The Girl You Left Behind

words still cause a reflexive twinge, as
     if David’s absence is a wound still located deep within her body.
    But Mo is silent. When she finally speaks
     she says simply, ‘Bummer.’ Her face is pale, impassive.
    ‘Yup,’ Liv says, and lets out a
     small breath. ‘Yup, it really is.’
    Liv listens to the one o’clock news
     on the radio, distantly aware of the sounds from the guest bathroom, the vague prickle
     of disquiet that she feels whenever someone else is in the house. She wipes the granite
     work surfaces and buffs them with a soft cloth. She sweeps non-existent crumbs from the
     floor. Finally she walks through the glass and wood hallway, then up the suspended wood
     and Perspex stairs to her bedroom. The stretch of unmarked cupboard doors gleams, giving
     no clue to the few clothes behind it. The bed sits vast and empty in the middle of the
     room, two Final Reminders on the covers, where she left them this morning. She sits
     down, folding them neatly back into their envelopes, and she stares straight ahead of
     her at the portrait of
The Girl You Left Behind
, vivid in its gilded frame
     among the muted eau de Nil and grey of the rest of the room, and allows herself to
     drift.
    She looks like you.
    She looks nothing like me.
    She had laughed at him giddily, still flush
     with new love. Still prepared to believe in his vision of her.
    You look just like that when you –
    The Girl You Left Behind smiles.
    Liv begins to undress, folding her clothes
     before she places them, neatly, on the chair near the end of the bed. She closes her
     eyes before she turns off the light so that she does not have to look at the painting
     again.

12
    Some lives work better with routines, and
     Liv Halston’s is one of them. Every weekday morning she rises at seven thirty
     a.m., pulls on her trainers, grabs her iPod, and before she can think about what she is
     doing, she heads down, bleary-eyed, in the rackety lift, and out for a half-hour run
     along the river. At some point, threading her way through the grimly determined
     commuters, swerving round reversing delivery vans, she comes fully awake, her brain
     slowly wrapping itself around the musical rhythms in her ears, the soft thud-thud-thud
     of her feet hitting the pavements. Most importantly, she has steered herself away again
     from a time she still fears: those initial waking minutes, when vulnerability means that
     loss can still strike her, unheralded and venal, sending her thoughts into a toxic black
     fug. She had begun running after she had realized that she could use the world outside,
     the noise in her earphones, her own motion, as a kind of deflector. Now it has become
     habit, an insurance policy.
I do not have to think. I do not have to think. I do not
     have to think.
    Especially today.
    She slows to a brisk walk, buys a coffee,
     and rides the lift back up to the Glass House, her eyes stinging with sweat, unsightly
     damp patches on her T-shirt. She showers, dresses, drinks her coffee and eats two slices
     of toast withmarmalade. She keeps almost no food in the house,
     having concluded that the sight of a full fridge is oddly overwhelming; a reminder that
     she should be cooking and eating, not living on crackers and cheese. A fridge full of
     food is a silent rebuke to her solitary state.
    Then she sits at her desk and checks her
     email for whatever work has come in overnight from copywritersperhour.com . Or, as seems to
     have been the case recently, not.
    ‘Mo? I’m leaving a coffee
     outside your door.’ She stands, her head cocked, waiting for some sound suggesting
     life within. It’s a quarter past eight: too early to wake a guest? It has been so
     long since she had anyone to stay that she no longer knows the right things to do. She
     waits awkwardly, half expecting some bleary response, an irritable grunt, even, then
     decides that Mo is asleep. She had worked all evening, after all. Liv places the
     polystyrene cup silently outside the door, just in case, and heads off to her
     shower.
    There are four messages in her inbox.
Dear Ms Halston
    I got your email from copywritersperhour.com . I run a
     personalized stationery business and have a brochure that needs rewriting. I notice
     your rates are £100 per 1000 words. Would you consider dropping that price at all?
     We are working on a very tight budget. The brochure copy currently stands at around
     1250 words.
    Yours sincerely
    Mr Terence Blank
Livvy darling
    This is your