Going Home by Harriet Evans

leading different lives. And neither of us noticed until it was too late.
    A month after I got back from New York I had a bad row with David. It started when he told me he wasn’t coming over for a friend’s wedding, and escalated into all sorts of things. I missed him; I was miserable. He told me he missed me too. But while I was still living the same life, if without him, I’d heard enough to know that he was having a great time, try as he might to deny it. And, of course, I wanted him to – I wanted him to be happy. So I felt guilty about being jealous of him, and he – well, I don’t think he missed me that much. I think he got along just fine without me.
    He had this thing about how us being together was a big step – ‘It’s a big step’, ‘We’re taking a big step’, ‘Our relationship is a big step’ – which made the word step lose all meaning for me. I found it vaguely amusing, but now, in the cold, Davidless light of day, I realized he was trying to tell me that he wasn’t in serious-long-term-relationship mode. So while I think he bought the ring meaning to propose, he must have bottled out at the last minute. And that says all there is to say, really, so the row ended with us both half-heartedly saying sorry and ringing off. What I should have done was call him back; I should have been the bigger person. But I didn’t. I was afraid, and so I bottled it.
    Then, three days of silence later, Miles rang up and took me out to dinner. Miles and I had been friends when we were teenagers; he’d lived in Spain with his and David’s father till he was fourteen, then come back to Wareham, which was when Tom and I became his pals. David was at university then, in Edinburgh.
    In addition to having a variety of jobs to pay his way up there, he volunteered to visit an old couple twice a week, didtheir shopping, and was on the committee for rag week, stuff like that. He rarely came back for the holidays, and when he had we’d never met him. I remember saying to Miles that he sounded like a Goody Two Shoes, and Miles offering me a Mayfair cigarette and saying, in a bored tone, that he was, and it was annoying to have such a girl for a brother.
    Miles, Tom and I thought we were a right cool teenage gang. On my eighteenth birthday I went to the Neptune in Wareham with them and some friends from school, and got royally drunk. Miles and I even snogged. In fact, in the summer of our first year at university we nearly slept together, but Miles got stage fright and his enthusiasm, as it were, wilted. He was mortified, but I told him I took it as a sign that we were meant to be friends and that was what we became. Of course, it was a bit different after I’d met David and fallen in love with him, but old friends stay old friends whatever happens. They’re there for you when things go wrong. They’ll tell you what no one else will because they love you.
    So, over dinner, with anguish on his face and in his voice, Miles told me that David was sleeping with Lisa, that she was virtually living in the apartment, that – and even now I think he could have spared me this bit – they had been caught in the photocopying room together. My David cautioned for fucking a colleague at the office, with his trousers round his ankles.
    I called David, and he was out. I left him a message. I couldn’t bring myself to mention her name. I just said that because of what had happened it was over and I never wanted to see him again. So, theoretically, I dumped him by leaving a message on his answering-machine, which is something you do to someone you barely know, not someone you’d wanted to spend the rest of your life with.
    I had an email from him in reply, just as I was leaving work.
Lizzy
    If you say it’s over, then it’s over. I think it’s for the best and you obviously do too. I’m sorry for what’s happened. Anything else sounds trite.
    For what it’s worth, I never thought this would happen. I’ve missed you.
    D
    And