You're Not the One (9781101558959) (29 page)

“Yeah.” I nod glumly, plopping myself on the sofa.

“How's your ankle?”

“Painful.” I wince, slipping off my sandal and rubbing my ankle. It's gone all puffy and a large purple bruise is starting to form.

“I've got some arnica gel for that.” Scrabbling around on the coffee table, on which more magazines are strewn, she unearths a tube. “Rub it on three times a day and you'll be as good as new,” she instructs, passing it to me.

“Thanks.” I smile gratefully, then watch as she grabs a pair of scissors and starts attacking a magazine. “What are you doing?” I ask curiously.

“Making a vision board.” She holds up a large piece of foam board, on which she's pasted various magazine cuttings. There's a chocolate-box country cottage with roses around the door, some rosy-cheeked children, a couple of dogs that look similar to Simon and Jenny. Across the top she's cut out letters that spell the words “Harold” and “soul mate.”

“I thought you'd done one of those already.”

“It didn't work, so I'm doing another one,” she says matter-of-factly.

I pause. I'm sure there's logic in there somewhere.

“This is the house I want to live in. These are all the children I'm going to have.” She starts pointing to the various pictures. “These are my dogs.”

“And where's Harold?” I ask, playing along.

“Well, that's the thing—I can't quite decide. What do you think about this one?” She holds up a magazine, which is turned to an aftershave advertisement featuring a tall, dark-haired man in a suit.

“Er, yeah, he looks fine.” I nod, trying not to think about what we're actually discussing here.

“Oh, good. I think so too.” She grabs the scissors and energetically cuts him out. Reaching for her glue stick, she pastes him slap-bang in the middle of the board.

“You've cut out his face,” I point out, looking at the stranger, who now has a blank space where his face should be.

“Of course.” She nods, as if that's absolutely normal and not verging on serial-killer behavior. “We don't know what Harold looks like yet, do we?” Wielding her scissors, she continues flicking through the magazine. “So I'll leave it empty until I do.” She glances up at me, bits of paper sticking to her hair and making her look like a crazy woman. “It makes perfect sense.”

“Right, yes, perfect sense,” I agree, somewhat dubiously.

“Oh, by the way, I just remembered I've got something for you.” Rummaging around under all the magazines, she unearths an envelope. “Theater tickets!”

“Wow, that's great, thanks.” I smile, taking them from her.

“Who are you going to take with you?” she asks, trying to sound nonchalant.

I hesitate. I know she still thinks I should take Nate, especially after what happened at the gym, which she declared was a sign that the universe is trying to keep us together, that the legend was working its magic.

I agree. It was a sign. A sign that exercise and I don't mix.

“No one,” I say defiantly. Briefly my mind flicks to Adam. I would have liked to have asked him, but after seeing him with the brunette . . . I force my mind to flick back again. “I'm going to put it on eBay, auction it off for charity,” I say decisively.

Immediately her face lights up. “Oh, Lucy, what an awesome idea.” She grins, all thoughts of Nate suddenly forgotten. “I know just the one. It's an orangutan sanctuary that I worked at when I was in Borneo.”

“Perfect.” I smile, stifling a yawn. It's been a long day, and not exactly one of my best. To tell the truth, I just want to go to bed and forget all about it. “Well, I think I'll call it a day.” I haul myself off the sofa.

“OK, night.” Throwing me a little wave, she turns back to her vision board. “How many
t
's in ‘serendipity'? One or two?”

I pause in the doorway. “Um, one, I think.”

“Cool, thanks,” she mutters, and grabs her glue stick and scissors. I leave her chopping up pages with a vengeance.

Fifteen minutes later I'm lying in bed with my laptop. Forget men—I want to marry my MacBook. It's dependable and reliable, and you can even go shopping with it, I think, logging on to eBay.

I go to the section marked “Sell” and type in the description: “One ticket for Broadway play to see performance of
Tomorrow's Lives
.” I add a few details, then post the listing. Hopefully someone will bid on it, I muse, searching for things to bid on myself. I'd really like a new bag.

I start looking through the vintage section. Usually I can spend hours like this, but tonight my heart's not in it. Instead my mind keeps sliding back to the gallery and Adam. I feel a beat of sadness. I didn't even say good-bye.

Regret gnaws. I wonder what he's doing now? Probably with the pretty brunette, I remind myself. In fact, they're probably somewhere right now having fun, while I'm here in bed with my laptop husband. I stare distractedly at the ceiling and listen to the droning hum of the fan on my windowsill.

Before I can sink even further into gloom, my attention is caught by the ping of an e-mail plopping into my in-box. I look at it absently. It's from Facebook.

It's as if someone suddenly plugged me into the mains. Adam!
The
Adam. Adam-who's-suddenly-switched-my-light-back-on-in-my-cab
Adam
?

Suddenly galvanized, I click on it and it takes me to Facebook and his profile picture. I peer at it closely. It's a photo of him in a silly hat and glasses. It's a good sign. You can tell a lot from Facebook pictures. Anyone who has a black-and-white head shot, or a picture of themselves posing in a bikini (women) or bare-chested and looking moody (men) is slightly worrisome.

As are all those people who have hundreds and hundreds of friends. I mean, they're not
real
friends; they're just people they met randomly in a club one night, or in a line at Target. I look at Adam's profile. He has fifty-seven friends—not too few, not too many, just perfect, I think happily, feeling like Goldilocks.

I stare at the message, feeling a mixture of delight and excitement. That will teach me to jump to conclusions about pretty brunettes.

Quickly I type, “Yes,” then smiling happily to myself, I snuggle down into my pillows and am about to log off when suddenly I notice a status update:

My ankle twinges in annoyance. Argh, is there no getting away from him? Quick! I need to defriend him.

I click on Remove Connection and he's gone.

E
xcept it's not that easy.

Unfortunately real life isn't like cyberspace—I can't just press Delete and erase him—and over the next few days Nate keeps popping up everywhere. Not in the literal sense of
boom!
he's right there in the flesh and standing next to me on the subway. Just small, random, apparently inconsequential things that by themselves seem like coincidences, but that put together are starting to seem really
weird
.

Like, for example, I keep getting missed calls from him on my mobile. At first I just ignored them, but when one woke me up at five a.m., I finally called him back and demanded what he wanted.

“Nothing,” he replied angrily, before swearing blind he hadn't rung me and it must have been an accident.

“What? Twelve times?” I huffed, before telling him he needed to learn how to lock his iPhone and hanging up.

Which by itself isn't that bizarre. After all, who hasn't sat on their phone and accidentally dialed someone, or answered a call from a friend only to hear their footsteps as they walk down the street?

What
was
bizarre was Nate calling me back the next day complaining that
I
was calling
him
! Which is impossible, “as my phone is locked,” I told him indignantly. Only later, when I checked my call log, sure enough there were all these calls to his number.

Then there was this funny incident when Magda sent me uptown in a cab to fetch some “supplies” from her friend Dr. Rosenbaum, a peculiar-looking man in a white coat who has a pink, shiny face that doesn't move and huge offices overlooking the park. It was all very cloak-and-dagger. After punching in a secret code, I was ushered inside, asked to hand over the cash, and given a bag of creams and potions. I felt as if we were doing a drug deal. Not that I've ever
done
a drug deal, but anyway, that wasn't the strange part. The strange part was on the way back.

One minute everything was totally normal. I was trundling along in the cab and the driver was cursing away on his phone in what sounded like Russian, when suddenly the engine spluttered loudly and we broke down. Guess
where
we broke down? Right outside Nate's apartment. I mean
right
outside. As if that wasn't enough of a coincidence, it was at
exactly
the same time as Nate was leaving the building! I had to duck down on the backseat so he didn't see me. A few seconds more and it would have been too late. How weird was that?

And it doesn't stop there. Every time I turn on the TV, he's on it. Admittedly not him personally, but
Big Bucks
is always playing. What's even worse, I've now got the jingle in my head and I can't stop humming it. It's as if there's no escaping him. It's the same with the radio. Only it's Bob Marley's “No Woman, No Cry,” which used to be our song. Every time I hear it, it reminds me of Nate. I haven't heard it for years. Normally it's Lady Gaga and Fergie and Katy Perry. Now suddenly, these past few days, every time I flick on the radio, it seems to be on every station. It's totally freaky.

So freaky that it gets me thinking about all the other things that have niggled me recently but that I've brushed off. Like Nate's confession that he had a strange desire to walk into our gallery one day,
for no apparent reason
, or discovering that we've been going to the same places for years and missing each other, or both of us finding the pendants again, even though mine was lost for years.

As one thought trips over another, like a row of dominoes, my mind starts whirring.... Bumping into him in the street after we broke up, sitting next to him at the sushi restaurant, the incident at the gym—Manhattan's small, but not
that
small. And then the other night at the gallery, seeing all the TV screens tuned to his game show as I was talking to Adam, then Brad suddenly appearing just as Adam was about to ask me out on a date, mentioning Nate's name and making Adam disappear.

If I were superstitious, I'd almost think there was some higher force trying to stop me from going out with anyone else.

I'm not superstitious, though. I don't believe in all that rubbish, I tell myself firmly. OK, so I admit, I read my horoscope now and again, and yes, it's true, I once saw a fortune-teller, but it was years ago at a school event and of course I
knew
all along it was Mrs. Cooper, the chemistry teacher, dressed up in a belly dancer's outfit. There's absolutely no way I would ever be like Robyn and believe in something silly like, for example, a legend about eternal love. Just because I'm Googling it doesn't mean that I'm starting to have these completely insane thoughts about it coming true.

I type “Legend of the Bridge of Sighs” and hit return. A page opens up:

Because, like I said, it's just insane. Ridiculous. Completely bananas. Hurriedly clicking off the page, I have a quick peek at Facebook to see if Adam has replied to my message, but instead all I notice is Nate. He's still there on my home page! He's still my Facebook friend! I stare at his photograph with a mixture of disbelief and incredulity.

Feeling a seed of panic, I frantically hit my keyboard.
Delete! Delete! Delete!