If I Never Met You: A Novel

Dan

What time you think you’ll be back tonight? Roughly?

Laurie

Dunno. SOON I HOPE.

Dan

You hope?

Laurie

Everyone has raspberries in Proseccos

Dan

I thought you liked Prosecco. And raspberries

Laurie

I do! I’ve got one. ☺ But denotes a certain type of Girls Night Out that’s not very me. They’re calling them “cheeky bubbles”

Dan

Your problem is other people like it too? Can’t imagine my criticism of a night out being “people ordered the same drink” ☺

Laurie

. . . Except when you said you hate stag dos that “start with getting ten pints of Stella in at 7am in Gatwick Spoons.”

Dan

You can’t take a moment off being a lawyer, can you?

Laurie

HAH. You misspelled “you got me bang to rights, Loz” ☺

Dan is typing

. . .

Dan is typing

. . .

Last seen today at 9:18 p.m.

Dan must’ve thought better of his reply. Laurie clicked her phone off and pushed it back into her bag.

Obviously she didn’t really mind the cliché, booze was booze, that was trying to be wittily acerbic bravado. It was a distress signal. Laurie was at sea and her phone felt like a connection back to shore. Tonight was an unwelcome flashback to the emotions of lunch breaks at secondary school, when you had a single-parent mum and no money and no cool.

So far, the girls had discussed the benefits of eyebrow microblading (“Ashley from Stag Communications looks like Eddie Munster”) whether or not Marcus Fairbright-Page at KPMG was a bad arsehole who’d break hearts and bed frames (Laurie thought on what she’d gleaned, that was an emphatic yes, but also gathered that a verdict wasn’t desired). And how many burpees you could manage in HIIT class at Virgin Active (no idea there, none).

They were all so glamorous and feminine, so carefully groomed and produced for public display. Laurie felt like a dishwater-feathered pigeon in an enclosure full of chirruping tropical birds.

Emily really owed her. Tonight was the product of something that happened roughly once every three months—her best friend, and owner of a PR company, begged Laurie to join their team night out and make it “less bloody boring, or we’ll spend the whole time discussing the new accounts.” Emily, as CEO and hostess, was at the head of the table putting everything on the company credit card and handing around the Nocellara olives and salted almonds. Laurie, late arrival, was at the far end.

“Who was that, then?” said Suzanne, to her right. Suzanne had a beautiful shoulder-length sheet of custard-colored hair and the gaze of a customs officer.

Laurie turned and concealed her irritation with a ventriloquist’s dummy smile. “Who was what?”

“On your phone! You looked well intense.” Suzanne rolled her doe eyes upward and mimed a sort of chimpanzee-like, vacant trance state, her hands moving across an imaginary handset. She whooped with girlish, alcohol-fueled laughter, the sort that could sound cruel.

Laurie said: “My boyfriend.”

The word “boyfriend” had started to sound a trifle silly, Laurie supposed, but “partner” was so dry and stiff. She had a feeling her present company already thought she was those things.

“Awww . . . is it early days?” Suzanne combed her fairy-tale princess hair over her ears with her fingers, and put her flute to her lips.

“Haha! Hardly. We’ve been going out since we were eighteen. We met at university.”

“Oh my GOD,” Suzanne said, “And you’re how old?”

Laurie tensed her stomach muscles and said: “Thirty-six.”

“Oh my GOD!” Suzanne squawked again, loudly enough that they had the attention of a few others. “And you’ve been together all this time? No flings or breaks? Like, he’s your first boyfriend?”

“Yeah.”

“I could not have done that. Oh my God. Wow. Was he your”—she lowered her voice—“first-first?”

Laurie cringed inwardly.

“Bit personal after two drinks, hah?”

Suzanne was not to be deterred.

“Oh my giddy aunt! Oh no!? Je-SUS!” she said gaily, as if she was being fun and not judgmental and prurient and generally awful. “But you’re not married?”

“No.”

“Do you want to be?”

“Not really,” Laurie said, shrugging. “I’m not madly pro or anti marriage.”

“Maybe when you have kids?” Suzanne supplied. Oh, subtle. Piss the piss off.

“Are you married?” Laurie said.

“No!” Suzanne shook her head and the lovely hair rippled. “I want to be married by thirty, for sure. I’ve got four years to find Mr. Right.”

“Why by thirty?”

“I just kinda feel that I don’t want to be on the shelf.” She paused. “No offense.”

“Sure.”

Laurie briefly debated saying: You know that this is really rude, right? I mean, you know you can’t stick “no offense” on the end like it takes the curse off? And then made the usual British calculations about the ten seconds of triumph not being worth the hours of embarrassment and hostility afterward.

“Where are you from, Laurie?” said Carly in the animal-print top, sitting on the other side of Suzanne, and a familiar heavy lead settled in Laurie’s gut.

“Yorkshire,” she said, with a bright aw hell please can we not smile, which she knew would be lost on the recipient. “You can probably tell from the accent.”

“No, I meant where are you from?” she said, vaguely gesturing at her own face.

Of course you did.

The usual fork in the road opened up: answer the question she knew they were asking, or pretend not to understand and prolong the agony. If you didn’t pander to it, you were being ungracious, chippy, making a thing of it. You were the problem.

“Yorkshire, seriously. I was born at Huddersfield Royal.”

A moment ticked past and Suzanne, to no surprise whatsoever, pitched in: “She means where are your mum and dad from?”

“My dad’s from Oldham . . .”

A fresh tray of cocktails arrived, cucumber curls inside like ribbons, and Laurie’s genealogy was abruptly demoted in interest.

“. . . My mum’s from Martinique,” she said, but a distracted Carly and Suzanne had already forgotten they’d asked.

“Y’what?”

“My mum is from Martinique!” Laurie said shrilly, above the music, pointing at her face.

“Your mum’s called MARTINE EEK?”

Fuck it.

“I’m getting an old-fashioned,” Laurie said, standing up abruptly. Make of that name what you will.

Then she saw them, a chance glimpse through the shifting throng. Laurie involuntarily grinned at the ignoble thrill of unexpectedly seeing something she definitely wasn’t supposed to see, huddled on a banquette, twenty feet away.

Her colleague Jamie Carter was out with a gorgeous young woman. So far, so predictable. But, rather than an unknown lovely, Laurie was 99 percent sure that the woman he was cozying up to was the boss’s niece, Eve, who he was specifically warned off going anywhere near, the day before she arrived. Office gossip dynamite. Possibly employment-contract-terminating dynamite, depending on just how protective Mr. Salter was.

The warning had been the source of much mirth at the office: Jamie really was a “Lock Up Your Daughters” threat.

“Might as well fit Carter with a GoPro, from what I heard,” she’d guffawed. “The secret life of the neighborhood tom.”

Laurie was picking at a bag of crimson seedless grapes at the time, and the office junior, Jasmine, unintentionally outed herself as yet another with a crush by blushing the same shade as the fruit.

Well, whatever had been said by his superiors, it obviously had a devastating impact. Jamie had the law school undergraduate and twenty-four-year-old babe out on her own after hours and sipping Havana Club within a week.

Laurie had to admire his balls. And no doubt she wouldn’t be the only one.

The risky choice of companion aside, the Refuge was exactly where she’d expect to see a man like Jamie on a Friday night. Chic’s “Good Times” was blaring and an artwork directly above their heads, a factory chimney skyline picked out in black and white tiles, declared THE GLAMOUR OF MANCHESTER. He and Eve were suited to their subtitles.

A glittering cathedral of a bar inside a nineteenth-century hotel, it was only about fifteen minutes’ walk from their office on Deansgate. It wasn’t as if Jamie was in deep cover. Why take such a risk?

Perhaps he’d simply gambled he wouldn’t be caught here by any of the old sticks or suburban snipes among their colleagues. Yes, that would be it, as what little Laurie knew of Jamie suggested he’d enjoy playing the odds. It was unlikely he’d notice her, for more than one reason, in her vantage point among a gaggle of women at the other end of the room.

She could see Jamie was in his element, handsome face animated in storytelling, a palm theatrically clapped over forehead at one point to emphasize dismay or shame. Eve was visibly falling for him by another degree with each passing moment, her eyes practically star shaped, like an emoji. (And didn’t he wear glasses usually? Hah, the vanity.)

Jamie was clearly an expert at this, a completely practiced hunter in his natural habitat. Whether Eve knew that she was this weekend’s antelope was another matter.

His hair was short and dark with a curl to it, his cheekbones like shoe molds. They’d come straight from the office, him still in white shirtsleeves. And Eve . . . hmmm, Eve knew they’d be doing this, as she was in a navy pinstripe trouser suit, jacket discarded, with a red silk camisole, swinging earrings, matching spiky ketchup-colored heels. No doubt her nine-to-five practical flats were crushed into that capacious bag. (Was that a Birkin? Oh, to have rich uncles.)

Laurie felt a shiver of awe at how well Jamie and Eve fit in amid the din and the crush of all these bright young things, their mating rituals, taut stomachs, and brash confidence.

Imagine being single, she thought. Imagine being expected to go home and take your clothes off with someone you’d never met before. Horror. Doing it for a hobby, the way Jamie Carter did, felt alien to her. Thank God for Dan. Thank God for going home to someone who was home.

As Laurie waited in the four-person-deep rabble at the bar, she pondered the Jamie Carter Phenomenon.

Jamie’s arrival had caused a stir from his first week at her law firm in the way conspicuously good-looking men were wont to do, and in the way anyone was wont to do in offices where people spent a lot of time in zoo captivity, feeding on distraction. The death of the cigarette break in the modern age, Laurie noticed, had been replaced by snouting around social media profiles for material for discussion. Laurie was constantly thankful her life was far too boring to make a sideshow.

At first there were excitable whispers at the water dispensers in Salter & Rowson solicitors that someone as fine as Jamie was single, wondering if he was an eligible bachelor, as if they were in an Austen novel. And, as Diana said, he was “without any baggage,” which Laurie always thought was a harsh way to refer to ex-spouses and children.

Then in time, the excitable whispers were about the fact he wasn’t apparently interested in dating anyone in particular, but that he’d disappeared off into the night with X or Y. (X or Y tended to be, like Eve, a beautiful intern, or a friend of an employee.) Laurie thought this was only a surprising turn of events if you’d never met a man with lots of options and nothing at stake before.

How old was he, thirty? And hungry for not just a plethora of dates but also professional advancement, if the second layer of whispers about him was to be believed.

The only unusual aspect to Jamie’s reputation as a stealth shagger was that he picked his targets cleverly. The interns had always finished their interning, the friend of a friend was never a close friend, and what Russians called kompromat was scant. Therefore, while it was known he was a ladies’ man, he never got blamed for lady-killing or suffered a poor testimonial about his sexual prowess from a scorned woman. Jamie Carter never got into any trouble. Until now, perhaps.