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He compresses his lips. “Is that why you keep this phone? To reminisce about the past?”
I pause, trying to find a way out, but he’s got me. “Yeah, okay, I admit it. Before I met you, I was finding it hard to let go of the past. But that’s all changed now. You’re all I care about, Nick. Andrew doesn’t mean a thing to me, I promise.”
Nick’s expression remains stormy. Moodily, he hands me back the phone, stalks over to the wardrobe and starts getting dressed.
“Darling, please!” I chase after him. “Don’t let us part on bad terms.” When he still doesn’t respond, I start to panic. Hurriedly, I scroll through the phone and hover over the ‘Delete All’ button. “Look, look!” I say, holding up the screen. “Let me prove he doesn’t mean anything.”
“You don’t have to prove anything.”
“Yes, I do. I’ve upset you and I need to put things right.”
Finally, this gets his attention. Smoothing down his shirt, Nick walks slowly back to me and scrutinises the phone as I press ‘Delete.’ Within seconds, five years of history is wiped away forever, and, rather than feel sorry, I find it strangely cathartic. This has been a long time coming and in a way, I’m glad this happened.
Nick’s face softens. “Thank you. I know that can’t have been easy for you.”
“It was easier than you think,” I say, hoping to be on his good side again. “You’re right; it wasn’t healthy for me to wallow in the past and ...” The words peter out. I’m trying to be sincere, but I can still see the pain in his eyes.
“Who ended the relationship?” he asks.
“Does it matter?”
“Yes. To me it does.”
I spread my hands. “I was the one who ended it. Happy?”
“Why did you end it?”
I hesitate, biting my thumbnail.
“Was Andrew unfaithful?” he presses.
“No. He wanted to marry me.”
Nick laughs bitterly. “And that’s a reason to end a relationship?”
“Yes, because it made me realise I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with him. Andrew never allowed me to be me. He hated my clothes, wanted me to wear black all the time. He said my voice was too loud, that I embarrassed him in public. He said I laughed too much. He hated cartoons, forced me to read Dostoyevsky and waffled endlessly aboutthe ConservativeParty. And once, when he got really mad, he threw me out of his car in the middle of nowhere and left me stranded.”
“And you still keep this person’s text messages?” Nick sounds incredulous.
I run my fingers through my hair. “I know it seems crazy, but I was afraid of being alone. Even though Andrew ill-treated me, I went along with it because I had no self-confidence. But one day, I just couldn’t take it anymore; the mask slipped and I had to end it.”
“That still doesn’t explain why you’ve kept his messages.”
I take a few calming breaths and find a point on the floor to focus on. I’ve never spoken about this before. “After the break-up, I fell into a black depression,” I explain softly. “With Andrew gone, I thought my life would get better, but it didn’t, so I started to think that maybe things with him weren’t so bad after all. Better the Devil you know, as they say. I thought perhaps I’d made a mistake and that we could have worked things out. But I was fooling myself. Nick, you’ve shown me what love is, what it truly means to care for someone. What I have with you, I never had with Andrew. He can’t hold a candle to you.”
Nick is silent for a long time. “Tell me about your depression,” he whispers.
“No. Therapy is over. Why dig up the past?”
“Because I want to know everything about you, Carly. I want to know why you were so unhappy before you met me.”
I shrug. “It was lots of things. Primarily, I didn’t like myself very much. I beat myself up over every little thing: my inability to hold down a relationship, my bad money management, my weight, just about everything you can think of. That’s why I stayed with Andrew for so long; I felt I couldn’t do better.”
“Are you sure that was all it was?”
“What else could it be?”
Nick slips his finger under my chin and tilts my face upwards. “Tell me what he was like.”
