Page 110 of The Spark

‘Jamie . . . was cheating on you.’

Everything blurs. I feel the world tilt beneath me. I stare at her, hot astonishment behind my eyes.

‘He... was seeing someone else. A girl called Heather. She worked at that firm he interned at.’

Heather. The name that is still, infuriatingly, branded onto my brain.

A hurricane of fragmented memories – of phone calls and excuses, times he brushed away my questions – begins to blow through me.

‘Jamie told me in the car that night. Just before he died.’

The room seems to shrink suddenly, like the walls and ceiling are closing in. I struggle for a few moments to focus, form thoughts, draw breath. ‘No, Lar.’

She just shakes her head, like, I’m sorry.

‘No.’ I cover my mouth, trying not to cry out with shock and pain. Jamie, no. Not you. Not this. Not us.

Lara sets a hand on her chest, like it’s physically paining her to tell me this. ‘He told me everything because he was a coward and he couldn’t face confessing to you. He actually asked me to tell you for him. But after he died, and I saw how broken you were... I couldn’t bring myself to do it.’

The realisation hits me like a truck. That everything I thought about Jamie and me – and the life and future we’d lost – is turning out to have been a lie.

‘He’d figured out a plan to do the last year of his course in London. He was planning to leave Norwich and move in with her, while you were out of the house.’

‘Why?’ I say, my voice wrenched with anguish.

But I know it is too tiny and inadequate a word for such a huge, fathomless question.

‘He said you’d told him you wanted to try for another baby. But he wasn’t ready. He kept saying you wanted different things from life, that he did think he was being held back by staying in Norwich. All that stuff. With the flat and London and Heather... his head was just turned.’

Cold, blunt devastation lands inside me. This, unequivocally, is proof she is telling the truth. I’ve never repeated to anyone that conversation I had with Jamie, about trying to get pregnant again.

Lara pulls her mustard-yellow cardigan more closely around her. I have no idea how she isn’t sweating. ‘What Jamie was saying to you and what he was doing with Heather were two completely different things. I’m so sorry, Neve.’

On the radio, the music switches to Coldplay. ‘Christmas Lights’. My heart aches in time to it. I swallow back wave after wave of sadness, fresh grief, the startling knife-wound of betrayal.

‘All those weekends during term-time when he went back to London, claiming he was with his dad in Putney... he was with her. For almost a whole year.’

No. Not Jamie. No.

‘Jamie was a cheater. A liar. A coward. The truth is... he didn’t even come close to deserving you.’

I think back to what Meena said to me about Jamie, only a few days ago. If you were to meet him today, there’s a chance you might not even recognise him.

I set down my cooling tea on the coffee table. The slogan on the mug is like a taunt: CUP OF POSITIVI-TEA. I feel the abrupt urge to fling it at a wall. I want to break everything.

‘Did Jamie’s dad know? His mum?’

Lara nods, silently.

I picture Chris, the contempt with which he used to look at me. ‘But... why did they never say anything? They would have relished the chance to see the back of me. God, I even wrote to them a few times, afterwards.’

Lara swallows. ‘Well, to be honest, it turns out we had that wrong. Jamie admitted they never disliked you, not really. He was the one raising doubts, saying he wasn’t sure. They argued about it, sometimes. They thought he should come clean with you.’

‘No. His mum... she offered to pay me, to get rid of the baby.’

Lara looks down at her lap. She already knows this, I realise. ‘I guess he’d made it clear things weren’t going to last between you.’

I think of my own mother, the things she used to mutter to herself as she paced the house after my father left. Idiot... open your eyes... right in front of you... wake up, Daniela!

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