LITMIR.BIZ

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without it being a giveaway. She had to play it off as business as usual, or the jig was up.

      Something that began so lightly was now the cause of much fretting for Edie. She spent evenings scrolling through Jack’s emails and texts, looking for proof of his reciprocal feelings for her. ‘X’ marks the spot.

      Jack was also once again saying that Charlotte wanted things he didn’t: weddings, babies. Wood-burning stoves and 4x4s.

      Edie now avoided talking about all this, and yet equally avoided what it told her about him. Refusing to look at the great big health and safety warning sign, saying: DO NOT PROCEED BEYOND THIS POINT. HAZARDOUS MATERIALS. MANAGEMENT ACCEPT NO LIABILITY.

      It dawned on Edie that he didn’t tell Charlotte about their chatting because he thought it was innocent. He told Charlotte because he was an accomplished liar, and those liars hid in plain sight.

      There was only one person to take this to. Her best mate, Hannah, who inconsiderately lived in Edinburgh.

      Edie bucketed it all out by last orders in a nice old man’s type boozer on the Royal Mile on a bank holiday trip to the far north.

      ‘You know,’ Edie said, trying desperately to wear it lightly, ‘I might be better with it if I understood him and Charlotte. They’re so different.’

      Hannah shook her head, dismissively.

      ‘Selfish jokers always like a woman who runs the show. They have a basic respect for finances and efficiency. If not fidelity.’

      This had the CLANG of ugly truth.

      ‘Take it as a sign you don’t know him as well as you think you do, not that she’s wrong for him,’ Hannah said, adjusting her poker-straight brown hair in its top knot.

      This sort of common sense wasn’t what Edie wanted to hear. She wanted to be told Jack was fatally in love with her and hadn’t found the courage to tell her.

      ‘This wasn’t your idea, you know,’ Hannah said, picking at peanuts in the ripped-open packet between them. ‘You didn’t want to end up here. He’s been messing with you and he doesn’t care if you get hurt, as long as he gets his entertainment. The butterflies and rollercoasters that you don’t get when you’re settled. And you’re friendly and obliging; some blokes take advantage of that openness.’

      Edie knew the word she wasn’t using that also applied. Needy. He exploited a neediness she’d not admitted to herself she had. Needy Edie.

      Hannah had been with lovely dependable Pete since university, though, Edie thought. Perhaps she doesn’t understand what a complicated jungle it is out here.

      ‘Does he even know I’ve been hurt by it, though? Maybe he doesn’t know I care,’ Edie said.

      Hannah shook her head.

      ‘He knows. If he didn’t know, why keep things that didn’t help, from you? Why not say, by the way what’s your views on this place on RightMove we’re seeing on Saturday?’

      Edie nodded, morose. ‘Don’t laugh at me. But could he be confused about his feelings?’

      ‘He’s not so confused he can’t co-sign mortgage papers. Bottom line. If he wanted to be with you, he’d be with you. However infatuated he is, he doesn’t want to be with you enough to do anything about it.’

      Hannah had special dispensation to be brutal, because she was a surgeon (kidneys) and when she’d had a bad day, someone had died. ‘I lost someone on the table,’ was a phrase that kicked Edie’s complaints into touch.

      Edie couldn’t find any way out of this last logical point. Her lip went wobbly.

      ‘Fuck, Hannah, he’s broken me. I feel as if there’s no one else in the world who will ever be right for me, if I can’t have him. And I’m thirty-five. I’m probably right.’

      Hannah put her hand on her shoulder.

      ‘Edith,’ – school friends didn’t hold with her ‘Edie’ revisionism – ‘he was not right for you. If he’s treating his girlfriend like shit by doing this, if you ended up together, he’d treat you like shit too. That is an eternal truth, and you know it.’

      Edie couldn’t allow this to be true, even though she knew it couldn’t be truer than Darwin being right about the ape thing.

      She whimpered that maybe he didn’t want to hurt Charlotte.

      ‘Haha!’ Hannah said. ‘Oh wait, you’re serious?’

      ‘Also,’ Edie said, knowing she was truly rummaging at the bottom of the Christmas stocking with this one, with the unshelled Brazil nuts you could never find a nutcracker to open, ‘he once said that I’m unpindownable and intimidating, I’ve been independent for so long. Perhaps he thinks I’d be a risk …’

      ‘Oh yeah, so hard to catch that you’re sat in another country crying about him over your weekends! Exactly the sort of thing that manipulative bullshitters say,’ Hannah said. ‘Ugh. Sorry, I really don’t like him, Edith.’

      Edie sort-of agreed and yet thought if Hannah met Jack and was exposed to the full force of his charm, she’d understand. And that perhaps Edie shouldn’t have said so much, because now if Hannah and Jack ever met she’d have to do some serious repair work on his image. This was such a triumph of hope over rationality, she wondered if he’d made her loopy.

      So, all things considered, Edie should’ve seen the engagement coming.

      Yet the Friday when Edie spied Charlotte pink-cheeked with excitement, fingers of her left hand clasped by a cooing secretary – it was like someone had put a fish hook in her stomach, attached it to a flatbed truck and accelerated away.

      Edie pretended not to have seen, and slipped out to a client meeting, which she didn’t return from. She got a text later that night.

       Hey you. Where were you today? Didn’t see you in Luigis’s after work? And yeah so I’m getting married, what’s up with that? Gulp. Are we growing up? Please tell me we aren’t … I’m not ready for the La-Z-Boy recliner yet, E.T. Jx

      She threw her phone across the room, drank three-quarters of a bottle of gin and danced around so loudly to Kelis’s ‘Caught Out There’ that the couple downstairs complained.

      It was in many ways worse than if she and Jack had a full- blown physical affair. That infidelity was incontrovertible; making fury and hurt legitimate. An emotional affair required two people to agree it had taken place, even while one person lay in tatters. Her dad once told her about ‘quantum superposition’ which seemed to boil down to something both existing and not existing at the same time. This, to Edie, summed up her and Jack.

      She couldn’t complain. She should never have got entangled with someone who was with someone else.

      It was like trying to go to the police to report that you’d had a knife pulled on you during a drug deal.

       8

      The problem with waking up after a day like yesterday, Edie discovered, were those few seconds of freedom before you remembered what had happened. A psychological prison break where you didn’t make it to the perimeter fence.

      She had finally passed out in twitchy exhaustion around four a.m., roused by the alarm on her phone at five. For a split second, she couldn’t remember where she was, why she was looking at a flowery bed canopy or why she was so tired and wrung out. When it all came rushing back, it was almost as bad as realising her fate the first time round.

      Edie jumped up and ran to the bathroom, dragged a flannel across her puffy eyes, threw make-up in the general direction of her face. She pushed every possession into her trolley case, swallowed hard and squared her shoulders. None of this should be happening. She should

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