Page 38 of The Girlfriend

C HERRY HUNG UP AND LET THE PHONE REST ON THE SOFA NEXT TO her.

Daniel was dead. She couldn’t take it in: He’d died; he had vanished; he was no more.

While she was on holiday! She suddenly realized she hadn’t even asked Laura the exact day.

What had she been doing on that day? Lying lazily on a sunbed on the beach?

Wandering around Chichen Itza? Or maybe even having dinner with Elliot.

It had been a fleeting thing, that much she’d made clear, but she’d needed the relief spending time with him had given her.

He’d approached her in their hotel bar and found that they were both traveling alone and their holidays overlapped by four days.

They ended up spending pretty much all of those four days—and nights—together.

Cherry didn’t feel guilty, she saw it more as a necessary healing balm for the last few months.

Then he left and she got on with the rest of her trip.

It disturbed her that she didn’t know when Daniel had died, that she couldn’t match an event of such magnitude to a moment in her own life.

She almost called Laura back, there and then, but as soon as she had the phone in her hand, she dropped it.

She didn’t feel up to asking questions yet; it was all still so unreal.

A movement at the window caught her eye, people walking past, going about their lives oblivious to what was going on inside her flat.

She jumped up suddenly, went to make a cup of tea.

As she was holding the kettle under the tap, it hit her.

She burst into tears, great wracking sobs, and dumped the kettle in the sink; then suddenly she remembered that the next-door neighbors could see in if their back door was open and the flat above them could see in if they looked down at a certain angle.

She recoiled, hating her flat, Tooting, poor man’s London, and the way people all lived on top of each other.

Instead she went into the bedroom, which was a little more private, and lay down, fully clothed, on the bed.

Daniel was dead. She thought she’d felt lonely, cast adrift when he was ill, but she realized that was nothing compared to now.

She’d always believed he’d recover; she had read numerous accounts, reports on the Internet, studied it in books and journals, until she felt she could pass as a doctor herself.

But instead he’d left her. And her new life, the one she’d planned, had disintegrated.

She couldn’t even say good-bye. She shrank inside remembering Laura’s words, “Family only.” She wasn’t included.

Was she not good enough? Not worthy? Not rich enough?

Yet again, she’d been slighted. It was like Nicolas, all over again.

Neither Laura nor Howard recognized her as a proper girlfriend, as someone who had meant anything to Daniel.

Where was he buried? Or had he been cremated?

Where were his ashes? She didn’t know the answers to any of these questions and was left in a vacuum of ignorance.

She felt a sudden, violent anger toward Laura for keeping everything to herself.

Laura had cut her from his life. And she, Cherry, was stuck in a dead-end job that she was growing to hate, with no escape on the horizon.

She couldn’t go through it all again. She realized that Daniel had made the job palatable, not just because he would eventually lead her out of it, but because he was what she looked forward to at the end of the day.

Talking to him, exchanging stories about the people they’d each had to deal with, he as a trainee doctor at the hospital and she as a real estate agent.

The way he’d held her and kissed her had made her feel good, feel as if she had value.

Now that was all gone. She was a nobody again.

The people she’d aspired to be like had unceremoniously kicked the door in her face. In the end, Laura had won.