If I Never Met You: A Novel

“Oh no, fuck that! You don’t get to do: ‘We kissed, woo, wavy lines screen fade.’ We need details.”

Jamie had spent Friday and Saturday nights at Laurie’s, and by Sunday, they agreed it was time for him to give some quality time to Margaret the cat, so Laurie went for a walk in Etherow Country Park with Emily and Nadia.

She decided to drop the “I have been having sex with Jamie Carter all weekend” bombshell when they were half an hour in, having some water. She was worried they’d spot it from the way she was walking.

Naturally, Emily spat her Evian in a huge arc.

Nadia straightened her cloche hat. Laurie wondered if she’d wear it in summer.

“We do, we need details,” Nadia agreed.

“It was . . . good,” Laurie said, knowing she was involuntarily doing a smug, dazzle-eyed, faraway face. “It was better than good. He said . . .”

“Yes?!” Emily said, primed for porn.

“He said I’d knackered him out by the time he left.”

“Haha, oh my God! Was it face holding I ruv you, or virile mean pounding?”

“Kind of a combination?”

“Oof. Potent.”

The First One After Dan experience had been a strange combination of quite overwhelming and completely straightforward. Laurie had built it up to be a seismic shift in the universe, some kind of nude Survivor challenge where she’d be marked out of ten for adventurousness. When in fact, rolling around unclothed with someone else was, it turned out, rolling around unclothed with someone else. It all worked on instinct, really. Knowing what to do next. Once she realized she was neither off-putting, nor remotely boring to him, she was, as Jamie said, unstoppable.

“He looks very nice without his clothes. He didn’t suggest we do anything athletic or freaky or involving ropes, so that was a relief. And he was very good at it and it was bloody nice and I’d like to do it again soon, that’s all, ARGH.”

“OK, not exactly an excerpt from Anaïs Nin but we can work with that,” Emily said. “Going forward, please take more notes.”

Emily was, as to be expected, overjoyed Laurie had taken her advice. Except with her usual ratlike cunning, had deduced Laurie had done more than that.

“You’ve fallen for him, haven’t you? I can see the milk-drunk baby look. You tool.”

“He says he’s fallen for me too.”

“No doubt. Just bear in mind you’re still recovering and don’t go too fast. No solitaires from Boodles. No surprise calls to me while I’m away this Christmas to announce rash engagements, and impending mad flits down the aisle, because you got eggnogged up and stupid.”

“Haha! Hardly. It’s a helluva drug, eggnog.”

When Laurie looked at her phone when she got back, she had a text from Dan.

I’d like to get some photos copied. Is 5pm OK to come round?

Hah, a very late-arriving realization.

Laurie

Yeah, fine.

When he knocked on the door, she was still in her exercise gear.

“Not like you?” he said.

“All kinds of changes ’round here,” Laurie said. “I’ve got the boxes of photos out from under the spare room bed, take the ones you want. I trust you to bring them back.”

Dan darted upstairs and reappeared after ten minutes, holding thirty-five or so pictures: holidays, the house in its embryonic stages, friends’ weddings, beer gardens. Christmases in Cardiff.

“Fucking hell, remember the kitchen? Those Irish builders straight out of Fawlty Towers? Lick o’ paint, lick o’ paint.”

Laurie smiled thinly.

“Do you want to check which ones I’ve got, so you can count them out and count them back in?” he added.

They sat on the sofa while Laurie riffled through; and Laurie marveled at how these months had transformed Dan from the person she knew best in the world to this person, sitting a short distance and yet a whole continent away. A thought occurred: this is a pretext. If he really wanted pictures, he’d have taken them by now. He has something else to say.

She handed them back. Dan’s eyes came to rest on something thrown on the floor, down by the sofa that Laurie was sitting on. It was one of Jamie’s shirts, removed sometime on Saturday after they’d tried and failed to go out for dinner and decided they preferred staying in. It hadn’t been the sort of weekend where she did much tidying up.

“Oh,” Laurie said, gathering it up, and stuffing the bundle next to her. It had not been done as any sort of taunt and yet it was difficult to think of a way she could’ve made the frenzied state of her relationship clearer.

“It’s really on with him, then?” Dan said, and swallowed hard.

Laurie nodded.

“I know how this makes me sound, but I convinced myself maybe you were pretending, to rub my face in it. That it was a deal between the two of you, to get him ahead at work and for you to get back at me.”

Laurie sighed. She had no reason to dissemble, now she and Jamie were the truth. “Look, being honest, that’s how it started. Then we got involved for real.”

To Laurie’s complete amazement, Dan teared up, then started properly weeping.

“I want you to know something. I want you to know that I know I’ve fucked up. Every time I see you. When I see you with him. It’s like being turned inside out.”

He wiped his face, nose running. Laurie sat, hands in lap, slightly stunned and mostly aghast.

“It was an affair, Laurie, you were right. It was a stupid self-indulgent oh God, I’m going to turn forty soon affair because she flattered me and came on to me and I started to let myself believe there was this other life I should be having. I was bored and dissatisfied with myself. It was so much easier to tell myself I was bored and dissatisfied with you, that you were holding me back. That someone else was the fix.”

Laurie nodded, staring at her hands, twisting them together.

“I would’ve tried to come back, asked to come back. It was a fad, a phase and you and I are forever. Or we were. And then she . . . Not she, we. We got pregnant. So.”

Dan looked hollow. Laurie felt nothing but pity for Megan. To the victor, the spoils.

“Why didn’t you tell me on the day you broke up with me that you had feelings for her? Why the lies about needing yoga or to find yourself or whatever?” Laurie said.

“I thought it would hurt you less if I left it weeks or months for you to find out about Megan. If I’d said, ‘Right now I want her more than you,’ it would’ve been the most terrible thing.”

This was a category error that too many people made Laurie thought—thinking untruths that didn’t add up were better than a hard truth.

“The thing is, Dan, it would’ve been terrible but I would’ve coped. I could’ve started the process of coping straightaway, instead of having to turn into Sherlock Holmes, trying to crack the puzzle. It’s the lies that killed me. Feeling I wasn’t important enough or worth enough after these years to be let inside your head, to be told what was happening.”

He nodded and took a shuddering breath.

“Do you love him?”

“Yes,” she said quietly. “It’s grown into something neither of us expected.”

Dan made the sort of inhalation when you’re trying to stifle a hiccup.

“Well, good. I want you to be happy. Seeing you lately has reminded me of who I fell in love with but ten times over. You are”—Dan cleared his throat—“a force to be reckoned with.”

“I’m sorry it took this to remind you of who you fell in love with,” Laurie said.

“So am I,” Dan said, and she had a feeling they were sorry in different ways.

“Would you have said any of this if you weren’t torn up by me being with a younger stud?” Laurie said, and Dan said yes as a reflex response and she almost cynic-laughed as she thought no.

She gave him a brief tight hug in the hallway, shut the door on him, slid to the floor, cupped her hands over her face, and howled.

Not because she loved Dan, or wanted him back. She’d thought this was her ultimate goal, but there wasn’t a shred of gloating or will to hurt him left in her. Only intense sadness that two decades of their life had ended the way it did, that a chapter of her life, a chapter she’d thought would be the full story, had closed.

She hoped Dan made Megan happy, and she hoped he would be a good father. She meant that from the bottom of her bruised and battered heart.

This epiphany took her by such force she had to pick up her mobile and make a call, still sitting on freezing-cold floor tiles.

“Emily? I’ve realized something. Ever since Dan and I split up, there was something I couldn’t make sense of. You said Dan and I were hit by lightning, in Bar CaVa, that it was fate, that it was a once-in-a-lifetime chance and it changed everything forever. I knew it was true, I could feel in my water that it was true, so I couldn’t reconcile it with Dan having gone. Well, I’ve figured it out. I did meet the love of my life that day. Only it wasn’t Dan. You are the love of my life. Are you still there?”

“Yes, I’m crying, you soft shite.”

Laurie’s mum had once said to her, keep a close eye on the worst things that happened to you, they could turn out to be a doorway, a route to someplace else entirely, a map you couldn’t yet read. Laurie, as cynical youth, had rolled her eyes at this. Uncle Ray’s broken bones again. Hippie talk.

“Look at the disaster with your father—I got you,” Peggy had said, and Laurie had responded with sulky, ungrateful disbelief.

Well, her mother was right. Daniel Price deciding he was done? It was the best thing that could’ve happened to her.