Page 69 of The Girl You Left Behind
“You ran?”
“I needed time to think about it.”
Pirate, the smaller of Greg’s dogs, has shot across the heath like a guided missile. The two men stop to watch, waiting to determine his eventual target.
“Please don’t let it be a cat, please don’t let it be a cat. Oh, it’s okay. It’s Ginger.” In the far distance Pirate hurls himself joyously at a springer spaniel, and the two dogs chase each other maniacally in ever-widening circles in the long grass. “And this was when? Last night?”
“Two nights ago. I know I should ring her. I just can’t work out what I’m going to say.”
“I guess ‘Give me your damn painting’ isn’t your best line.” Greg calls his older dog to heel and lifts his hand to his brow, trying to track Pirate’s progress. “Bro, I think you may have to accept that Fate has just blown this particular date out of the water.”
Paul shoves his hands deep in his pockets. “I liked her.”
Greg glances sideways at him. “What? As in really liked her?”
“Yeah. She... she got under my skin.”
His brother studies his face. “Okay. Well, this has just gotten interesting....Pirate. Here!Oh, man. There’s the Vizsla. I hate that dog. Did you speak to your boss about it?”
“Yeah. Because Janey would definitely want to talk to me about some other woman. No. I just checked with our lawyer about the strength of the case. He seems to think we would win.”
There’s no time bar on these cases, Paul, Sean had said, barely looking up from his papers. You know that.
“So what are you going to do?” Greg clips his dog back onto the lead and stands there, waiting.
“Not a lot I can do. The picture has to go back to its rightful owners. I’m not sure how well she’s going to take that.”
“She might be okay. You never know.” Greg strides over the grass toward where Pirate is running around, yapping dementedly at the sky. “Hey, if she’s broke and there’s proper money involved, you may actually be doing her a favor.” He starts to run, and his last words fly over his shoulder on the breeze. “And she might feel the same way about you and just not give a shit about anything else. You’ve got to keep in mind, bro, that ultimately, it’s just a painting.”
Paul stares at his brother’s back.It’s never just a painting, he thinks.
•••
The weekend stretches, is weighed down by silence. Mo comes and goes. Her new verdict on Paul: “Divorced Toxic Bachelor. Worst variety of species.” She makes Liv a little clay model of him and urges her to stick things in it.
Liv has to admit that mini Paul’s hair is alarmingly accurate. “You think this will give him a stomachache?”
“I can’t guarantee it. But it’ll make you feel better.”
Liv picks up a cocktail stick and tentatively gives mini Paul a belly button, then feels immediately guilty and smoothes it over with her thumb. She can’t quite reconcile this version of Paul with what she knows, but she is smart enough to grasp that some things are not worth dwelling on, so she has taken Mo’s advice and run until she has given herself shin splints. She has cleaned the Glass House from top to bottom. She has binned the shoes with butterflies. She has checked her phone four times, then turned it off, hating herself for caring.
“That’s feeble. You haven’t even squished his toes. You want me to have a go for you?” says Mo, inspecting the little model on Monday morning.
“No. It’s fine. Really.”
“You’re too soft. Tell you what: When I get home, we’ll ball him up and turn him into an ashtray.” When Liv returns to the kitchen Mo has stuck fifteen matches into the top of his head.
Two pieces of work come in on Monday. One, some catalog copy for a direct-marketing company, is littered with grammatical and spelling errors. By six o’clock Liv has altered so much of it that she has pretty much rewritten the whole thing. The word rate is terrible. She doesn’t care. She is so relieved to be working instead of thinking that she might well write Forbex Solutions a whole extra catalog for free.
The doorbell rings. Mo will have left her keys at work. She unfolds herself from the desk, stretches, and heads for the entryphone.
“You left them on the side.”
“It’s Paul.”
She freezes. “Oh. Hi.”
“Can I come up?”
