Page 99 of People Skills

I want her to leave. I want to go back to my bubble with Xavier, but that’s not what I am here for. And I’m not what is best for him. She is. Or she’s what’s best for my job. And depriving her of her own cat feels too cruel.

‘You should stay,’ I say. ‘You can take the couch, if you like.’

It’s not my place to offer Xavier’s room and bed and, also, the thought of her in Xavier’s bed makes me want to sob and scream. But I’m nothing if not professional.

‘Oh, that’s so nice, but really, Xavier needs to be the one to ask me, you know? It would be too humiliating to just insert myself into his house like that if he didn’t.’ She laughs a little. ‘This whole breakup has been a lesson in humiliation. I wrote this essay about being broken-hearted and it was…a lot.’ She trails off.

‘I read it.’

‘Oh, you subscribe to my newsletter?’ She looks surprised.

‘I do.’

‘I wrote that in the middle of the night, this big unburdening that just flowed out of me, and I am so used to thinking of everything as content, my life is so open in so many ways to people, the type of writing I do, what I share, that I just put it in the newsletter and scheduled it to go out to all these strangers, and it’s like, what the hell was I thinking? That should have been private. Only me and my therapist should have seen it. That goes for half the things I write.’

‘I thought it was really powerful,’ I say.

‘You don’t need to say that. I know it was a lot.’

‘I think it was brave,’ I say to her.

While we’re having this conversation, the uproar is continuing among Hillary and her family.

‘Come and visit Rex, at least,’ I say.

She nods, and the two of us escape out the door.

I drive home, with Lana following in her car.

Inside the house, she plays with Rex in the living room, picking him up and cuddling him and bursting into tears, saying, ‘I miss you buddy’ over and over, while I clean up the toilet paper Rex has shredded and dragged through the house (his preferred method of punishing us for going out).

I make Lana a cup of tea, we chat about books, and movies, and her newsletter, and, unfortunately, I like her.

We’re halfway through drinking our tea when Xavier walks in. He looks startled at the sight of Lana.

‘Don’t worry,’ she says. ‘I’m not staying. I just wanted to visit Rexy boy.’

‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Of course.’ Then there’s a pause.

‘Charlotte offered,’ Lana says.

‘I told her she can stay on the couch, if she wants. Rather than drive back to Melbourne in the dark.’

‘Right. Yes. You should,’ Xavier says. He looks distracted, almost agitated.

I quickly make an excuse and go into my bedroom, shamelessly leaving my door open a crack so I can hear them. I stand in the dark with my back against the bedroom wall, right next to the door, trying to breathe silently, closing my eyes, straining to listen.

‘I don’t think you want me to stay,’ Lana says to Xavier.

‘You can stay if you want to. I want you to be safe,’ he says.

‘But you don’t want me to stay in your room.’

‘No, I don’t,’ he says. ‘We’ve broken up, Lana.’

‘I know. But maybe we could change that.’

He says something to this that I can’t quite catch and then I hear her moving to the door.