Sadie. Sadie fucking Banks. Did everyone know? Their colleagues, their friends? At that moment she remembered the card DS Anderson had left for her, and she pulled it out now, staring down at it until with sudden decisiveness she picked up her phone and dialed the number before she could change her mind, before the tsunami broke and pulled her under.
“DS Anderson.”
She swallowed. “It’s Clara Haynes. I—you—”
“Yes. Hello, Clara. How can I help?”
She forced herself to speak. “Luke was having an affair,” she said, in the unrecognizable, matter-of-fact voice of a stranger’s. “Her name’s Sadie Banks; she works at Brindle too. Maybe you should speak to her. She might have a better idea of where he is.” Her voice cracked on the last word and when she hung up, the pain crashed over her at last, dragging her down in its vicious undertow, filling her lungs with grief.
A long time later she sat, head in hands, her face raw from crying. What should she do now? Pack her bags and move out? Had Luke simply left her for someone else? Was that all this was? Merely a gutless way of telling her she was dumped, that he hadn’t loved her after all?
—
When she arrived at work the next morning—the thought of staying at home alone in their silent, waiting flat had been unbearable—she hurried toward her magazine’s office, keeping her head down, unable to contemplate how she could begin to answer even the most innocent question about where she’d been. Perhaps the police hadn’t called there yet, she thought hopefully; perhaps no one had an inkling of the bomb that had detonated in the middle of her life. Making eye contact with no one, she hurried to her seat.
When she looked up from her computer thirty seconds later, however, it was to a ring of her colleagues gathered around her desk, staring down at her.
“Shit, Clara, are you okay?” asked the features editor.
“We had the police here yesterday,” breathed one of the subs.
“Is there any news of Luke? Where do you think he is?” asked someone else.
“I don’t know,” she stammered. “They don’t—the police, I mean—they don’t know either.” She wondered, as she spoke, how many of them knew about Sadie, and felt the heat climb in her cheeks.
For the rest of the morning she tried to distract herself with work, ignoring her colleagues’ sympathetic glances, but by eleven she found herself gazing blankly at her computer screen, unable to concentrate on anything except the thought of Sadie sitting a couple of floors below. At last, before she could change her mind, she clicked open her e-mails and began to type. Can you meet me at lunch?
She waited, heart thumping, for a response, and a few seconds later it came: a one-word reply that read simply, Okay.
—
She’d chosen a café on the far side of Leicester Square, one where they were unlikely to be spotted by any of their colleagues. It was a tacky, overpriced ice cream parlor cum souvenir shop, crammed with tourists buying Union Jack rubbish and clogging the aisle while they confusedly counted out their change. She had made sure she’d arrived early and taken a table at the back out of the way, staring hard at the can of Coke in front of her, her fingers nervously shredding a napkin.
For a second, when Sadie appeared in front of Clara, she almost laughed; she was so ridiculously beautiful. Long honey-colored hair and wide blue eyes, the proverbial traffic-stopping figure. And then she had a sudden image of her and Luke in bed together and felt as though she’d been punched, the pain like a physical blow to the solar plexus. How must she have compared with this goddess? Had he secretly been laughing at her, comparing Clara’s short legs and unimpressive chest with this perfection? She found it difficult to comprehend now that she could have been so naive, so self-deceiving as to have believed Luke when he’d dismissed girls like Sadie as too young and too silly to really find attractive—that he found her intelligence and wit preferable to such beauty. What a total fool she’d been.
Wordlessly Sadie sat down opposite her. They stared at each other warily for a moment, each of them waiting for the other to speak. It was Sadie who looked away first. She began fiddling with a bowl of sugar cubes, and Clara noticed with a flicker of surprise that her hands were trembling.
“Have the police spoken to you yet?” Clara asked at last, amazed when her voice came out sure and strong, rather than the tearful stutter she’d been expecting.
Sadie nodded.
She swallowed. “Well? Have you seen Luke? Do you know where he is?”
At this she shook her head vehemently. “No! I haven’t seen him since Tuesday, at work, I swear to God, Clara!”
“Were you still . . . seeing him?”
She shook her head again.
“How long?” Clara’s voice caught and she winced at the indignity of it all. She cleared her throat and tried again. “How long were you fucking my boyfriend?”
Sadie colored, a delicate dusky rose staining her flawless skin. “It only happened once.”
Clara gave a snort of disbelief. That wasn’t what Mac had said. For the first time her hurt was replaced by an icy disdain for Luke. Beautiful or not, was this lying child what he’d in fact wanted? Really? “I know that’s not true,” she said. “Didn’t you even care he had a girlfriend?”
Sadie’s eyes filled with tears. “I’m so sorry, Clara. We never meant it to happen.”
We. The irony was Clara had always liked Sadie; they’d often chatted at work dos, laughed together in the pub about Sadie’s crazy boss. She’d been too sweet, too eager
