Then She Was Gone - Lisa Jewell Page 0,42
never cries. Sometimes Hanna looks like she might cry but her eyes stay dry and the opportunity to touch her, to hold her, to nurture her eludes Laurel. So it is some long untapped maternal longing that sends her out of the kitchen and into the hall where SJ is snatching her coat off the coatrack and sobbing uncontrollably.
“Sara,” she starts. “SJ. Come into the living room with me. Come. We can talk.”
“What is there to talk about?” she wails. “I’m a bitch. I’m bad. There’s nothing else to say.”
“Well, actually,” says Laurel, “that’s not true. I . . .” She inhales. “Come and sit with me. Please.”
SJ rehangs her coat and follows Laurel. In the living room she curls herself into the armchair and looks at Laurel through wet eyelashes.
Laurel sits opposite her. “I had an affair with a married man once. When I was very young.”
SJ blinks.
“To be fair, he didn’t have any children. And he’d only been married for a year. We had an affair for two years. It was while I was at university.”
“Was it a teacher?”
“No. Not a teacher. Just a friend.”
“And then what happened? Did he leave her for you?”
Laurel smiles. “No. He didn’t. I left university and moved to London and we thought we couldn’t live without each other and that we were going to have all these wildly romantic rendezvous in country hotels. Of course, within six weeks it had totally fizzled out. Apparently he and his wife split up that same year. Too young to get married, basically. We were all too young. Did you know that the parts of the brain involved in decision-making aren’t fully developed until you’re twenty-five years old?”
SJ shrugs.
“Who is it?” Laurel asks.
“It’s the course leader,” SJ says, “at the art college where I model.”
“How long has it been going on for?”
SJ drops her chin into her chest and mumbles, “A few months.”
“And how often are you seeing him?”
“Most days,” she says.
“Where?”
“At work. In his office.” She shrugs. “Sometimes at his brother’s place when he’s out of town.”
“Does he ever take you out anywhere? Drinks? Dinner?”
SJ shakes her head and plucks at the drawstring on her joggers.
“So it’s just sex?”
SJ lifts her head quickly. “No!” she exclaims. “No! It’s much more than that! We talk, all the time. And he draws me. I’m his . . .”
“Muse.”
“Yes. I’m his muse.”
Laurel sighs. Cliché after cliché after cliché.
“Sara-Jade,” she starts carefully. “You are a very beautiful girl.”
“Huh.”
“You are very beautiful and very special. This man—what’s his name?”
“Simon.”
“Simon has very good taste. He can clearly see quality when it crosses his path. And I’m sure he’s a wonderful man.”
“He is,” says SJ. “He really is.”
“Of course. You wouldn’t be with him if he wasn’t. Has he said he’ll leave his wife?”
“Partner.”
“Partner, wife, it doesn’t matter. They have children. They share a home. Has he said he’ll leave her for you?”
She shakes her head.
“Do you want him to?”
She nods. And then shakes it again. “No. Obviously. I mean, you know, his kids, especially the little one. And I’ve been through it myself. So I know what it feels like.”
“How old were you when your parents split up?”
“Six,” she says. “Virtually the same age as Simon’s son. So . . .”
“So you don’t want him to leave her for you?”
“No. Only in an imaginary way, where no one gets hurt.”
“But what if she finds out? His partner? What if she finds out? And then leaves him anyway?”
“She won’t find out.”
“How do you know?”
“Because we’re discreet.”
“SJ, this is the modern world. There is no privacy anymore. Everyone knows everything. All the time. I mean, look how quickly you googled me after we met. Found out about Ellie. Someone, somewhere will find out what’s happening and they might just tell Simon’s partner and then everything will be broken. Irreparably. And the only way you can avoid that happening is by walking away. Making it stop.”
SJ sniffs and ties knots in her drawstring.
“Do you love him?”
“Yes.”
“Do you love him enough to hurt a lot of people who don’t deserve to be hurt?”
“How do you expect me to answer that?”
“It’s a tough question, but you do need to answer it. Not now, but over the next hours and days. I’m not going to tell you that in ten years you’ll look back and wonder what the hell you were thinking, because I remember being twenty-one and thinking that my personality was a solid thing, that me was set in stone, that I would always feel