The One Who Got Away (3 page)

We were cuddled as close to each other as two people can get.

‘You held it against her?'

‘Maybe, which is stupid. It's hardly her fault. But I guess there were a few years after that where it was pretty ugly, and maybe I didn't behave all that well, but it was hard, knowing that Dad preferred living with Molly to living with me.'

David kissed the top of my head. ‘You know that's not right. He left your mom, not you.'

‘But that's not how it feels when you're a kid. It felt like he was choosing Molly.'

‘Right, but it's all good now. Because now you have me.'

* * *

‘He's The One.'

‘Who is?'

‘David. He's The One.'

I was sitting near the window in my Brooklyn apartment with Nadine Perez. Yes, yes, with
that
Nadine Perez. Nobody believes me when I tell them this but, two weeks after I moved to New York, Nadine Perez placed an ad for a roommate on Craigslist, and I answered it. This was back before
Crank Girl
, obviously. This was back when Nadine was still one of a million girls waiting tables and taking acting lessons and hoping for a break.

I'm off-topic, but whenever people find out that I used to room with Nadine, they ask me: could you tell, even then, what was going to happen for her? Honestly? Yes. She had that … that thing that some people have. Don't even ask me to try to describe it, but Nadine Perez had it.

For the record, it wasn't just the two of us living together. We had another roommate, a girl who moved in at the same time as me, a girl called Emma …

Emma …?

Emma-what?

Emma-something. Oh come on, Loren, she must have had a surname?

Emma, Emma … jeepers, all I can remember is that she was British and thank God she was living with us, because she paid her share of the rent, which is more than I can say for Nadine, which is hilarious when you think about it because I mean, I haven't seen Nadine for years, but when I do see her – in magazines and on the TV – she's on the red carpet, dripping Harry Winston diamonds and rocking Gucci couture, whereas when I knew her, she had money for cigarettes and black toenail polish, and that was about it.

Nadine Perez, twelve years ago, was broke.

Anyway, the point is that Nadine Perez was the first person I confided in about David and she was … well, let's say sceptical.

‘This man, David Wynne-Estes, I know this man,' she said, tapping the ash from her cigarette into the brick courtyard four floors below. ‘You be careful, Loren.'

‘You know David?' I said, surprised. ‘How do you know him?'

‘Not him. I know a man like him,' she said impatiently. ‘A man like him, I've met before. These men, they're bachelors. You must watch yourself, Loren. You're going to get hurt.'

Did I listen?

No.

Do we ever?

No.

Would Nadine be proven right? Yes, because just six months into what I considered our relationship – our wild, funny, mutually supportive, madly sexy relationship – David ended it.

Didn't expect that, did you?

No. Me either. But that's what happened. David called me into his office at Book-IT – his glass-walled office on the upper floor, with who knows how many Book-IT staff trying to think of a reason to hurry past and get a quick look inside – and dumped me.

‘I don't understand,' I said, and I genuinely could not compute what he was telling me.

‘Oh, Loren. We've had a good time. But I wasn't intending this – me and you – to be something exclusive,' said David, ‘I mean, you're great! But the thing is, there's this other girl, and I want to see where that relationship might go.'

There was another girl? But how could that even be? I was so shocked that I burst into tears.

‘Oh, Jesus,' said David, rushing to close the door (not that it helped, because: glass-walled office). ‘Oh, Loren, please. Stop this. Stop this now. Don't cry.'

To be clear, he wasn't upset. People were walking past and gawking in. He was embarrassed.

‘Please stop, Loren,' David said, looking around for something to mop up my tears. ‘Loren, please. This is crazy. The last thing in the world I wanted to do was to hurt you.'

Again, this made no sense. If he didn't want to hurt me, then why was he leaving me?

‘But we've been happy,' I said, chest heaving. ‘Why not find out where this is going? Leave her and stay with me. What has she got that I haven't? I thought we were in love.'

Oh yes, I went there. And it gets worse. You know all those rules about keeping your dignity after a breakup? About not calling and texting and sobbing? About keeping your head high? I broke all of them.
All
of them. I called David long after he'd made it clear that he didn't want me to call anymore. I texted him vague messages like,
Thursday 6pm best for me
to see if he might text me back, saying:
Sorry, what?
so I could then pretend that I'd sent the message to the wrong person (that didn't work, either). I turned up on his street corner, where I jogged up and down in one spot in my Lycra gym pants, hoping that he might come out and see me and say, ‘Wow, Loren, you are gorgeous. Come on back to your rightful place – in my bed.'

None of it worked. David had dumped me, and he wasn't playing games. His calls and texts to me just stopped. Bang. So brutal. Like I hadn't existed. I remember Molly telling me: ‘Look, it's probably for the best. Cutting you dead, it's harsh, but it's so much better than letting you hang on, wondering whether he might come back …'

Which was all well and good, but I was hurting like hell. When I wasn't at work or jogging, I was moping.

‘I don't understand,' I sobbed to Nadine. ‘What did I do wrong?'

‘This isn't about you,' she said. ‘I told you, this man is a player. Now, enough. Week after week, you're in bed. You need to get up. You need to stop. You need to move on.' With that, she tried to drag the covers off me.

‘I can't move on,' I said, snatching them back. ‘I'm devastated. I've got a broken heart.'

‘You have not got a broken heart. You have a broken head. You dated. You broke up. This happens, Loren. To thousands of girls in this city, every day. You know what you must do. Get back on the donkey.'

She meant the horse. But who wanted a horse? Not me. I wanted David, a situation made infinitely worse by the fact that I was still seeing him – literally, I was still seeing him every day, because we worked together at Book-IT – until one day, when he simply disappeared.

* * *

‘What the hell happened?'

I was standing outside David's office, looking in. The entire staff was doing the same. His desk – a desk that I knew intimately from all the times he'd called me in to sit on it – had been wiped clean.

‘Where is everything?'

All the things that normally covered his desk – the baseball signed by Derek Jeter, the two computer screens he needed to watch the stock market, the miniature rake resting in the sandbox – were gone.

David's posters –
WINNERS GET UP ONE MORE TIME
– were gone, too.

‘Why doesn't anyone ask me what happened, because I happen to know.' It was whiny Marvin, the least likeable of the unpaid interns we had slaving at Book-IT.

‘What do you know?' I said.

‘The guy who worked in there,' said Marvin, ‘the jerk with the dollar-sign cufflinks like he's Michael Douglas in
Wall Street
and hello, it's the new millennium?'

Yes, that was David.

‘Well, he got a call to come in on the weekend, and then when he got here, lawyer types were waiting for him,' Marvin said. ‘Guys in suits. Guys with ties. They had this big, closed-door meeting. Next thing, he walked out.'

‘How do you know all this?'

‘Because I got a call to come in, too. I was standing right here when he came out of there. The lawyers, they told me: “Go in, pack up all his stuff, and take it to him.” Which I did. He lives on Mercer. You should see the apartment. It's got all this fancy furniture: that famous leather chair with the footstool, one of those arc lamps.'

Yes, I remembered.

‘But what did he say?' I said anxiously. ‘Was he upset, or …?'

‘He wasn't upset. He just said, put those things there, and those things there, and while I was doing that, he told me that it was no big deal, he was planning on leaving New York anyway.'

That hit me like a hammer. David was leaving New York? But why? To go where? And how was I going to get him back if that happened?

‘He's going back to his home town.' Marvin shrugged. ‘He said something about his mom being sick, and he felt sad to be going because he would have stayed a bit longer to keep the company out of trouble.'

‘Out of trouble? What does that mean?'

‘He didn't say, only that he thought they'd regret asking him to go because he was the one holding everything together. Like, how arrogant can you get?'

I looked back into David's empty office. His title at Book-IT had been Vice-President, Capital Raising, meaning he was in charge of finding investors, and since we were a start-up – i.e.
not making any money – he could well have been holding the place together.

‘Maybe he's right,' I said, ‘maybe we are in trouble.'

I rushed home from work to tell Nadine.

‘So they must have caught him,' she said, because Nadine is smart like that.

‘What do you mean?' I said, because I'm dumb like that.

‘The amount of money he was throwing around – the apartment on Mercer, all those fancy clothes and paying for every round – it had to be coming from somewhere.'

‘But he was really high up, and they were paying him a lot,' I said indignantly, and loyally.

‘Sure they were,' said Nadine, grinding her cigarette butt against the fire escape. ‘Believe me, Loren, nobody gets marched out of the building on a Sunday unless they've been stealing.'

* * *

David left Book-IT in the summer. I stayed on, as did most of the staff. Whatever calamity he predicted might come from his departure never eventuated. We went from strength to strength. I got promoted from a cubicle to an office, and I promoted myself from the smallest bedroom in our little apartment to a one-bedroom apartment on the Lower East Side.

There was no contact between me and David, and I do mean none. He had lost his Book-IT email when he left and I couldn't find a forwarding address; he'd had to hand back his cell, and I didn't have his new number. Nadine encouraged me to quit moping and enjoy New York, which I did, to a point, but when your heart gets broken, it gets broken, and there's not much you can do to fix it, except give it time.

And then
bang
.

Yes, you guessed it. I ran into David. Literally. I crashed into him, on the corner of Park and 45th.

David was first to speak. ‘Hey, hey, hey, easy there, girl,' and then, as we collected ourselves, he said: ‘Oh my God, it's Loren Franklin! What are the chances? How the hell are you, Loren? How long has it been?'

It had been four years.

‘You look amazing,' he said. ‘What the hell are you doing with yourself?'

Truth be told, right at that moment, I was struggling to get a word out. It was just such a shock to see him again, and he hadn't changed at all. He still had the dark hair, the blue eyes, the deep voice, and I don't know, I just couldn't seem to get a hold of myself.

‘Me? I'm not doing anything,' I said, ‘I'm just walking along.'

‘Oh come on. You must be doing something. You're not still at Book-IT?'

As a matter of fact, yes, I was, but for some reason I said: ‘No,' and then: ‘I mean, yes! Yes, I'm still at Book-IT. Not at the same job.'

I was talking gibberish.

‘So they promoted you?' he said. ‘It was only ever a matter of time. You'll end up running that place.'

‘Why did they fire you?' I spluttered, thinking:
Oh, gee, Loren, did you really just say that?!

David threw back his head and laughed. ‘Is that what they told people? They didn't fire me! I quit. I had to go home to Bienveneda. Mom had a bit of a health scare. But now I've started a business there. Capital Shrine. I do capital raising, investment, same as I used to do for Book-IT, but now I do it for me.'

‘Oh right,' I said, and then – inexplicably – ‘and you come to New York?'

Like he wasn't standing in the streets of Manhattan? Like capital raising doesn't happen in New York? I wanted to slap myself.

‘I do,' said David, smiling. ‘I come quite often. I've been thinking about getting a place here because you know, the hotels are a bit dingy and small.'

I didn't know. I'd never stayed in a New York City hotel. I heard from people that they were small, but would David be staying in a small room in a dodgy hotel? I didn't think so. To look at David – and I couldn't take my eyes off him – was to see a man doing well for himself. Maybe I couldn't have put a price tag on it then, but his elegant suit must have been expensive, and the cufflinks were still there.

‘But hey, what about you?' he asked. ‘Still in that little apartment of yours? The one you shared with Nadine? You know I saw her at something the other day … not saw-saw, in person, but in a magazine. Magnificent.'

I felt a twinge of jealousy. I knew the shots he meant. Nadine had made the cover of
Fancy
. She wasn't wearing much: knickers and lipstick, and she had a cigarette dangling from her bottom lip. It was all very black-and-white and arty, and no, of course I wasn't still sharing with her. Nadine had taken off one weekend for what she said was a test shoot for a Hollywood pilot, after which we'd never seen her again, except in magazines. Nadine had made it.

‘And what about Emma what's-her-name?' said David. ‘Do you still see her?'