Dan had said it wasn’t planned, but Laurie was at the stage where, if Dan said it was raining, she’d go outside to check.
The clock on Laurie’s bedside table hit six. A whole day had floated by and she had barely registered it passing.
Six months or so ago, Dan had taken up running. Laurie had been pleased, even impressed. She was quite good at keeping fit, going to the gym, walking everywhere; Dan had been the one glued to the sofa with his hand stuck in a bag of Tangy Cheese Doritos.
She now saw that hobby for what it was – getting match fit for wrestling with an exciting new prospect. Spending hours pounding the streets, music blaring, not having to interact with his long-term girlfriend, while he plotted a fresh course. Beginning to break away.
They used to talk so openly, it was something they used to privately congratulate themselves on, even boast about to one another. How come they don’t discuss this stuff? they’d say in wonder about friends, shaking their heads. You’re my best friend as well as my girlfriend, why would I not? Dan used to say, at whatever laddish thing a friend had said he’d never tell his other half.
Dan was a great talker, Laurie was a talker and a good listener; when something had bothered one of them, it got dealt with up front.
That had subtly changed in the last couple of years, Laurie realised. What she called Dan’s moodiness – and it was moods, even sulks, certainly extended silences which she couldn’t and wasn’t invited to penetrate – was also a closing off and a closing down, putting up a forbidding wall around what was actually going on in his head.
At some point, he turned away from her, he made the decision that the solution to his problems didn’t lie in Laurie.
That was the promise you made when you fell head over heels in love, really, she thought. Not that you wouldn’t have problems, but that no problem would be the sort where you couldn’t find the solution, together.
On the third day of mourning, Laurie’s utter horror at the thought of knowing anything about Megan – simply saying the name in her head was like repeating a curse, hexing herself – turned on a sixpence.
Laurie suddenly had a gnawing hunger to see everything. It must be some part of the stages of grieving, or the shock receding. Your appetite returning after a sickness.
It was a Saturday, but time had ceased to have much meaning for Laurie, since the Wednesday night of the announcement. She wondered if she could get a doctor’s note to not go in to work next week, too.
With shaky hands and weak body – when did she last eat? She thought she recalled finding half a squashed Twix in her gym bag, yesterday lunchtime – Laurie hauled her laptop onto her knees on the sofa. She opened her rarely used Facebook page, and searched for Megan. The first name, fairly unusual, would surely reveal the likeliest suspect.
Nothing. Not in Dan’s friends, not in the friend’s lists of those she knew at Rawlings. Megan must be one of those rare people who didn’t use social media.
Unless … Laurie lay on her back and stared at the filigree of spider webs along the picture rail, the parts of a house you rarely paused long enough to inspect, when not laid prone, in the twilight land of the unwell. Unless.
Unless Megan had blocked her? It seemed aggressive, unfair – surely it was for Laurie to block Megan, in the proper way of things. But if you knew your new boyfriend had told his very-recent-ex long-term girlfriend you were pregnant, you’d know a very, very scorned woman was coming hurtling your way. Why would you leave any of your business open to it?
Laurie opened a browser again, but this time, set up a fresh Facebook profile using her Gmail address, instead of the old Yahoo one.
Laurie wouldn’t need to add any friends or signal the existence of the second account in any way, she could use it purely as a stalking tool.
Once it was active and she launched her investigations again, Laurie didn’t know what to hope for.
Confirming you’d been blocked was disconcerting enough when it was just someone you didn’t rub along with brilliantly well at work, let alone the woman who stole the love of your life and was pregnant with his child. But if she wasn’t blocked and Megan really was a twenty-first century Greta Garbo, Laurie’s burning need to know more would go unmet.
With a dull thud, as she clicked on Dan Price’s profile – his photo, a throwback picture of himself in fancy dress at university on the night he met Laurie, salt into wounds – and then again in his friends, Megan Mooney sprang up in front of her. Profile photo, a jokey one of Lucille Ball.
She was blocked. The bitch had blocked her, while camping here brazenly in Dan’s friends. Laurie swallowed back bile, literal, physical bile.
She took a deep breath and braced herself before diving in. Megan Mooney. She sounded like a secretary in a 1940s screwball, or the quiet mouse ‘by day’ alter ego of a Marvel superhero.
Laurie checked herself: she could do this without sobbing or screaming, breathed again, and clicked.
Megan had shared some JustGiving links – OH YOU LIKE SUPPORTING CHARITIES, DO YOU, LIKE A GOOD PERSON? – Laurie internally spasmed: she might not be ready for this experience, like a wobbly patient on a ward trying to walk too fast and doing themselves a mischief.
Would she ever be ready?
What was publicly available on Megan’s profile wasn’t very informative, and when Laurie was scrolling birthday wishes from two years ago (was Dan there? Not that she could find) she moved to the photo galleries.
They were generally of groups, but Laurie clicked and clicked until she saw enough of the pictures so she could spot which was Megan, by her ubiquity.
She couldn’t help it; her first response was to compare herself.
Megan was a redhead, nothing like Laurie physically, properly Lucozade ginger. Laurie remembered something about gingerism being a ‘recessive gene’ and couldn’t remember if that meant Dan’s child would be one.
Megan had close-set eyes, a strong nose, and an intimidating, rather than pretty face. Laurie was easily conventionally prettier. Laurie both knew this to be true straight away and yet simultaneously didn’t trust it, doubted it, and hated herself for this being such a necessary measure. Laurie had never been someone who’d traded on her looks. But, as an acerbic female colleague once said to her regards the length of her coupledom, you’ve never needed to.
And much like Megan’s age, Laurie moved from a split second of relief, to confusion and intimidation. If she wasn’t a dazzling beauty, then how could a woman whose powers of attraction she couldn’t immediately see do this to her? Dan wanted her more than he wanted Laurie, so any bargaining and comparing now was futile. Megan was clearly killer sexy to Dan, as she’d killed their relationship. Her powers of attraction had annihilated an eighteen-year history.
Further poking around revealed Megan was sporty and had an incredible figure, a near-concave stomach (that was about to change. Laurie hated herself for expanding the picture with forefinger and thumb, staring morbidly at the space where Dan’s child was) and legs that went on for days.
If she needed to feel physically inferior to understand this, then Megan’s physique could do it. Laurie had a twinge of political outrage – if she’d left Dan for another man, was it likely he’d spend any time studying his rival’s calf muscles for clues as to why she’d strayed? Nope.