Read The Love Market for Free Online Page A

to a walk. Jacqui looks at me with that expression in her eyes, the expression of someone who will always want to protect me from my worst self. ‘This isn’t because you want him back, is it?’
    ‘I can’t be that messed up can I?’
    ‘It’s got definite Taylor-Burton elements to it. But where’s the law that says you can’t get back together again if you’ve made a mistake?’
    I lean over and pant, realising that as I’ve not been running in about two months I seem to have become seriously unfit. ‘Yes, but we were never Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, were we?’ Jacqui will always confer romance on everything, and I’ve become so cynical that I don’t know whether she’s right to want to, or she’s mad to try to. ‘They had something indestructible that destroyed them. We were empty vessels who wanted the other to fill them.’
    ‘How do you know he’s not divorced and out there thinking about you?’ she asks.
    I stand up straight again. ‘Are we talking about Patrick again by any chance?’ My sister is like a dog with a bone over this topic. After I told her about him all those years ago, Jacqui was the only one who seemed to fall under the spell of him the way I had. She was the only one who didn’t judge him, or me, when I told her what the problem was with Patrick. I could say things about him and she knew. As though she too had been his lover at one time. Plus she was the only one who ever tried to drill me with good advice about how to forget him. Which couldn’t have been brilliant because it clearly never worked.
    We walk now, Jacqui strides it out employing both legs and arms, always putting the max into it, convinced she has to shed a few more pounds than she really does. ‘I don’t know anything about him, or what he’s doing. Do I?’
    ‘But the point is, you still wonder.’
    ‘Thanks,’ I tell her. ‘For being in my head.’ I peer at her strikingly pretty face. ‘But actually, I don’t. Not any more.’
    ‘Have you Googled him lately?’
    ‘I don’t do things like that.’
    ‘Why not? You did it before.’
    She forgets nothing. ‘Once. Ages ago.’
    ‘But didn’t you look him up after you thought you saw him in London?’
    I tut. ‘Okay, twice then. And it wasn’t him. We’ve been through this a million times.’
    ‘All because he was wearing sunglasses and you needed to see his eyes to be convinced. And you rang the hotel and they told you there was no guest by that name.’ Sometimes we will find ourselves talking about Patrick as though he wasn’t old news.
    I remember how I snuck away from Mike to use the payphone, how my heart hammered as I dialled that number. How I was worried Mike was going to know just by my face. I was outside myself watching myself do it, disapproving but unable to stop myself. If it was Patrick I had to know. And I had to cope with whatever act of insanity I would commit when I found out. The fact that I was even contemplating a reckless act of insanity of course spoke volumes to me about my marriage, which depressed me for days. And that was a side-effect I tried to hide, but Mike had to see it and know.
    ‘Everybody wonders about somebody, Jacqui. It’s called the politics of disenchantment. But—I even researched this once—most reunions with old flames don’t work out. Not unless it was a war separation or something on that scale. The moral is, you have to live the life you’re living. Not some parallel life that you wish you could live.’
    She pretends to play the violin. ‘Nice words. I’ve got some too. Life is short. Botox is just round the corner. You have to grab your happiness by the horns. Maybe seeing him three years ago meant you were on some parallel cosmic track. Maybe it meant you weren’t supposed to forget him.’
    ‘Well I’m sure he’s forgotten me. I mean it’s not as though he’s ever come looking for me in all these years, has he?’
    ‘Who knows? Maybe he really wanted to. Or maybe he did and