‘No. I drove into a wall, no one else was involved. The front is a bit mashed but the back hasn’t a scratch on it.’

I took time to digest all this. I should care, but I didn’t, it was only a car.

‘But, Anna, what were you doing.’

‘Uh,’ she sounded confused, ‘driving.’

After a few expensive seconds of cross-continental silence I said, ‘Are you hurt?’

‘Yes.’

Concern half-heartedly flared in me. ‘Is something broken?’

‘Yes.’

‘What?’

‘My heart.’

Right. Shane. But much as I loved Anna, I’d no comfort to give, I was too messed up myself. Time for a platitude. Luckily I had several to hand, as a result of my own circumstances. ‘Just hang on in there, it’ll get better,’ I lied. ‘And with the car, I’ve insurance. Can you sort it out?’

‘Yes, yes, I will. Thank you, sorry, I won’t do it again. I’m so sorry.’

‘It’s OK.’

This sort of serious situation called for more of a response than that, but the best I could manage was, ‘Anna, you’re twenty-eight.’

‘I know,’ she said wretchedly. ‘I know.’

12

The news about Garv had devastated me, there was no getting away from it. And the others wouldn’t let me ring him.

‘Not when you re sore,’ Emily said firmly.

A bit wild in myself, I wanted answers. How had this happened? Where had it all gone wrong?

‘Had you any idea about this other girl?’ Lara asked.

‘Yes.’

‘But you hoped it would burn out and you two’d get back together?’ Troy suggested.

‘No.’ In all honesty, I hadn’t been holding out for a reunion – but there was a big difference between a strong suspicion that something was going on and knowing for definite. And knowing for definite meant that I was destroyed, distracted, lost to myself. I began reconstructing my last visit to the house – when I’d been picking up clothes and stuff for Los Angeles. I hadn’t noticed any evidence of torrid carry-on. Mind you, I’d told Garv I’d be coming, so he would have had time to clean the Häagen –Dazs stains off the sheets. ‘I left him, you know.’ My attempt at bravado didn’t really convince. Especially when I tagged on, ‘Well, it was really a case of constructive dismissal.’

‘Let’s go out!’ Emily suggested, when she saw me looking longingly at the phone again. So we went to a movie. All of us except Desiree, who stayed in the house, wearing a long suffering, stoical, ‘I’ll-watch-it-when-it-comes-out-on-video face.

There seemed to be several hundred cinemas in Santa Monica, a bit like the way pubs are in Ireland. I sat between Justin and Troy, who tried to ply me with foodstuffs. I shook my head when Justin tilted a bucket of popcorn the size of a dustbin towards me and I waved away Troy’s bumper pack of twizzlers.

‘No?’ he whispered in surprise.

‘No.’

‘Gimme your wrist.’

I extended my arm and carefully he tied a thick, red liquorice lace around it. ‘In case of emergency,’ and his teeth flashed in the dark of the cinema.

There was never any chance that I’d lose myself and forget my troubles in the film. Especially when it turned out to be a stylish, violent, highly complicated thriller, with bad cops and good villains double-crossing and even triple-crossing each other. I was too dazed to keep up with the myriad changes of allegiance. Unlike Troy, who seemed thoroughly immersed in it: when someone who’d been a baddy turned out to be a goody, he laughed a delighted ‘Aha!’ and made me jump. On the other side of me, Justin’s hand moved from his popcorn bucket to his mouth and back again in a regular rhythm which I found deeply soothing. He only paused from this pattern to whisper, when an innocent – and I must admit, quite plump – ‘regular Joe’ got caught in crossfire, ‘That should’ve been me!’ Or when a goody-turned-baddy’s dog’s ear got severed by a baddy-turned-goody-turned-baddy, he confided, ‘Ew! Boy, am I glad Desiree isn’t here to see this.’

As we all trooped out at the end, Troy asked, ‘Did we enjoy that?’

‘I couldn’t really follow it,’ I admitted.

‘Yeah,’ he sighed sympathetically. ‘Concentration shot to hell?’

‘I’m not sure that’s the only reason,’ I confessed. ‘To be honest, I can never really keep up with the twists and turns of that kind of movie.’ And I always got Garv to explain it to me at the end, I thought, but didn’t say.

It’s funny what strikes you, but what seemed terrible and final and wrenching was not that I’d lost my life companion, not that Garv and I would never have a baby, but that I’d have to go through the rest of my life not understanding thrillers. That, and never getting the hang of exchange rates: Garv was like a calculator made human. ‘There’s three of them to the pound,’ he’d explain, giving me a load of foreign currency at the start of a holiday.

‘OK, so to find out what things really cost I multiply by three.’

‘No, you divide by three,’ he’d say patiently.

So as well as not understanding thrillers, all I had to look forward to was an empty future being swizzed by souk traders.

‘You’ve got to talk about it,’ Emily insisted, once we were home and everyone had gone. ‘I know you don’t want to but it’ll help, I swear to you.’

You see, now that things were going well for Emily, she had renewed energy to focus on me and my drama.

‘You Californians,’ I scorned. ‘You talk about everything. Like it helps.’

‘Better than putting a lid on things and trying to bury them.’ Emily knew me too well.

‘What good will talking do?’ I said helplessly. ‘Maybe I should never have married him.’

‘Maybe you shouldn’t,’ she replied evenly.

She’d said it at the time to me. When I’d got engaged, instead of shrieking with excitement and making vulgar jokes about seeing my ring, she’d said soberly, ‘I’m afraid you’re playing it safe by marrying Garv.’

‘I thought you liked him!’ I’d said, wounded.

‘I love him. Look, I just want you to be sure. Think about it.’