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She was out of the door before Carly could answer.
The corridor felt longer on the way back. Lauren walked down the middle of the freshly mopped floor with her hands in her pockets and her face arranged into something neutral, in case anyone was watching. Nobody was.
She shut the treatment room door and leaned on it, like she had the day she found out Carly was the new owner. She’d been so sure, that day, that Carly would look at her and see the girl from City and nothing else.
Turned out she’d been right. It had just taken longer to prove.
Her eyes stung. She pressed the heels of her hands into them.
She’d asked. The answer was Carly’s. It just wasn’t the one Lauren wanted, and now she had to live with it without turning it into something else.
She didn’t text Paige. Paige would be right, and Lauren couldn’t face that on top of this.
Instead, she stripped the perfectly clean paper off the table and replaced it. She lined up her oils. She straightened the anatomical poster, and when it peeled off at the corner again, she let it hang.
On the laptop, the spreadsheet she’d been so proud of at midnight was still open. CLINIC. Four columns. A number at the bottom that had looked, thirteen hours ago, like the start of something.
She closed the lid.
Her phone buzzed on the desk.
She almost didn’t look. Then she did, because some idiot part of her thought it might be Carly.
It wasn’t.
It was a name she hadn’t seen on her screen since the summer. One she’d never got round to deleting, like the hoodie at the back of her wardrobe that had belonged to someone else.
Saw you won on Sunday. Proud of you x Drink sometime? Miss you.
Lauren sat down on the edge of the folding table and read it twice.
She knew the shape of it. Months of nothing, then a crumb, dropped at the moment Lauren was lowest, as if her ex had a sixth sense for it. Two years, on and off, had run on crumbs like this, including the season Lauren had gone back to City Rovers for her. A text after a bad game. A miss you the week she finally started sleeping properly. A door left open a crack, never wide enough to walk through, never shut enough to stop trying.
The old Lauren would have replied inside thirty seconds. She’d have been in a pub by eight and back in that bed by midnight, telling herself it was one last night. It had always been one last night.
And today it would have been easy. That was the worst part. After I’ll figure something out, it would have been the easiest thing in the world to let someone want her for an evening, even someone who didn’t mean it. Being wanted by someone who didn’t mean it had always felt safer than being turned down by someone who did.
The one who kept coming back for one more night, Paige had said.
She opened the contact. She scrolled to the bottom. She pressed Block.
The phone asked if she was sure.
She was.
It didn’t feel like a victory. It didn’t feel like much at all, which she was beginning to suspect was what the right thing felt like, most of the time. She dropped the phone in the drawer and sat for a moment with her hands in her lap.
At five to two, there was a knock at the door. Lauren checked her face in the mirror on the back of it, found it acceptable, and arranged a smile on top.
“Come in,” she called. “Let’s have a look at those hamstrings.”
30
Carly
Carly had read the same line of the same email six times and still couldn’t have said what it wanted. The cursor blinked at the end of an unfinished reply. Somewhere beyond the office wall, the old pipes clicked and settled.
She hadn’t taken in a word since Lauren had stood in front of her and offered to take Berkeley. Not borrow him. Not have him for an evening. Take him. Give him somewhere that wasn’t Samantha’s kitchen, Carly’s back seat, or an emptying house everyone kept pretending was still a home.
