No, We Can't Be Friends: A totally perfect romantic comedy

by Sophie Ranald

  My whole face felt numb, and my lips didn’t want to move. ‘You what?’

  ‘I thought he’d moved out,’ she babbled. ‘He told me he had, and that your marriage was over, and I – well, I’d fallen for him and I guess I wanted that to be true. I should have known it wasn’t, but I didn’t. I only found out when Bianca told me.’

  ‘Bianca told you? Bianca Cole? How?’ Of all the details I wanted – or didn’t want – to know, for some reason this seemed the single thing I most needed to understand.

  ‘She… My friend Maddy’s married to her brother,’ Charlotte said. ‘So she knows me through them. And I’d been going on about this man I’d met and she told me he was married to you and you were trying for a baby. And then I ended it with him straight away. I told him that if he didn’t tell you, I would, and he said he had so I didn’t, but now I see that wasn’t true. But even if you’d known already, I wanted to apologise and ask if you were okay.’

  ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘Last year.’ Again, that painful blush, that gulp of wine like it was medicine. The glow of happiness and confidence that had illuminated her was all gone. ‘It didn’t last long, honestly. Like, four months? It was over by Christmas.’

  Four months. Over by Christmas. I tried to piece together the events of last autumn, but my thoughts were too disordered. Later, I knew, I’d open my calendar and I’d check every day, torturing myself with analysing when, and where, and what, and how. Now, I could barely hear her words over the roaring of blood in my head.

  ‘And Bianca knew?’

  ‘Yes. Well, I guess not at first. But she must have figured it out somehow. Maybe she asked him. I don’t know. Sloane, I’m so terribly sorry.’

  Bianca had known. She’d known, and not said anything to me. Not one word, not when we went shopping together and when she came over for dinner and we went round to theirs and we went out to a swanky restaurant for Michael’s birthday and when she planned the décor of our fucking house. And Michael must have known, too, and this Maddy girl and Bianca’s brother and no doubt all of Charlotte’s friends. That happy group over in the corner, chatting to each other and carefully not looking our way. They’d known. I was the only one who hadn’t.

  The wife’s always the last to find out.

  And, more to the point, when Bianca had delivered that veiled warning to me months before, it had been this girl she was talking about. Not some theoretical infidelity that might happen in the future. And, more importantly, not a relationship between Myles and Bianca herself.

  A wave of sick, churning shame engulfed me. I’d been a fool. I’d been made a fool of, by this pretty young woman, by my supposed friend, by my own husband. By the way I’d behaved towards Bianca, which, I now realised, had been unforgivable. And most of all, by my own inability to see what had been going on in my own sorry life.

  ‘I can see this has been the most horrible shock,’ Charlotte was saying. ‘I didn’t realise – I wouldn’t have come over if I didn’t think you knew. But now I have, and I… I mean, is there anything I can do? Could I get you a glass of water, or another drink or something?’

  She’d finished her wine. She looked so abjectly miserable sitting there, I almost wanted to say something to comfort her. But I couldn’t, not quite. He told you he was married. Maybe she was lying. Maybe Myles hadn’t told her we were separating. Maybe she just didn’t care who she slept with, whose life she ruined.

  I managed to say in a croak, ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘I’ll send you an email, with my contact details. Nothing else. Just in case you want to talk. And, Sloane, I really am so awfully sorry.’

  I nodded. I didn’t know what I wanted, beyond a sudden, desperate urge to get out of there, away from her concern and the eyes of her friends. If she got up and went back to their table and I saw them leaning over to her and imagined them saying, ‘Oh my God, Charlotte, what did she say? Are you okay?’ I thought I’d die of humiliation.

  And then I thought, No. It’s not for me to be ashamed, or humiliated. None of what happened was my fault. I’m not going to run away. I’ve got this.

  I said, ‘Don’t be sorry. You weren’t to know. Hell, I didn’t know. Well, I kind of did but I got it all wrong. I thought Bianca might have been hiding something but I didn’t realise exactly what it was. Thank you for coming over and talking to me. It must have been a bloody hard thing to do.’

  Relief washed over her face. ‘Not as hard as what you’re going through. I had a part in that, and I wish I didn’t.’

  ‘No point in wishing. It’s done now. I hope you’ve moved on, and you’re happy.’

  She smiled, and again I saw the radiantly pretty girl who’d caught my eye across the room. ‘I am, you know. Thank you for asking.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ I said. ‘And you know what? I’m going to be, again, too. I’m already getting there.’

  And I said goodbye, got my stuff together and watched as she went back to her table. Her friends all leaned in, and I saw her talking softly to them, but instead of looking remorseful and pitying, she looked relieved, lightened, full of hope.

  I’d done that for her, and I was glad I had. And I was glad to be able to walk out of there, my head held high.

  Twenty-One

  ‘So how long were you married for?’ Vanessa Pinkrah asked, her pen poised over her spiral-bound notebook.

  ‘Five years. Well, almost six now.’

  ‘And the house is in your joint names?’

  ‘Yes. The house and the mortgage. Although Myles paid the deposit, because he had savings and I didn’t.’

  ‘And you paid how much for it?’

  I told her, and when she asked how much the deposit had been, I told her that, too. I was glad I’d done my homework – all the details I needed were in a plastic folder in front of me, literally at my fingertips.

  ‘And how much would you say it’s worth now?’

  ‘I don’t know, exactly. We’re just finishing off a massive renovation and extension. But a lot more than we paid for it, although we bought when the market was at a bit of a peak. We’ll get proper valuations, obviously.’

  ‘And are there any other assets you hold, jointly or separately? Any other properties, investments, pensions, that kind of thing?’

  ‘Myles has his business, and I’m a partner in the company I help to run. We both have pensions, but no other properties or anything like that. I’ve got some savings, but not much.’

  I told her the amount, feeling a great wave of weariness wash over me. Since I left New York to move here with Myles, back when I’d had literally nothing except a heart full of love and a suitcase full of clothes, I’d hoped that our lives would knit together over the years, growing more complex and entangled as we accumulated possessions, memories, children. All but the last had happened, and now it never would.

  But back then, it had never crossed my mind that it might one day be necessary to unpick the tapestry of our life, separate the threads that were mine from those that were his, and try to roll them up again into tidy skeins, ready to be crafted into something new.

  Now I’d begun the process, the complexity of it overwhelmed me.

  Vanessa was speaking again, outlining all the steps we’d need to take: the disclosure of every minute detail of our finances, the forms that would need to be exchanged between her and Myles’s solicitor and submitted to a court, the lengthy delay before, finally, a judge somewhere put a stamp on a piece of paper that told us we weren’t married any more.

  ‘I know it seems daunting,’ she said. ‘But we take it one step at a time. If he doesn’t decide to be awkward, the process can proceed quite smoothly and amicably. I’ll put everything we’ve discussed in an email, and you can confirm whether you want me to act for you, and then we get the ball rolling. Okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘And I’ll email over my invoice.’

  ‘Thanks, Vanessa.’

  ‘Do you have any more questio
ns?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Nice to meet you, then, Sloane. And don’t worry, we’ll get through this.’

  I suppose we’ll have to, I thought, barely able to feel the grey carpet tiles under my feet as I walked back out through the tastefully, blandly decorated office in a nondescript mid-rise block in the City, and into the lift.

  Megan had asked around on my behalf, and a friend of hers who’d recently taken her financially abusive husband ‘to the cleaners’, as Megs reported, had recommended Vanessa Pinkrah. Another contact had recommended an independent financial adviser, who’d hopefully be able to help me scrape my own affairs into some sort of sensible order, once I knew how much money I’d get when the house was sold. If, of course, anyone wanted to buy it.

  Wearily, I emerged into the street. It was a blustery October day, sunshine occasionally bursting through the clouds and then being blotted out by squalls of rain. One of them was squalling away right now, threatening to soak my too-light denim jacket, so I ducked into a coffee shop, bought a hot chocolate and sat at one of the little circular tables to gather my thoughts.

  The house was on its way to being finished. Eventually, someone would buy it, live in it, make it their home. I hoped it wouldn’t be haunted by the echoes of my unhappiness, the shattered pieces of our marriage littering the floor like grit underfoot, no matter how often its new occupants swept or their robot hoover trundled around.

  For now, at least I had a roof over my head. Jared, who owned the Airbnb apartment I was renting, was going to be away for another three weeks and had been relieved to accept a long-term tenant rather than renting his place out to tourists on an ad hoc basis. But once he came back, I was going to need another plan – and I had no idea what that might be. With the mortgage on our house still eating away more than half of my take-home pay, renting a flat was out of the question for now unless I dug deep into my meagre savings.

  I thought longingly of my apartment in Brooklyn: its white walls and white bed linen; the one wall I’d painted bright, sunshine yellow because the room was dark; the fresh flowers I bought from the market and arranged in thrift-store vases. Okay, there’d also been the battalions of roaches that had marched across the kitchen floor at night; the downstairs neighbour’s weed smoke drifting in whenever I opened a window; the choking traffic on the busy road below, leading out of town. But it had been home – it had been mine. The first place that had felt like home since I was a little girl in Sparwood, when Mom was still truly a mother.

  But I could never go back. Even if the flat was the same – which it wouldn’t be; it would have rocketed far out of my reach in price, apart from anything else – I wouldn’t be the same, and I’d feel like I was trying to wear clothes I’d last put on when I was twenty-five.

  I couldn’t go back to Canada, either. Dad and Maura, my stepmom, would be thrilled to have me, I knew – they’d say I was welcome to stay, rent-free, for as long as I wanted. But no matter how strong the longing was to flee back to their warm house and their waiting arms, it was no good as a long-term prospect; there wasn’t exactly much call for new media agents in small, remote Ontario mining towns.

  I could, I supposed, sell my car. That would cover a deposit on a flat and a couple of months’ rent. But I thought of my beloved little Mini, the independence and freedom it represented, and how loyal a friend it had been to me over the years – never once breaking down, always there for me when I saw its friendly face waiting in the street, as if it was saying, ‘Are we going anywhere nice today?’ – and I knew I couldn’t do that. I had enough sadness to deal with without adding one more loss to the pile that weighed down on my heart.

  I sipped the last of my hot chocolate – the chalky, bitter dregs of it – and took my phone out of my bag. I’d written a long checklist of things I needed to do, and the first visit with the solicitor could, at least, be checked off.

  Way down at the bottom of that list, below ‘Find a place to live’ and ‘Get quotes from removal companies’, was ‘Talk to Bianca’. I was going to have to do it – I knew I was. I was going to have to apologise to her for the hurtful conclusion I’d jumped to, and explain how I’d got things so wrong. But whenever I thought about picking up the phone and calling her, I felt so flooded with hurt and rage – She knew. She knew all along about Charlotte, and she didn’t tell me – that I couldn’t do it. I knew that in order to tell Bianca sincerely that I was sorry, I’d have to get past that first, and I was nowhere near that yet.

  I looked out at the grey, rain-swept street, already beginning to fill with commuters hurrying, umbrellas held rigidly over their heads against the rain, towards the Tube. I’d be joining them soon, cramming myself onto the Central line, which would be uncomfortably hot even on this chilly day. I imagined edging myself to a free square foot of space, the damp bodies pressed closely around me in the fug.

  I loved my job. Ripple Effect was far more than just a workplace; it was half mine. I’d helped Megan build up the business over the past five years, so we’d gone from a scrappy newcomer to a respected force in the world of influencer marketing. I loved most of my clients, too – even the high-maintenance ones, whose diva ways often hid deep insecurity, and who needed the most handholding and ego-boosting of all. Ruby-Grace, I was beginning to suspect, fell firmly into this category, and I was glad that Sam had her back – or at any rate that she had his strong arms to carry her shopping hauls. Vivienne, on the other hand – well, finding some proper work for her was a challenge I hadn’t yet cracked.

  But still, at that moment, I wanted nothing more than to turn my back on it all and walk away. Not that I would, of course – I had responsibilities to Megan, my clients, the partner companies who we’d brokered sponsorship deals with, my team – all of them. But the germ of a thought had been planted in my brain: I might not do this for ever.

  Maybe the end of my marriage would mean other changes, too – not just to where I lived, but to my life more generally. In the meantime, however, I had no option but to keep on keeping on, taking it one day at a time, even though just opening my eyes in the morning sometimes felt like a task so huge I might not be able to achieve it.

  With a twist of pain, I remembered the last time I’d seen Myles. In a coffee shop like this one, which I’d chosen on the basis that it was best to meet on neutral territory. It was a decision I’d regretted straight away when I realised that the tables were so close together we had to lean over so our noses were practically touching, and conduct the entire meeting in whispers so the woman working at her laptop on one side of us and the teenage boy eating cake with his granny on the other couldn’t overhear.

  I’d started off by saying, ‘I think I owe you an apology.’

  Hope flashed in his eyes and he said cautiously, ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘I accused you of having an affair with Bianca. I was wrong about that.’

  ‘Thank God you’ve realised that at last, sweetheart. Look, I want to put this behind us just as much as you do. But before we can do that, you really do need to address these trust issues you have. I never thought you were the jealous type, until—’

  I held up one hand for him to stop and, to my surprise, he did. ‘You weren’t cheating on me with Bianca. But you were cheating on me.’

  ‘Oh come on, Sloane. Not this again. You’re paranoid; you’re making shit up. It’s got to stop.’

  I leaned in slightly closer. The woman at the next table glanced curiously at us, then turned determinedly back to her work. I was willing to bet she was listening as hard as she could, though – I knew I would have been, if I’d been her.

  I said, ‘A couple of days ago I was approached by a woman in the Daily Grind, after I’d had a meeting there with Gemma. Her name’s Charlotte Bell.’

  Myles flinched. That movement, almost imperceptible, told me everything I needed to know.

  But he wasn’t going to give up that easily. ‘Charlotte who?’

  ‘Charlotte Bell,’ I repeate
d, with exaggerated patience. ‘She was an admin assistant at Colton Capital. I presume you remember that name? Or shall I repeat it as well?’

  ‘Don’t be absurd. Actually, I do remember the name now. Blonde girl?’

  ‘Yes, an attractive blonde woman in her twenties. About ten years younger than you, I’d say.’

  I meant that to sting, but I realised that it hadn’t – what man ever feels ashamed of sleeping with an adult woman significantly younger than he is?

  Myles said, ‘She had a bit of a thing for me. Bit of a crush. I never mentioned it at the time – it was pretty awkward but I didn’t have anything to do with her on a day-to-day basis, so I just let it go. And it’s just as well I never mentioned it to you, Sloane, given how irrational you’re being. Clearly not only can I never look at another woman again, but if one looks at me I’m in trouble too.’

  He’d moved from being angry to being dismissive – and now he was giving jocular a try. It was like trying to nail jelly to a wall, I thought with hindsight. But at the time, I had been almost overwhelmed with frustrated despair.

  ‘Myles, I don’t believe you. I believe her. I think that what she said was true.’

  ‘You’d take the word of some woman you’d never met before – some lying fantasist – over your own husband’s?’

  ‘Yes, I think I do. Why would she make something like that up? Why would she accost me in a coffee shop and tell me some made-up story? She thought I already knew it had happened. She said you’d said you told me.’

  Myles glanced around. Laptop woman was still there. The boy at the next table was still determinedly eating his carrot cake, but his granny had given up on her scone and was sitting, agog, drinking in our words while her tea grew cold in front of her, occasionally casting what I guess she thought were discreet sideways glances at us.