I follow him upstairs and it’s obvious immediately Mark isn’t here. His room is empty.
‘But I saw his car outside.’
‘He sold it to a colleague who’s picking it up later tonight.’
‘He’s gone?’ I whisper.
Yan nods. ‘His flight’s in an hour – he’ll already be airside at Heathrow.’
For a wild moment I imagine jumping in Yan’s car and tearing to the airport.
But I know it won’t matter.
Yan pulls me into a hug. I don’t blame Mark for leaving without a word. Goodbyes are fucking awful.
I wrap one arm around Yan, but I keep the other hand in my pocket, my fingers folded around the cufflink. The last remaining trace of Mark.
Chapter 56
The way I deal with Mark leaving is to throw myself into my book proposal. It was Charles who randomly unlocked my writer’s block. I’d told him there was no way anyone would want to read about cheaters from a therapist who didn’t spot the signs in her own relationship.
‘Nella, my dear,’ he’d said one Friday when we were the last two in the clinic. ‘Do you think I opened this place because I’d never had an STD? And that only a squeaky clean fuddy-duddy can be trusted to treat other people’s infections? Of course not. I grew up in the seventies, for God’s sake. I knew Elton before he was gay, back when his parties were full of pretty girls. Not that I remember any of them.
‘The point is, I caught every disease going, but those experiences helped me. I can empathise with my patients because I speak from painful experience. And now, so can you. Even The Heart Doctor can get her heart broken. How would she be relatable if she couldn’t?’
I went home after his pep talk and wrote the proposal over that weekend. As I was putting the finishing touches on it at 3 a.m. on that Sunday, I had a moment of revelation. Yes, I’d been cheated on, but I’d also once been the cheater. And I needed to acknowledge this, at least to myself. What category of cheater did I fall into when I betrayed Leo?
Very clearly, I was Category 2. I did it to get out of the relationship I found myself trapped in. My tryst with Mark was a sure-fire way to end things with Leo, because even if I never toldhim, I knew I wouldn’t be able to stay with him. Consciously, or unconsciously, I knew there was no going back.
No half-measures for me – I went straight to the nuclear button.
At the beginning of September, a month after Mark leaves, I get in touch with my old therapist, Selma. I haven’t seen her for five years, but muscle memory takes me all the way from Chalk Farm tube to her house in Primrose Hill.
She greets me warmly when she opens the door.
‘You look really well,’ I tell her. She does – and not just for her age, even though she’s 80. She always has perfect make-up, amazing nails and glossy chestnut hair.
She leads me into the small ground-floor office where she still sees a few patients. The tweed armchairs and thick-piled carpet are exactly as I remember them. Homely and calming.
‘So, what brings you here?’ Her soft voice still has traces of Edinburgh, sixty years after leaving the city.
I blow out a breath. ‘A couple of months ago, I broke up with Rich, my boyfriend of five years. He cheated on me.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
I tell her what a big shock it was and how my whole life was upended. How it affected my confidence to do my job.
‘But that’s not what I’m here to talk about.’ She nods and waits for me to continue. ‘Over the summer, I spent a lot of time with Mark. I knew him from school but hadn’t seen him for fifteen years.’
‘You’ve mentioned him before. He was Leo’s brother, wasn’t he?’
Her memory is a steel trap. I only hope mine is half as good when I’m 80. ‘That must have brought up painful memories.’
I swallow. Selma knows the whole story with Mark. She was the first person I ever told.
I tell her about the wedding and all the time we spent together over the summer and how, in my darker moments, I even thought that Rich cheating on me was payback for what I did to Leo.
‘It sounds like you’ve been through quite a challenging time.’
