If I Never Met You: A Novel

As Christmas drew ever closer, Laurie was back on form at work, and it highlighted how unfair it had been to accuse her of falling standards. She’d known this, but it was reassuring to have it confirmed.

She saw Colm McClaverty on the court steps, after her Disturbance of the Peace client had got off with a mere knuckle rap.

“Thanks for the hatchet job reviews you’ve been giving me,” she said.

“It’s just Chinatown, Jake!”

“Idiot.”

“Oh God, if one of Arsenal’s strikers is off form, Man U don’t let them win to be nice.”

“Yeah, but winning or losing happens in court, there’s no need to garbage talk me outside afterward.”

“All I said was you didn’t seem like yourself, and that—Malcolm is it?—Michael, yeah, took it and ran with it. Like you had other things going on.” He raised his eyebrows.

Laurie wasn’t going to bite.

“Next time, can you not?”

“You have my word.”

Colm ducked down, grabbed her hand, and kissed the back of it, while Laurie said: “UGH, GERROFF.”

Men in her profession, honestly.

“Coffee and a Pret at lunch?” Jamie had WhatsApped her. They’d done this a few times, and when Laurie today commended him on attention to detail in keeping up appearances, Jamie said, “To be honest, it’s nice to have a friend at work. Nothing more than that to it.”

“Aw, God! You poor thing,” Laurie said.

“Don’t worry about me, I’m used to it. ‘I’m married to the sea.’”

Laurie snorted, digging a wooden fork into her crayfish and avocado.

“I have a question for you, and you don’t have to answer. When Dan and Michael were having a go, they mentioned a woman in Liverpool who had a nervous breakdown. Was that your ex?”

“Yeah, God. Michael has people everywhere, huh?” Jamie said. “Stephanie had time off work and said she’d had a breakdown, I’m not sure if it was true. Yes, that sounds . . . unkind, but she leaned hard on how it looked unchivalrous of me to contradict her. I was screwed. Stay silent and tacitly accept her version, or speak up and be the bastard adding to her pain. By the end I had no friends, a whack reputation, and I had to leave.”

Laurie had a funny twinge at “Stephanie.” Nothing like the same magnitude as hearing of a “Megan,” but that thud when an abstract concept of a person becomes flesh and blood specific. Names mattered more than you realized.

“What happened?”

“We had a thing, for maybe two months. I broke a rule by getting involved with someone in the same office which I will never, ever . . .” He looked at Laurie and stopped. “Except when it’s deeply civilized, like us.”

Laurie nodded.

“I thought we’d been clear it was casual. She was not happy when I decided it had run its course, felt I’d wronged her and misled her. Tale as old as time.”

“Tale usually told by men, as old as time.” Laurie smiled.

“Yes, all right, no need to go all Emmeline Pankhurst on me.” Jamie smiled. “Anyway, from then on it was warfare: psychological, biochemical. I had to block her on every place online, she dragged my emails from the work server, she said . . .” Jamie grimaced, and brushed a piece of arugula from his jacket sleeve.

“You don’t have to tell me.”

He lowered his voice: “She went ’round saying I’d roughed her up in bed. That there’d been some choking, I’d gone too far and had violent tendencies.”

“Ugh.” Laurie blanched, immediately wondering if he was into choking.

“Yeah, ugh, you have a visceral reaction to that. Afterward, though, the doubt sets in that maybe, maybe, I did do it. Her whispering campaign was pretty effective—they started calling me the Boston Lincolnshire Strangler.”

“Oof.”

“Eventually it wasn’t possible for me to stay, and I started looking for jobs here. So Michael and Dan are right: my name’s mud at that firm. I would point out two things though: one, my work was fine, and two, it all relies on the testimony of one person, who I was forced to conclude isn’t very stable.”

Laurie knew that as much as Michael and Dan were biased as hell in wanting to think the worst of Jamie, she was biased in wanting to believe the best. She’d heard men do the oh her, she’s crazy spiel to discredit women before and she instinctively didn’t like it. But unless she’d been very blessed or Jamie was exceptionally cunning, she’d not seen a whisper of this villainy herself.

“Anyway, enough of my grisly past. What’s on my not-girlfriend’s weekend schedule?”

“Oh. Sunday lunch at Albert’s Schloss with my dad. Before he goes back to the Balearics for the winter.”

She told Jamie how his advice to tell her mother had been spot-on. “I thought you were a new soul but you might be an old soul. As my mother says,” Laurie said.

“Being strictly accurate, you thought I was an arsehole,” Jamie said, laughing. He paused and she thought he might be ruminating on her paternal relationship, except he said, “Mind if I copy that venue idea? I’m meant to be organizing something lunch-like myself.”

“Sure.”

As they arrived back at the office, a slender, striking young woman, with slicked-back hair and coordinated belted coat and spike-heeled shoes, reached the door at the same time as them.

“Eve!” Jamie said, more of an exclamation than a greeting.

“Oh, hey you.”

She swung in for a wholly nothing-like-a-former-intern kiss on his cheek. Her eyes flickered to Laurie and back again.

“I’m here for lunch with my uncle,” she said.

She was clearly lingering to say more to Jamie, and Laurie muttered polite excuses and left them to it.

Jamie’s relief at her absenting herself was palpable, his nerves crackling and swooping in the dead air, like a radio trying to find a signal.

Suddenly, as much as she wanted to believe that nothing untoward had happened between them, she didn’t. They were birds of a feather: sly, stunning, up to Machiavellian shenanigans that remained mysterious to plodding mortals like Laurie.

Wait, wait: Eve was the woman he’d fallen for? Of course! It was forehead-slap obvious. No wonder Jamie had seemed so discomfited just now, no wonder he’d been edgy in Lincoln. What a quandary! He was going to get his partnership, then figure out how to broach it with Salter? Woo-hoo.

How life surprised you: not so long ago, she’d have thought, Ideal match, those two can sit on thrones side by side in hell together. Now, frankly, it seemed more like heaven.

She’d grown so fond of Jamie, and just like that, he was returned to the magical realm he was from. This would be true even without Eve—Jamie wasn’t going to stay doing his job long. If he didn’t get made partner, as Michael correctly predicted, he’d be off to London, no doubt.

Back at her desk, Laurie had a feeling of missing him before he’d left her life.