very scorned woman was coming hurtling your way. Why would you leave any of your business open to it?

Laurie opened a browser again, but this time, set up a fresh Facebook profile using her Gmail address, instead of the old Yahoo one.

Laurie wouldn’t need to add any friends or signal the existence of the second account in any way; she could use it purely as a stalking tool.

Once it was active and she launched her investigations again, Laurie didn’t know what to hope for.

Confirming you’d been blocked was disconcerting enough when it was just someone you didn’t rub along with brilliantly well at work, let alone the woman who stole the love of your life and was pregnant with his child. But if she wasn’t blocked and Megan really was a twenty-first-century Greta Garbo, Laurie’s burning need to know more would go unmet.

With a dull thud, as she clicked on Dan Price’s profile—his photo, a throwback picture of himself in fancy dress at university on the night he met Laurie, salt into wounds—and then again in his friends, Megan Mooney sprang up in front of her. Profile photo, a jokey one of Lucille Ball.

She was blocked. The bitch had blocked her, while camping here brazenly in Dan’s friends. Laurie swallowed back bile, literal, physical bile.

She took a deep breath and braced herself before diving in. Megan Mooney. She sounded like a secretary in a 1940s screwball, or the quiet mouse “by day” alter ego of a Marvel superhero.

Laurie checked herself: she could do this without sobbing or screaming, breathed again, and clicked.

Megan had shared some JustGiving links—OH YOU LIKE SUPPORTING CHARITIES, DO YOU, LIKE A GOOD PERSON?—Laurie internally spasmed: she might not be ready for this experience, like a wobbly patient on a ward trying to walk too fast and doing themselves a mischief.

Would she ever be ready?

What was publicly available on Megan’s profile wasn’t very informative, and when Laurie was scrolling birthday wishes from two years ago (was Dan there? Not that she could find) she moved to the photo galleries.

They were generally of groups, but Laurie clicked and clicked until she saw enough of the pictures so she could spot which was Megan, by her ubiquity.

She couldn’t help it; her first response was to compare herself.

Megan was a redhead, nothing like Laurie physically, properly Lucozade ginger. Laurie remembered something about gingerism being a recessive gene and couldn’t remember if that meant Dan’s child would be one.

Megan had close-set eyes, a strong nose, and an intimidating rather than pretty face. Laurie was easily conventionally prettier. Laurie both knew this to be true straightaway and yet simultaneously didn’t trust it, doubted it, and hated herself for this being such a necessary measure. Laurie had never been someone who’d traded on her looks. But, as an acerbic female colleague once said to her regards the length of her coupledom, you’ve never needed to.

And much like Megan’s age, Laurie moved from a split second of relief to confusion and intimidation. If she wasn’t a dazzling beauty, then how could a woman whose powers of attraction she couldn’t immediately see do this to her? Dan wanted her more than he wanted Laurie, so any bargaining and comparing now was futile. Megan was clearly killer sexy to Dan, as she’d killed their relationship. Her powers of attraction had annihilated an eighteen-year history.

Further poking around revealed Megan was sporty and had an incredible figure, a near-concave stomach (that was about to change. Laurie hated herself for expanding the picture with forefinger and thumb, staring morbidly at the space where Dan’s child was), and legs that went on for days.

If she needed to feel physically inferior to understand this, then Megan’s physique could do it. Laurie had a twinge of political outrage—if she’d left Dan for another man, was it likely he’d spend any time studying his rival’s calf muscles for clues as to why she’d strayed? Nope.

Here was Megan at the end of a 10K run for breast cancer research, everyone pink faced in their Lycra gear, linked arms and holding their medals up to the camera. Laurie burned at the grinning women flanking her, the sense of sisterhood in their female cause—some for me would’ve been nice, eh, “Megs”? (She was Megs on her tabard.) Hell hath no fury.

She came to the end of what she was able to see. The Add Friend button taunted her and she closed the window, a dampness gathering on her brow. Laurie fantasized the catastrophe of hitting it by mistake, Megan seeing the request.

Hah, Laurie was worried about that gaffe, when Megan had a fetus half made of Dan’s DNA to explain?

She shut her laptop and lay down on the sofa again.

There had been a secretive alternative universe, a budding romance, alongside Laurie’s normal life with Dan, the two timelines eventually to intersect in the most explosive way.

Laurie knew how it must have been steadily built, for them to be ready to leap into bed together as soon as the Getting Rid of Laurie admin was complete. (Assuming that it was true they waited, of course.)

Shared glances, momentary, supposedly insignificant touching of hands, or knees, under tables. Innocent coffees after court, in which perhaps a little too much was said about their respective private lives. Rueful humor that suggested maybe it wasn’t a bed of roses. Tiny hints that you might be open to alternatives. Texts on the weekend, only light jokes but making it clear you were thinking about someone out of hours. Testing responses, plausible deniability always there if you got nothing back.

Knowing this had happened felt to Laurie like thinking you were healthy, going about your normal days, and not knowing a fatal cancer was flowering somewhere, unfelt, in an organ. Had Megan cheated on her partner too? There was no sign of a significant other, but Laurie could see only a dozen or so images.

When did it start? How did it start? They were questions to which Laurie would very likely never know answers.

In a few short years, or even months, it would be past the point anyone would even think it was her business. A page had turned for Dan, and Laurie was now part of his past tense. Laurie was someone who’d appear fleetingly in shadowy form in dinner party anecdotes. Dan dandling an infant on his lap: Oh, Santorini? Yeah, I went there with my ex. Eighteen years, and she’d be worth a two-letter descriptor.

While Laurie did some exhausted sobbing in lieu of being willing to throw her nice crockery around the room, a clear thought solidified in her mind: I am not only a sad woman. I am a bloody lawyer. I want to know when it started. I want to get this bastard for provable infidelity, even if not sexual. So there will be evidence. THINK.

Megan was into running. And Dan had taken up running, which Laurie was sure wasn’t a coincidence. When he ran, he listened to music. She was confident he was running and not off on any rendezvous, as he regularly came back red-faced and showed her his route on Runkeeper, before dramatically collapsing and saying Laurie best fetch him a medicinal beer.

Laurie was rarely online, so the place he could interact with Megan was Facebook, and the topic they’d bond over was their stupid jogging. Running groups? Laurie used her old profile to check Dan’s activity. Nothing. He wasn’t the sort of person to be fair, the NIMBYs of Chorlton Community site drove him around the bend.

Music, though. Running. She’d glimpsed a playlist on his phone screen, as he wound the earphones around it.

A combination of her professional cunning and her instincts about Dan meant the answer came to her in a second: they made running playlists together. She was sure of it. Dan used to give her endless mixtapes when they were first going out—it was his kind of courtship. Song choices could covertly yet powerfully declare all kinds of things you’d never dare say outright.

Laurie opened her laptop, logged in to Spotify. She’d only ever had Dan’s user name for that, and she bet he thought she’d never check in, and if she did, wouldn’t know what she was looking at.

Well, she did now.

Laurie’s skin prickled with the successful detective “Gotcha!” sensation, coupled with horror at seeing it laid out, as if she’d torn back the covers on writhing bodies.

Among Dan’s playlists, there was one made six months ago, called I Wanna Run 2 U. Nice wordplay, twat. There it was, halfway down: a song added by a different user, one calling herself meggymoon. Ugh, UGH.

The track was called “When Love Takes Over.”

Dan’s next was “Go Your Own Way” by Fleetwood Mac. Another from meggymoon: “Not Afraid.” It was straight call-and-response of two people panting for each other; Laurie hardly needed to be a Bletchley code breaker.

Dan’s next: the Stones’ “Start Me Up.” Puke. Laurie was embarrassed for him.

It was a very modern way to transact cheating and yet it was an age-old dynamic—overcaffeinated, adolescent excitement, egging each other on by degrees.

And hiding in plain sight, because if Laurie had queried this playlist, they would be a bunch of songs, and—DUH!—loads of songs are about sex and love, dummy. She wondered how Dan would’ve denied it. Or would he have broken down, used it as a chance to tell the truth? She’d never know.

Laurie picked up her phone, not in full control of herself, and texted Dan.

I know you were messing around with her six months back, I have the proof. I have no idea who you are anymore, and I don’t want to know.

Then she turned onto her side and went to sleep. When she briefly awoke, she had three messages in reply, and managed to delete them without reading them.