Second Chance - Jane Green [20]
‘I’m going alone,’ George said gently, taking her hand across the table.
‘What do you mean?’ Olivia didn’t understand. Still doesn’t understand, for that matter. ‘What about Jessica?’
George sighed. ‘I know, this has been the hardest thing. I get her for the entire holidays, every school holiday, and I’m going to try to come back a couple of times a month, so hopefully it won’t be so different. But when I say alone,’ he looked back up to meet her eyes, ‘I mean…’ He sighed. ‘God, this is so hard. I’m not going with you, Olivia. I love you, I’ll always love you, but I think this is a perfect opportunity for us to go our separate ways.’
‘What?’ Olivia froze, feeling as if she were stuck in a bad dream. What had happened to her safe, predictable world? Why was it spinning out of control? ‘What are you talking about?’ she managed. ‘Are you finishing with me?’
‘That’s not how I look at it,’ George said. ‘It’s just that I don’t see where this is going, it feels like we’ve been coasting, and I think this has happened for a reason, that it’s time for us both to move on.’
‘But I don’t want to move on,’ Olivia said, tears already welling in her eyes, hating herself for sounding like a five-year-old. ‘I want us to be together. I thought we were happy.’
‘We were,’ George said sadly. ‘But I’m not any more.’
Tom was the one who had sat on the phone that night as Olivia sobbed into the receiver.
‘How could he do this to me?’ she kept saying over and over again.
‘I agree,’ Tom said from time to time. ‘Fucker. Do you want me to come over and break his legs?’
‘I just want him back,’ Olivia sobbed, and this time Tom didn’t say anything at all.
Six months on it was supposed to have become easier, but the truth was, it hadn’t much. Tom checked in on her regularly, other friends dragged her out, and although she threw herself into her work, often the last one to leave the shelter, she still came home and lay on the sofa for hours, completely numb.
Bed offered no respite. She would wake up in the middle of the night and replay their relationship, wonder how it went wrong, think about the reasons why she wasn’t good enough for him to stay.
‘Oh Christ,’ Tom would say, his voice tinny on the line, as he sat at his desk at work in Boston. ‘It’s not you, don’t ever think it’s you. He’s obviously got some issues he needs to work out but, Olivia, don’t ever think it’s because you weren’t good enough for him.’
She had even been on a couple of dates. Not willingly, it has to be said. She had hoped they would be a welcome distraction, but it was awful to have to be sitting across a table from a stranger, sharing your stories again, wondering how quickly you could possibly leave and crawl into bed. Olivia thought those days were over, thought she would never have to endure that particular hell again.
And then George phoned one night with some news. He sounded happy, as high as a kite, and Olivia expected those words she had been waiting for, for months: ‘I’ve made a mistake. I miss you. I love you and I’m coming home.’
But instead George told her he was getting married. Oblivious to the pain that would cause, he went on to tell her that Cindy was someone Olivia would love, that he hoped Olivia would come to the wedding, and that he knew that Olivia would also find a love like this one.
‘Cindy!’ she spat to Tom later that night on the phone. ‘How could he? How could he do this? And why is he getting married? Why didn’t he want to marry me? What’s wrong with me?’
Tom listened, and then, a couple of weeks later, phoned and said he thought the best thing for Olivia to do would be to have a fling, someone fun to take her mind off George, and he had just the person in mind.
‘Oh God, Tom,’ she groaned. ‘Not you too.’
‘Look, I’m not trying