‘Good question,’ he replied, the angry red spots blooming in his cheeks. ‘What did you do? Nothing. You’re obsessed with your job, Gwen, the only thing you care about is getting that promotion, you completely took us for granted. You didn’t care about me, about us. All the parties you missed, the birthdays, my brother’s wedding? Where were you when I needed you? You were at work.’
‘I didn’t miss your brother’s wedding,’ I countered quickly, frowning at the hazy memory of a marquee, a light-up dance floor and Michael’s dad doing a striptease to ‘You Sexy Thing’. ‘I was definitely there.’
‘You managed to squeeze in the reception, but you should have been there for all of it!’ he shouted, scaring a flock of birds out of a nearby tree. ‘I shouldn’t have had to beg you to take a Saturday off to be at my own brother’s wedding!’
My stomach lurched. He was right.
I was prepping papers for a merger because my boss had gone on a last-minute holiday and I’d missed the ceremony. And if I was being entirely honest, I’d missed it because Ivolunteeredto prep the papers so my boss could go on a last-minute holiday. A rush of nausea washed over me and I very much regretted eating an entire six-pack of Mini Cheddars on the drive down.
‘I – I’m sorry?’ I stuttered, holding on to Manny’s carfor fear of falling over. ‘But I explained at the time and you said it was OK. Why didn’t you say anything then?’
Michael screwed his face into an ugly scowl and shrugged. ‘Because I already knew it was over.’
I took a step back as though I’d been pushed. His brother got married last autumn, more than a year ago.
‘I hated your job,’ he said, striding up and down the car park.
‘You hated it?’ I whispered. ‘But you were always so proud of me? You always bragged about me to our friends, you encouraged me.’
‘What was I supposed to do?’ he asked. ‘I hated your job, and what’s more, I hated that hating your job made me look like an arsehole, like I was some old-fashioned chauvinist or something because I wanted my girlfriend to put me first.’
I was reeling. How could any of this be true?
‘That’s not fair, I put you first all the time. I moved to the other side of the city so we could live together even though it meant I had a longer commute. You made all our joint decisions, where we went, who we saw, what we ate. Whose idea was it to go vegan for six months, Michael? Not me! But I did it. I even stopped drinking Diet Coke because you told me to.’
‘Diet Coke is poison,’ he snapped.
‘Poisonous anddelicious,’ I countered. ‘My point is, I made a lot of sacrifices for our relationship, I did a lot of stuff because it made you happy, even if it wasn’t top of my agenda.’
‘Justine does things to make me happy because she wants to, not because I force her,’ he said. ‘Being with you, God, Gwen, it was like trying to butter cold toast.’
‘Cold toast?’ I pushed my fingers into my hair and squeezed my skull. ‘First I’m a beakless chicken and now I’m cold toast?’
He swiped at a nearby bush and yanked his hand away, scratched and bleeding.
‘Cold butter on cold toast,’ he barked. ‘Impossible! It was at my brother’s wedding that I knew, but you always made things so difficult, pretending you were OK with my decisions then acting like some kind of bloody martyr.’
Biting my lip, I tightened my grip on the boot of the car.
‘Justine puts me first.’ Michael stepped away from the bush and dabbed at the scratches on his palm. It looked like it stung and I was not sorry. ‘She cares about me, she takes care of me. Do you know she cancelled her own birthday party to come with me to my nephew’s christening so I wouldn’t have to go on my own? Can you even imagine that? She and I want the same things.’
I gulped down a big lungful of air. The christening was the weekend we broke up. He had taken a new girlfriend to his nephew’s christening five days after I moved out of our home.
‘Sounds more like Justine wants whatever you tell her she wants,’ I said, choking out the words. ‘Good job you’re her boss, isn’t it?’
‘Don’t be jealous,’ he shot back. ‘It’s beneath you.’
‘I think you’ll find it isn’t,’ I replied triumphantly.
What an absolute twat. If I could have made my own wish, it would’ve been to have had this argument eighteen months earlier. If I’d known aboutthisMichael, I might not have spent so many nights crying and scrollingthrough photos of us and placing unnecessary ASOS orders to soothe my pain.
‘I fell in love with someone else, that’s all.’
He said it as though it was perfectly reasonable, as though I was the idiot for not understanding. We were collateral damage.Iwas collateral damage. The path of true love never did run smooth, but no one liked to talk about all the people it steamrolled over en route to happiness.
‘There was no big plan to mess you around,’ he added, a gust of wind blowing his terrible Tintin hair up off his head. ‘I wasn’t sat at work thinking of the best ways to hurt your feelings. To be honest, once things started with Justine, I really didn’t think about you at all.’
The sting of his words caught me off guard and when I breathed in, I found I couldn’t breathe out.