Either way, I hadn’t been to the gym since, and blaming my insane behaviour on a year of celibacy and the rush of exercise-fuelled endorphins was the only thing getting me through.
It helped that Luke seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth. After a fortnight of seeing him everywhere, Gus had apparently taken to walking home from work every night.
“Don’t start,” he said. “I’m so over you and him, and you’ve only been back two weeks.”
I had nothing sensible to say. I made him the worst stir-fry in the world for dinner and retreated to my room. It was Saturday night—the eve of my sole lie-in of the week as I didn’t take orders or open the shop on Sundays—and I was bored. Restless. A dangerous thing, as for me, restless equalled reckless. In an effort to distract myself from hunting down Luke’s number, I fished my divorce papers out of the drawer I’d stuffed them in.
Signing them was easy, but letting go of five years of hard work was proving more difficult. Freedom was worth a lot, but my mother had died for everything I’d ever made of myself. Giving it up cut me to the bone.
Gus came upstairs as I was flicking despairingly through the pages.
“I’m going out.”
I rolled my eyes. “Of course you are.”
“Don’t be like that. I asked you if you wanted to do something.”
It was true, but I’d refused his offer of company in favour of sulking in my room like a stroppy teenager.
“Is that your divorce stuff?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Are you ever going to tell me about that?”
“What do you want to know?”
“Who he is. How it started. Why it ended. The usual stuff, chère sœur.”
I sighed. Gus had been pretty good about letting me be, but I couldn’t hold out on him forever. “His name was Laurent. I met him at a dodgy wine bar in Porte d’Orléans when I was looking for cheap premises for my first shop. I was young and stupid, and he promised me everything I’d never had—everything I thought I wanted. But he turned out to be a controlling douchebag, and when he realised I’d figured that out, he drained our bank accounts and ran off with a mutual friend.”
“When was this?”
“A year ago. By then we’d invested in a bigger shop, and I tried to keep it going, but he’d taken so much I had to fold. I came back here with all I had left, thankful I’d stashed some capital in UK accounts he didn’t know about.”
Gus folded his arms and leaned on the door frame, concern clouding the hurt swimming in his dark gaze. “Are you scared of him?”
“What?”
“Come on, Mia. You think I didn’t see your face when this envelope turned up? Or the way you jump every time the shop door opens? I know you’re dancing around Luke, but I’ve never seen you on edge like this.”
“I’m not on edge.”
“Mia.”
“I’m not,” I snapped, before it occurred to me that Gus wasn’t as easily persuaded by me shouting as he’d been five years ago. “It’s just—I don’t know. He was a weird guy, okay? I can’t explain it... It’s just—”
I stopped and tried to find words to describe the handsome stranger who’d charmed me so absolutely back then. “Laurent always gets what he wants. And he doesn’t like decisions being taken out of his hands. He’s divorcing me so I don’t get to divorce him, but even though he’s rinsing me for everything we had together, it feels too easy. I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
Saying it out loud brought a clarity I’d been missing. I’d been so busy—and distracted—that I’d let my failed marriage fade into the background, but my garbled explanation made more sense than I’d anticipated.
Gus ventured farther into the room and sat on the edge of my bed. “What are you actually worried about? That he’ll turn up here and hurt you?”
I started to shake my head, but the lie wouldn’t come. My marriage had ended violently on both sides, but Laurent’s last words to me had echoed in my head ever since. “Don’t ever try to be happy.” I was a long way from happy, but the fact that he’d known my whereabouts a week after I’d left Paris still weirded me out.
The divorce papers were heavy in my lap. I took the pen I’d been staring at all night and quickly scribbled my name on the final page before stuffing them back into the envelope. “I don’t think he’d come here and hurt me, but I want him out of my life for good.”
Gus nodded. “Want me to post that shit for you?”
I hesitated only a moment before passing him the envelope. “Please.”
We weren’t twins, but the deep sibling connection we’d always shared seemed to tell Gus I needed those papers out of my sight right now, even though they couldn’t go anywhere until Monday morning.
He disappeared. A moment later, the front door slammed. I assumed he was gone for the night unless he’d decided to stash my pathetic attempt at adulthood behind the wheelie bins.
I flopped back onto my bed, stretching out, trying to sleep. My foot nudged something hard. I considered kicking it to the floor, but curiosity got the better of me. I sat up. My gaze fell on Gus’s phone. It must’ve slipped from his pocket.
Don’t. But I picked it up anyway and quickly typed in an educated guess of his passcode. My mother’s date of birth activated the screen and it took two beats of my stampeding heart to locate the phone number I’d scoured from my skin.
Downstairs, the front door opened and Gus’s footsteps pounded on the varnished staircase. I made a ninja like grab for my own phone and snapped a photo of Gus’s screen. Then I shut his phone down, tossed it on the floor, and lay back down.
He burst through the door a split second later. “Must’ve dropped my phone.”
I gave him a bland look as he bent to retrieve it. “Are you off out now?”
“Yeah, but I can stay if you—”
“Go,” I cut him off. “I’m gonna have a bath and go to bed.”
“You sure? I’ll be back later, but I don’t have to—”
I threw a pillow at him. He caught it, took the hint, and tossed it back before he left all over again.
Buzzing with a sudden energy that made my knees tremble, I sat up and retrieved my phone from the bedside table. Luke’s number jumped out at me and indelibly imprinted on my brain. I opened WhatsApp and tapped out a message without stopping to make sense of what I was doing.