If I Never Met You: A Novel

As the days between the party and the Christmas break ticked down, Jamie remained as popular in the criminal department as a drugs dog in a college dorm; but now his relationship with Laurie was realer than real, they began to spend more time together in the office, and he was gladly welcomed into the inner circle with Bharat and Diana.

“Bharat’s hilarious, isn’t he?” he said, over an afterwork dinner with Amaretto sours at Rudy’s Pizza on the Thursday before Christmas. “Really witty. Wasted in med neg, he should be doing Graham Norton’s job. Though to be fair, he’s stunningly good at the lawyering.”

“It’s his incisive arguments, absolutely nothing gets past him,” Laurie agreed, wiping the dough dust from her hands. “He sharpens his teeth daily on Di. He should be fictionalized in a series starring Aziz Ansari.”

“I was wondering,” Jamie said, “would you declare it the naffest thing in the world if I changed my profile picture on Facebook to the one of us in the Ivy? I know it was a construct and all that at the time, but it’s still a lovely one of you.”

Laurie laughed. “We spent forty-eight hours with each other last weekend during which time I think the only thing we wore was a smile, and you’re politely inquiring if I’ll find a picture too much?”

“Look, grandma, where I come from, a joint profile photo is a big step, OK. I might even caption it with a heart emoticon. That makes us legally married on social media.”

“Do it,” Laurie said. “I am happy to be social media married to you.” Jamie tinkered with his phone and held it up.

“I don’t want you to think it’s anything to do with my promotion meeting tomorrow!” he said.

“Hah! I’d forgotten about it.”

“Would you believe it that I’m not that bothered if I get it anymore?” Jamie said.

“Not really,” Laurie said, making a mischievous, tongue-lol face.

“Hey, it’d still be amazing. But it turned out this wasn’t about finding the treasure; it was about the friends I made along the way.”

The following morning, Laurie returned from a decent-size win at court, checking her watch. Jamie would be in with them now.

This was the final shit storm they’d have to weather, if he got it—Michael, for one, would be apoplectic. She’d do it, for Jamie. She was proud to know him, too.

Bharat met her in the doorway of their office, and looked so upset that Laurie feared there’d been bad family news. Di looked no less concerned.

“What is it? Who died?”

“Here, look.”

Bharat swung his mouse from side to side to wake the screen.

The email, cc all staff, was titled: “FYI: It Was All Bullshit From The Start.”

To: all

From: [email protected]

Hi!

As discussed, here’s how I thought the arrangement might work. Obviously feel very free to say either, no, these are the ravings of a lunatic, or suggest any guidelines of your own.

As said, we’d start next weekend (how you fixed to take a photo in a bar, early doors Saturday?) and then run it up until Christmas . . .

“Right,” Laurie said, taking a deep breath, in shock and a light sweat. “So what happened was . . .”

Who sent this? And today?

Kerry put her head around the door.

“Laurie, Mr. Salter wants to see you. This minute, please.”

Laurie hard-gulped and followed her across the landing, past the lifts to his office. After she knocked and was told ENTER, she saw that Jamie was already standing there. He gave her the merest glance and looked away again.

“Hello, Ms. Watkinson,” Salter said. “Sit please. An email chain has been brought to my attention between yourself and Mr. Carter that suggests that the pair of you have been pretending a romantic liaison for effect, is that correct?”

“Yes,” Laurie said. She didn’t think lying was a remotely good idea at this point, and even if she did, she’d had no time to think of any.

“Can you explain to me, why you did this?”

“I . . .” Laurie threw a look at Jamie and Salter bellowed, “DON’T LOOK AT HIM PLEASE, I AM ASKING YOU!” making Laurie jump out of her skin. She’d never seen him this angry.

“I’d been left by Dan Price, for another woman, who he’d got pregnant. I was in the situation of still having to work with him here. I wanted to make him jealous, to get my own back.”

It sounded as tawdry and ridiculous as it was, repeated in this room.

“Why was Mr. Carter moved to help you?”

“He . . .” God, she couldn’t think of how to cover this up. “He wanted to apply for a promotion and felt it would better his chances if you thought he had a girlfriend.”

Laurie really hoped Jamie had already come clean. It was his only hope.

“The fact you work in law, and this was a deception. That gave you no qualms?”

Laurie thought her only way to survive was self-lacerating honesty.

“I told myself that it was my private life, nothing to do with my work and therefore had no bearing on my job. I am pretty appalled and ashamed at this now I stand back and look at it from a distance, but the breakup had put me in a hyper state, I think. I wasn’t eating and I wasn’t sleeping much either. I was consumed by the pain of what had happened.”

“Yet you knew Mr. Carter was doing it for professional advantage?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think the hygiene of this being personal and not professional existed quite in the way you think it does. If you were involved in Mr. Carter’s pretenses, and you knew he wanted to be made partner as a result, you are an accessory to what he was doing. Are you not?”

“Yes.”

A heavy silence.

“Mr. Salter. I have no idea if I am making things better or worse by saying this, but I don’t want to be involved in any more lies—”

“A rather late-arriving fit of conscience,” he spat. She was going to be sacked. Surely.

“Jamie and I are together. We became involved for real, some weeks back.”

“You’re in a relationship now?”

Laurie said “Yes” at the exact same time that Jamie said “No.”

This was the first he’d spoken. Laurie stared in shock at Jamie.

“Which is it?” Mr. Salter said.

“We’re not,” Jamie said firmly, glancing at Laurie. “We had . . . crossed a line or two for authenticity’s sake, got a bit carried away. But we certainly aren’t together.”

Jamie barely met Laurie’s eyes, set his jaw, and stared straight ahead.

Mr. Salter saw all of this, she realized, as she turned back and his rheumy gaze came to rest on Laurie.

“All right, I’ve heard enough, Ms. Watkinson. I feel severely let down by you, and by this. We had spoken in this office, on trust, which I believed was mutual. Consider this a verbal warning and if you do anything to piss me off in the foreseeable future, I might skip the written stage. Close the door on your way out.”

Laurie was desperate to speak to Jamie, to find out what had happened, and she didn’t have to wait long.

A junior from the criminal department called Matt appeared in the doorway and said breathlessly: “Jamie Carter’s been sacked. Immediate effect.”

Laurie, Bharat, and Di almost comically scrambled to get past one another and out to see what was happening.

A Roman amphitheater of spectators had gathered on the second floor as Jamie exited the criminal office, holding a briefcase, his coat, and the umbrella that Laurie once remembered him jamming lift doors with.

A very sad-faced Mick, the security guard, was guiding Jamie toward the stairs. Laurie made to go after him.

“I wouldn’t follow him out,” Michael said, arms folded, “or they might just lock the door after you. You don’t want any more of his reputation smeared over you.”

“He’s my boyfriend, so I’ll see him out, thanks,” Laurie said, to an audible “ooh!” from the crowd, presumably both at the declaration and the insubordination. She glimpsed Dan, looking pig sick at the back. At least her honesty with him had stopped this being any gotcha.

“You can stop the show now, we’ve all seen the email,” Kerry snapped.

Laurie turned.

“You know what, I couldn’t care less what you do or don’t think, Kerry. You’re not the policewoman of my private life. Or anyone else’s here for that matter.”

“Can I get an amen!” Bharat shouted, from the back of the crowd, and incredibly, a reasonably hearty “AMEN” went up. Kerry scowled, looking green as a parrot.

Laurie walked down the stairs with Jamie and out through the lobby, Mick holding the door for them, beckoning for Jamie to hand over his security pass and pulling the door shut behind them.

Once they were outside in the street, Jamie turned and said: “I hate to say it, but Michael’s right. Go back in, now. Salter’s temper’s on a hair trigger. If he hears you’re out here with me, you could get sacked too.”

“I can’t believe they sacked you and not me?!” Laurie said.

“Laurie, now I’m gone, blame the whole idea of the phony relationship on me,” Jamie said. “When Salter’s calmed down, he won’t want to fall out with his best defense lawyer.”

“But this is unfair! And probably illegal, getting rid of you but not me for the same offense.”

“Hah. They know every loophole and can safely get rid of anyone. I’ve struck a deal where they say it was my decision and I get some gardening leave. Word will get ’round, of course, so I have to be quicker than the word before the pay runs out. He knows I couldn’t stay, Laurie, not when they loathe me. It was untenable.” He paused. “They didn’t only sack me for our relationship.”

“What then?”

He didn’t speak for a few seconds. “They think I was involved with Eve.”

“You said . . . you didn’t . . . ?” Laurie said, and trailed off. Oh, no.

“Yeah, I wasn’t. But I haven’t told you the whole story of that night.”

Laurie swallowed hard. “OK.”

“It was dinner, nothing more. But Eve had booked a room at the hotel. She made a play for me at the end of the evening and I said no, stakes are too high here, thanks. She was not impressed. She had a point. I shouldn’t have been seeing her out of hours. It was mixed messages and it was undignified to have to put her straight. For both of us.”

“Right . . .”

“I told you I was networking, but quite specifically, I wanted to know if Salter was thinking of retiring. I thought she might have information, as family, that’d help me with the timing of my pitch for partner. Short version, I used her. She’s whip smart. She figured that out.”

Jamie continued: “Then the photos of you and me started going up, and Eve got in touch and said, ‘I see what you’re doing, and I know what was said in your promotion meeting’—she’d fished with her uncle. She said, ‘You’re using another woman to get ahead.’ I told her you were happily in on it but she didn’t believe me. This sounds strange, but she didn’t want you to feel used in the same way that she had done. She thought I was playing you and wanted to find a way to make you see sense—she’d clearly worked out that if she said anything to you directly, she’d sound jealous.”

The text, in Lincoln, that Laurie wasn’t allowed to see.

“What was the lunchtime visit about?”

“To unsettle me, and it worked. More pertinently, to give Michael my phone pass code. She asked me to find something on my phone, moments after you’d gone upstairs, and she leaned right in as I did it. I think Michael reached out to her to see if we’d slept together; they discovered a common cause. She had the idea of unmasking me to ‘save’ you and Michael probably laid it on thick about how vulnerable you were. But Michael probably spotted that, to be absolutely sure I got the heave overboard, she needed to tell her uncle I had form.”

They stood in silence for a moment. Laurie felt numb.

“How did Michael get your phone?”

“I leave it on my desk plenty. It’s locked, so I don’t think anything of it. I guess he’d have gone in, searched for your name for incriminating material, and bingo. There’s no other emails between us.”

Laurie absorbed this. “He sent it global, for maximum damage.”

“Oh yes. No one’s asked how he got hold of it, from what I can tell. Fuck this place, it’s a clique and it’s rotten. I’m glad to go.”

“But I should stay?”

Jamie looked discomfited. “Unless you have any other irons in the fire. The bosses love you.”

“Correction. They used to.”

She’d been in denial, but this was it. Jamie was off, into the horizon, and Laurie’s standing at her workplace was irreparably soiled. Much as she hated Dan and Michael’s intervention, their premonitions had come to pass.

“Did you split up with me in there, when Salter asked us point blank?”

“No. I knew I was fucked and I thought any more idea from Salter that we were a couple, and you would be too.”

“What if he’d not sacked you? How would we have managed that? We start keeping a real romance secret?”

Jamie shrugged. “I suppose so?”

“Or, or. You would’ve split up with me to keep them happy?”

This felt eminently possible, despite everything. She believed in Jamie’s feelings for her but she’d never seen a second’s self-sacrifice regards his career, for anyone. All this time worrying about another woman coming between him, but was his job the thing she could never compete with?

“No,” Jamie said, frowning. “I never wanted the promotion that much. Wow.”

“You sure? It seems to be all that’s driven you since I’ve known you.”

“I’ve changed since I’ve known you.”

People don’t change. Do they?

Laurie couldn’t let this go.

“It was pretty mortifying, me saying yes when you said no.”

“Well, sorry. It didn’t mean anything.”

“If you’ve changed, why still lie? Why not say, hey, Mr. Salter, yeah, I shouldn’t have done it but now here is the situation and, yes, I am with Laurie.”

“The truth wasn’t what was needed, here, or what was going to help.” He clenched his jaw and jutted his chin slightly and they were clearly skirting the territory of their first big fight. Or the last one?

“Jamie, the truth is sometimes of value in itself. Not working out what it’ll get you.”

“Oh, Laurie, of all the times to go all ‘inspirational meme over a sunset’ on me.” Jamie smiled weakly, and it felt so much like Dan’s brush-offs that her hair stood on end.

“Of all the times for you to go lying triangulating lawyer bastard on me!” she snapped.

“This is the way the world IS, Laurie!” Jamie’s temper broke. “I know you’re honest and decent and I love you for it, but this is how it actually works. It’s shit and cruel and unjust and you do what you need to do to survive. I learned that young. So did you.”

“Don’t do that, don’t try to make me feel bad for being upset about this.”

“What exactly are you angry with me for, here, please? Not standing there pledging my undying devotion to you, to someone who’d sack us both for it?”

“Ah . . .” Laurie turned her eyes to the sky. “Right now? Everything. For not telling me about Eve, so this ambushed me.”

“Yeah, sorry.” Jamie adjusted the weight of his briefcase. “I’d hoped I wouldn’t have to. There it is.”

She didn’t feel much apology coming from him, however.

“How will you get another job in Manchester? With the rules on practicing elsewhere?” Laurie said.

“I don’t know, I might have to look at other cities.”

“London?” Laurie said. Jamie did a double take. “Uhm yeah, maybe, I don’t know? There are a lot of law firms there. Give me a second, given I just got sacked five minutes ago?”

“That’s us done then, isn’t it?”

“Is it? There’s this thing called a train . . .”

“Remember what Michael and Dan said? That you’d lie to me, that you’d leave my professional standing in tatters when you moved on to pastures new? No part of that prediction was in fact wrong, was it?”

“What? You’re agreeing with their view of me? That’s pretty disloyal and weak.”

He glowered in disgust, nose wrinkled. She’d never felt this defensive hostility from him before. She had to come out fighting, to stop it frightening her. Attack as a form of defense.

“I’ve been disloyal and weak?! You manipulating another woman has brought the whole house of cards crashing down on both of us, but I’m supposed to carry on thinking you won’t treat me badly, because you’ve changed or it’s different with me? All those lines that have been used by bad men since the dawn of time.”

“‘Bad man’! Stop acting like this was all my idea, something I’ve tricked you into for my nefarious ends. We both did it because we both wanted something from it. Sorry it went wrong, but then I’m the one who lost my job.”

“It was your idea.”

Jamie rolled his eyes in genuine contempt. “Nice. So under pressure, I tried to think about what’s best for both of us. You revert to shit old stereotypes of me, start insinuating I’m using you. This is how deep it runs, your good opinion of me.”

“Did you sleep with Eve?”

“You honestly have to ask me that, when I just said I didn’t?”

“Yes. It’s the one thing you’ve been accused of that isn’t true, according to you. It’s something of an anomaly.”

“It doesn’t sound like you’re going to believe me, whatever I say.”

Laurie’s chest hurt. It was one of those rare times when you can feel something being torn down, the something intangible that exists between you.

A moment whistled between them in the frostbitten Manchester wind. It was one of those moments that decided how everything was going to be afterward.

“I’m not sure I know who you are,” Laurie said simply. Persuade me, she thought. Talk me around. Please. She didn’t want to push this hard but she had to, or she wouldn’t trust him from now on.

“In that case, you’re not who I thought you were either,” Jamie said.

Chattering people spilled out of the doors behind them and Jamie gave her a weary, hard glance, adjusted his briefcase again, and turned, walked off. Laurie sucked in air and let it out and said “oh” to herself. She thought he’d fight harder. Apparently not.

As she trod back up the stairs, empty as a husk, Michael was standing at the top, jangling change in his pocket.

“I did try to warn you. We tried to protect you from him, but you wouldn’t have it.”

“Get bent, Michael,” she said.

“Let me guess, he’s announced that you’re not together as of ’round about now? Given that he has no need for you anymore?”

“Incorrect, sorry.”

He’d hear eventually, but no way was she adding to his jubilation this afternoon.

“Oh, right. I look forward to the announcement of your wedding, at which point I will bike naked around Piccadilly Gardens singing ‘Life Is a Rollercoaster.’”

“Get yourself some saddle rub in, then.”

“Haha! Good one. Don’t cry over him, darling—he’s not, and has never been, worth it.”

“I wish I was as interested in your life as you are in mine.”

“So do I,” Michael said, as a very sudden, spiky way of declaring himself a No Score Draw sensation. Laurie said nothing, marching past, leaving him standing, startled, by himself.

“Bharat, Di,” Laurie said, back at her desk, “I’m so sorry I lied to you. It had to be a strict policy of telling no one or it wouldn’t have worked. I was telling the truth later on; Jamie and I did end up together for real.”

“Oh, darling, I don’t care, I think it’s genius!” Bharat said. “So bloody cool. You’re my wife from another life. And that Jerry Maguire shit you just pulled was BALLSY AS FUCK.”

Laurie flopped into her chair. At least she only had Monday and the morning of Christmas Eve to get through before the office closed at lunchtime for ten days for Christmas, and she’d not have to see any of the rest of her colleagues until the New Year.

She hadn’t begun to mentally pick through the wreckage of what happened with Jamie.

How had it all gone wrong so fast?

Bharat leaned over and patted her hand. “Don’t sweat it, Lozza. Some days you’re the dog, and other days you’re the bone.”