gone forever, when she’d lived off a diet of frustration and self-loathing.
‘Crikey.’
‘I watched him change before my eyes in a matter of weeks from a feckless drifter into this manic creature with an obsessive drive. He became someone I didn’t recognise. Still, I thought he was on the road to nowhere. I had no faith in him. Not a bit. I thought he’d gone batshit insane.’
‘Did that lead to you breaking up?’ asked Mary.
Bridge gave a long outward breath. ‘Oh, Mary, there were about a million reasons why we broke up. I don’t even know where to begin answering that.’
* * *
‘Must be weird being here with Bridge,’ said Jack.
‘Weird isn’t the word,’ said Luke with a dry chuckle.
‘When did you split up?’
‘Four years, nine months and three weeks ago. I can give you days, hours and minutes if you like because the exact moment when I walked out of the door for the very last time is tattooed on my brain.’
‘That’s a long time to be battling,’ said Jack, raising his long thick line of eyebrow in acknowledgement of the fact. ‘My parents’ divorce was done and dusted within six months and they despised each other.’
‘My solicitor explained to me that there are two types of acrimonious divorce,’ began Luke. ‘Firstly, where the couples hate each other so much, they can’t wait to be free and just want it all over and done with as soon as possible. Secondly, where the couples hate each other so much that the desire to hang on and hurt becomes more of an aim than the parting of the ways. Crazy stuff. The flipside of love can be very ugly.’
‘I see,’ said Jack, although he knew that already.
‘I used to marvel how I could hate someone with as much passion as I used to love them,’ said Luke. ‘Once upon a time, I’d have cut out my heart for her. Now, she’d let me.’
Jack shuddered at the mental image. ‘How did you meet each other in the first place?’
‘I was nineteen, walking to work in a factory early one snowy morning and a woman went arse over tit right in front of me. I helped her up. Turns out she was heading to the same place I was. We worked in the same building but didn’t know it. Then again, so did a thousand other people. And that was the start of us. After that, I seemed to bump into her all the time and I couldn’t wait to bump into her either. I fell hook, line and sinker for her, the full soulmates fairy story. We were married within the year, not a penny between us, trusted love would sort out any problems and we really thought it could solve everything. We struggled, had good times, bad times, really bad times, we fought, made up… until we ended up fighting more than loving. We tried to stay together, we had a dog that we both wanted to keep, but there was too much going on. We were both terrified that we’d try and claim each other’s hard-earned profits. Bridge got a new boyfriend and I was jealous as hell, then I got a girlfriend and she went nuts. Well, even more nuts, because nuts was her default setting.
‘Then… I met Carmen and Bridge met Ben and they were both for keeps, which accelerated the need to get this sorted, and somewhere in the last year, I grew up. I decided that if Bridge tried to fleece me for half my business, I’d just let her have what she wanted to make it all stop. Turns out she’d grown up too, and thought the same as me. So we both waved a white flag and called a ceasefire. We started to talk to each other as we should have done at the beginning, made the decision at last to walk away from each other cleanly, make the split final and forever, not take a thing from each other.’
‘And the dog?’ asked Jack.
‘She died,’ said Luke in such a way that told Jack that subject was off limits.
‘She’s quite… formidable, Bridge,’ Jack went on, which made Luke snigger.
‘That’s conservative. Bridge is a tornado, a volcano, a tsunami. If she was born a horse, she’d have been a bucking bronco.’ Jack smiled at that. ‘But yes,’ Luke continued. ‘She’s most definitely formidable. I admire her more than I can put into words.’
‘Do you?’ Jack couldn’t work out what Luke’s true feelings for Bridge were at