She went into autopilot mode, making calls to builders, electricians, painters and decorators. Her French, which had become rusty, improved with each day and the friendly B&B owners, who had quickly realised that all was not well but were too discreet to ask, practised with her over breakfast each day, encouraging her, correcting her and praising her.
On dry days she tackled the garden, pulling out weeds, attacking hedges with vigour and slowly transforming it back to its former glory.
Within three weeks the house was habitable enough to move into. She spent her days clearing out her dad’s old stuff and decorating to make it homely. One day she walked into the village for some fresh bread and cheese and saw a little white car parked on the street, with a handwritten ‘for sale’ sign stuck on to the inside of a window. On a whim she called the owner and two days later she was behind the wheel, driving to the nearest city to go shopping for things for the house.
The days went by quickly, but the nights were long. Winter was coming and the darkness that enveloped the house felt almost claustrophobic. She would light a fire and sit in her dad’s battered old armchair, clutching a glass of red wine and trying to immerse herself in a book but her mind always wandered. She was usually pretty content in her own company but her relationship with Pete had opened the door to another way of life and she now missed it acutely. Occasionally she would have a wobble and try to call him but the phone was always switched off. She assumed he had changed his number, a startlingly obvious indication that he had banished all trace of her from his life. After a few glasses of wine she would google him, desperate to find a photo, information, anything that could connect her to him but there was nothing. His social media profiles were still gone and he didn’t have a profile on the website of the company he had accepted the job offer from. She even called them once, asking to speak to him, but the receptionist told him that there was no Pete Garland working there and never had been.
She assumed that it would get better over time, this near-constant feeling of grief for the idea of a life that she had lost. She told herself that she would heal eventually and find happiness in her solitude again. But she had too much time during those long, lonely evenings to overthink and overanalyse, and she found herself wondering if she truly had been happy before or whether it was just a foolish sense of pride that she clung on to.
‘Look at Claire, she doesn’t need anyone in her life to make her happy,’ her friends would say after yet another heartbreak, and their envy and praise would make Claire glow with pleasure. But now it all just seemed pathetic. Who was she to think that she was any better or different to everyone else? We all needed someone in our lives. Time passed, quickly and slowly, quickly and slowly again, and the healing didn’t come. The days turned to weeks and then to months.
At Christmas the people she had come to know in the village couldn’t have been kinder or more generous to her, they had all loved her father and remembered her from her regular visits many years ago, and she received plenty of offers to dine with them in their homes. But she politely declined them all and spent the day alone.
By February the house renovation was nearly complete and she’d started working on the outbuildings, hoping to get them ready for the summer season so that she could rent them out. Most days she walked to the village, stopping to say hi and chat to the locals that she had come to know. Occasionally she would sit and have a coffee with them, feeling proud at how good her French had become. She really wanted to be happy and she tried, she really did. But her heart wasn’t in it.
And so here she was, five months after she had boarded the Eurostar alone, on her way back to London again. She just had to see him, to talk to him again, before she could truly let him go. It was an itch that she had to scratch no matter how high the stakes were for her and for him. And given that he had changed his number and she couldn’t reach him by email or social media he had left her no choice at all. She was going to have to go to his home and confront him.
She’d looked up his address in his work file when they had first got serious and made a note of it because knowing where he lived had made her feel closer to him somehow. She had checked it on Google Street View so she could see what his house looked like and picture it in her mind when he wasn’t with her. But she had kept well away, the north–south divide unspoken but clear in both their minds – north London was Pete’s family’s domain and south London was hers. Now she was going to cross that bridge and invade his other life and she felt a mixture of excitement, anticipation and terror at what she was about to do.
The train pulled into St Pancras and she grabbed her holdall, stepped on to the platform and made her
