Max stares at me, his eyes budding with tears. “God, Lucy. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s why I’ve found it... quite hard to trust.”
I can tell the irony isn’t lost on him. His face pales, and he looks away from me. “I just... I can’t believe this. Why didn’t you tell me before?”
I hesitate, draw shapes against the cushion I’ve pulled onto my lap for comfort, like a child. “I mean, I still don’t even know what really happened.”
“I think you do,” he says, softly.
Yes, I do. But as Max is so fond of saying, instinct isn’t evidence. “I know he stole my stuff. But I don’t know... the rest. Not for sure.”
The sound of a speeding motorbike shoots through the room from the road. It sounds like it’s going so fast, I wait for the ensuing sirens, but for once they don’t come.
“That’s why you don’t have any pictures,” he says, slowly. “You keep making excuses not to show me, but you don’t have any. He took your camera.”
I nod, feeling my forehead knit together. “The worst thing is having no way to find out the full story. It makes me feel sick, if I think about it too much. It’s why I don’t drink anymore. The thought of ever losing control like that again...”
Listening to every beat of regret between us now is one of the saddest sensations I’ve ever known.
“Did they investigate?”
I nod. “As far as they could. He was on CCTV, so they know it was him that stole my things. But they don’t know the rest. And they never caught him.”
“Have you ever talked to anyone about this?” Max is fiddling with a pinecone, turning it over and over in his hand. It must have fallen from the little pile I’ve balanced in the grate of my redundant fireplace.
“Only Jools knows.”
“Not your family?”
I shake my head.
“Not a professional?”
“Nope.”
“I think you should. It’s really serious, what happened to you.”
“I don’t want to go over it all again. I actually just want to forget it.”
A few more seconds tick by. “God, Lucy, I’m just... so sorry.”
He doesn’t say what we’re both thinking: that if he’d not slept with Tash, we might never have split up, I might never have gone traveling, I might never have met Nate...
If... if... if...
But the truth is, I don’t want Max to feel guilty. Not about Nate. There are plenty of other things I could blame him for. But not that.
From downstairs, a cheer erupts, like they’re about to start a conga, or someone’s just lost at strip poker. It makes me smile, despite myself.
“I take it... it wasn’t really him you saw tonight?” Max asks me, gently.
I shake my head. “He’d be ten years older by now. He’d look different. It was just my mind playing tricks on me. It’s happened a couple of times before.”
Once in a restaurant, with my parents and my ex-boyfriend. And once at Figaro, when I walked into a meeting room to encounter a new client, who just happened to be Nate’s double. On both occasions I fled, locking myself in a toilet to throw up, thereby convincing most of the people involved I was pregnant.
Max comes over to the bed and takes my hand, and then we just lie down next to each other, breathing in sync and not speaking. And when I next look around it is morning, and for a horrifying moment I think I’m back in that hotel room. But then I turn my head, and it is Max by my side and I am wrapped in his arms, both of us still fully clothed. And in this moment, to know I’m safe is the most precious feeling onearth.
Fourteen
