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saying any damned thing.
    The wipers were driving him nuts, he couldn’t get the speed right, they were either too slow and he couldn’t see through the sudden squalls or they were too fast and made a scraping sound on the windshield.
    “You can’t do this to me,” he said.
    “It’s not just about you.”
    “DID YOU FUCKING SLEEP WITH HIM?”
    She jumped out of the car just as another squall hit. He swore and jumped out of the car after her. What the hell was she doing, she was going to get soaked in this. The traffic started to move and the cars behind him punched their horns, someone leaned out and yelled at him. He had lost her anyway in the rain and the tangle of traffic.
    He stood there in the rain, in the chaos, in the dark, and cursed back, at the driver behind him, at Boston, at the whole fuck-you world. He got back in the X5 and slammed the steering wheel with the flat of his hand. This couldn’t be happening.
    He loved her.
    He wouldn’t let her go.
     
     
     

Chapter 14
     
    When someone experiences trauma there is often no pain at first. The body goes into shock, which works as a kind of anaesthetic. It doesn’t last. The nervous system can transit from numb to agony very quickly.
    At first he couldn’t really believe it was over, and his life continued as normal. He worked long hours and tried to forget about it. It was only when he got home and there were no CDs lying on the carpet, no g-strings on the floor of the bathroom, no breakfast dishes in the sink, that he remembered how much he missed her.
    He started to self medicate with rye and bourbon, and once or twice he missed the alarm and got to work a few minutes late. Bill grumbled at him, but it was nothing to worry about.
    He went on a couple of dates. He told himself some novelty sex was the best remedy. They both worked in the ER, Fi - Fiona - a pretty blonde scrub nurse, and Jackie her supervisor. That wasn’t smart. When it inevitably got ugly he got another dressing down from Bill.
    He felt even lonelier than before.
    He supposed he had to give it time.
     
     

Chapter 15
     
    He had never imagined he could be this way. He couldn’t sleep, every time he closed his eyes he kept thinking about her with another man. On dates he found himself staring dreamily off into space. He found fault with every girl he took out. He couldn’t manage small talk on his coffee breaks, so he spent the time in the ambulance bay smoking cigarettes.
    He found a blouse of Elena’s in the closet and he could have mailed it back to her or thrown it in the trash but instead he kept it in a drawer and sometimes he would take it out and hold it to his face and breathe in the smell of her.
    This was getting out of hand.
    He knew he had to pull himself together but he couldn’t seem to shake it.
    He stared at her favourite window seat, imagined her there. He thought about the way she used to sit there with her knees drawn up and a pen between her teeth, chewing on the end while she did the Sudoku in the newspaper.
    He missed her contradictions, how she would go to bed in a T-shirt with a pink rabbit on it and read Fifty Shades of Grey ; how she might put on the hottest, shortest black dress to go out to dinner and then inhale her mojito through a straw so that it made a sucking noise like a little kid.
    He told himself these were predictable emotional attachments. It was just chemicals, everything was chemicals. Love was a heady cocktail of hormones and he had simply become intoxicated. A break-up was like getting over a bad hangover. Tomorrow he would wake up feeling better.
    Then one day he got in the shower and started singing “River Deep Mountain High” with the Ike and Tina voices, just like they used to do, and he started laughing because it was funny, and when he got out of the shower he was still singing and then he sat down naked on the cold tiles and cried because it wasn’t funny on his own and he was just so fucking lonely.
     
    * * *
     
    He