If I Never Met You. Mhairi McFarlane

Well this is his journey, I guess. What his heart is telling him.’

      Laurie was being sarcastic but it evidently didn’t register. She could hear her mum fidgeting on the other end of the phone, and pictured the frown that usually accompanied mentions of her father.

      ‘I shouldn’t be surprised at your father being a shit by now, and yet somehow I always am.’

      ‘He says they did it for tax breaks.’

      ‘Ever the romantic,’ she sniffed.

      Of course, had Laurie said he’d done it for love, her mum would’ve scorned that too.

      ‘Please warn me when he’s having his reception because I do not want any chance of running into him and this woman. Wanda and I were going to come over for an exhibition at the Whitworth.’

      ‘Mum, I don’t mean to sound mean-spirited …’ Laurie knew she was about to start a fight, even while she intellectually, rationally, wanted a fight with her mum like she wanted a hole in the head. Yet emotionally, it was somehow an inevitability. ‘I tell you my boyfriend of eighteen years dumped me and it was, oh well Dan must have his reasons to follow his lodestar and I’ve told you Dad’s got married, and he left you thirty-seven years ago, and you’re now pissed off and angry. Why can’t I be pissed off and angry at Dan?’

      ‘You can! When did I say you couldn’t be?’

      ‘The whole “he must be doing the next part on his own and listening to his heart” stuff wasn’t exactly saying I had a right to be upset.’

      ‘Of course you do, but he’s not cheating on you, he’s not lied to you? What do you want me to say, Laurie? Do you want me to criticise him?’

      ‘No!’ She didn’t. Infuriatingly, she still felt defensive of him. ‘It’d just be nice if …’ she trailed off, as what came next was harsh.

      ‘What?’

      ‘… As if you sounded like you cared about my break-up anything like as much as you care about Dad’s rubbish.’

      ‘That’s a dreadful thing to say, I care much more about you than I do about him!’

      Hmmm yeah, not what Laurie was saying, but how did Laurie think it would go, pointing out her mum’s hypocrisy in the sting of her dad’s news?

      Her mother and father were opposite perils, Laurie realised: her dad said the right things and didn’t mean them and her mum might feel it, but she never said so.

      They finished the call with terse politeness so they could go away and boil resentfully on the things the other had said.

      As Laurie replaced the receiver she thought: well that was ironic, wasn’t that the ultimate moment to be bonding over similar experiences? You wouldn’t get this on the bloody Gilmore Girls.

      Her mum was still heavily marked by what her dad did almost four decades ago; Laurie felt the tremor his name caused. Was that going to be Laurie’s fate where Dan was concerned, too?

      ‘At some point, you have to give up wishing for your parents to be who you wanted them to be and accept them as they are,’ Dan once said.

      Easy for him to say, with his kind, dependable mum and dad who thought he was a prince among men and would drop anything and do anything for him.

      As Laurie sat on the stairs, hugging her knees and nursing her bruised emotions, there was muttered cursing in the distance as someone tripped over a step, the scrape of a key in the lock, and Dan came in the door.

      ‘Hi,’ he said. He was pink from running, and wore the look of apprehensive guilt he always did around Laurie now.

      ‘Hi. I told my mum.’

      ‘Ah.’ Dan was obviously at a loss over what to say. ‘I’ve not told mine yet.’

      Laurie had guessed that from the lack of call from Dan’s mum, Barbara. They got on very well and Barbara had always, in a benign way, treated Laurie as Dan’s PA and hotline to his psyche, as well as his diary. Yeah, good luck with that from now on.

      ‘I’ve found a flat,’ he said. ‘Quite central. I can move in next week.’ He gulped and rushed on. ‘I know this sounds really soon and that I’d had it lined up but I honestly didn’t. I was on Rightmove yesterday afternoon and it just came up and when I called the agent they said I could pop round this morning. It’s not great but it’ll do for now.’ He trailed off, his cheeks flushed with the exercise and – hopefully – mortification at being so evidently eager to see the back of her.

      ‘Oh. Good?’ Laurie said. She didn’t know what note to strike, in the teeth of total rejection. She’d always had this knack with Dan, she could joke him out of any temper, persuade him when no one else could. ‘He’s proper silly for you,’ a friend of his once said.

      Now she felt as if anything she said would be either pathetic or annoying; she could hear it become one or the other to him as soon as it left her mouth. All the usual doors, her ways in, had been bricked up.

      ‘I’m going to keep paying the mortgage here for the time being. Give you a grace period so you can decide … what you want to do.’

      ‘Thanks,’ Laurie said, flatly, because no way was she going to be more fulsome than that. Dan’s larger salary came with a ton of stress at times, but had its uses. She’d have to remortgage herself up to her eyeballs and eBay everything that wasn’t nailed to the floor. Losing Dan and her home felt insurmountable.

      ‘I’m going to get fish and chips for dinner tonight, want some?’ Dan added, and Laurie shook her head. The rest of the bottle of red in the kitchen would be more effective on an empty stomach. She noticed Dan’s appetite was fine.

      ‘When do we tell everyone at work?’ she said. They’d mutually avoided this pressing question yesterday, but Laurie knew her office mate, Bharat, would sniff it out in days.

      They’d be a week-long scandal, with the news cycle moving into a different phase day by day. ‘Have you heard?’ on Monday, ‘Was he playing away?’ on Tuesday, ‘Was she playing away?’ on Wednesday, ‘I saw them arguing outside the Arndale last Christmas, the writing was on the wall’ fib dropped in as a lump of red meat to keep it going on Thursday. ‘When is it OK to ask either one on a date?’ nailed on by Friday, because Salter & Rowson was an absolute sin bin. There was a lot of adrenaline involved in their work at times, which was dampened by after hours booze. Add a steady influx of people aged twenty to forty joining or interning, and you had a recipe for a lot of flirting and more.

      It was a shame this had happened now, just when the Jamie-Eve gossip could have been a useful distraction. But there was no way a furtive bunk-up, even a specifically verboten one, was going to trump the break-up of the firm’s most prominent couple. And Laurie wouldn’t have dobbed Jamie in either. She wasn’t ruthless.

      Dan leaned on the wall and sighed. ‘Shall we not? For the time being? I can’t face all the bullshit. I can’t see how they’d find out otherwise. It’s not like I’m going to put it on Facebook and you’re hardly ever on there.’

      ‘Yeah. OK,’ Laurie said. They both wanted to wait for a time it’d matter less, though right now Laurie couldn’t imagine when that might be.

      ‘And my Dad’s got married.’

      ‘No way!’ Dan’s eyes lit up. He officially disapproved of Laurie’s dad in order to stay on the right side of history – and of Laurie and her mum – but she’d always sensed Dan had a soft spot. ‘To, what was her name, Nicola?’

      ‘Yeah. Some party happening here. I’m a bridesmaid.’

      Barely true, but she wanted Dan to picture her in a dress, in a spotlight, in a glamorous context with scallywag dad, whom he sneakingly admired.

      ‘Ah. Nice.’ Dan looked briefly sad and ashamed as obviously, he’d not be there. ‘Never