What Goes Around

chapter FIFTY ONE

There’ll be no amicable divorce with Jess.

She’s amazing!

There’s four weeks of mourning, where she works mainly from home (mine) because she can’t face the office. It works out great because she’s there for Charlotte in the holidays. Then, after about a month of watching movies with me on the sofa at night and breakfast in bed by day, she suddenly turns the corner.

The very day I’m about to suggest that she sees her GP and maybe go on the happy tabs, I come home from work and she’s dressed in a tight black skirt and black top and she’s off to see a lawyer she tells me.

Her Welsh accent is getting stronger by the minute because she’s on the phone all the time to her sisters in Wales. I’ve got a fiery Catherine Zeta Jones sitting at my breakfast bench and she’s going to take him for all he’s got and boyo, yes, she’s going out on Friday.

‘F*ck him,’ she says, but it sounds sexier with a Welsh accent. ‘We’ll go out. Come on Lucy,’ she says when I wrinkle my nose. ‘You need to get back out there.’

But I like it in here.

I am boring – I’m finding out that I really am. I love being home and I love having someone to sit and watch movies with and I’d love to have someone to walk round furniture shops with, but I don’t want to do the first bit – do you know what I mean?

‘Well, he’s out shagging.’ Jess says, because she has it on good authority that Luke is. ‘He’s out celebrating his freedom…’

She really is amazing.

I can see that she’s ready to move on and I’m jealous of her resilience.

I am.

How she can put her heart back out there?

How she can just move on?

I used to be like that.

One relationship ended and I was straight into the next, I had a new one lined up before I left sometimes.

Then I met him and I thought I’d hit the jackpot.

God, I even manage a smile at myself, at how, after he died, I thought I’d just go out and get another one.

I know that I need to be on my own.

For the first time I want to be on my own.

Or rather, just Charlotte and me.

I get Charlotte’s uniform ready for tomorrow.

We’ve had to get new shoes and a new winter skirt because she’s grown so much over summer.

The school fees will start thudding in soon and I shouldn’t be panicked because I can pay them.

For now.

It really is a tiny mortgage that Luke got me.

I don’t think it will even see out the year.