Read Online That Girl From Nowhere by Dorothy Koomson - Free Book Online Page B

and I could see how angry he was, how bewildered and hurt by my refusal to talk to him – so angry he could probably shout, too. But it was all too much right now. If he’d only answered in the right way. We would have been in a difficult, fraught place but we’d be there together, working through it with each other. But the lying on top of what he’d done? That was what had ended this. I could not get over betrayal
and
lying. Not right now.
    ‘We had a chance to talk and you said there was nothing to tell,’ I reminded him.
    And there it was again: the flash of panic that I might know, the rationalisation that it’d be impossible for me to know. ‘If you’ve got something to say, just say it and stop playing games,’ he said. The rage was bubbling out of him into every word.
    ‘Do you want me to leave the key?’ I asked. We had nothing more to say to each other and I didn’t want to be in the flat any longer, especially not with what I had secreted away in my back pocket moments before he entered the flat.
    He glared at me again. And again I saw the almost perfect reflection of what I felt. ‘Keep the key. Don’t keep the key. Makes no difference either way to me,’ he eventually said. He shrugged. ‘What I want doesn’t matter to you, does it?’
    Seth’s body brushed against mine when he headed towards the kitchen at the end of the corridor. He couldn’t stand to look at me, nor to watch me leave.
    He stood at the kitchen window, though, his hand against the glass, watching as I left the building and then got into Lottie. He didn’t move while I started her up and pulled away from the kerb. I suspected he stood still and expectant for a long time after I’d turned the corner out of sight, probably hoping I’d change my mind and come back to him.
    At the first litterbin I saw, I pulled Lottie over, fished the plastic white stick I had weed on earlier out of my back pocket and threw it in the bin without looking at the result. I didn’t need to, not really. I knew what it would say.
     
    ‘I’d like you to tell me a story about you. Not the jewellery, but you,’ I say to the woman beside me.
    ‘Me?’ she replies.
    ‘Yes.’
    Like the photos I take, I collect other people’s stories like a magpie collects shiny things. Sometimes I wonder whether I would need to collect so many stories if I knew where I came from. Then I would wonder if I’d be able to do my job, make and relove jewellery, if I didn’t spend time trying to unwrap the layers of who my clients were, to find the right use and look for their forgotten, unused, discarded pieces of jewellery. If I didn’t sometimes feel like that forgotten item at the back of a bedside cabinet, would I try so hard to make other things special and lovable?
    ‘I’m not interesting enough to tell you a story,’ Melissa, the woman in front of me, says. She’s about my age, maybe a little younger. She’s well dressed in a suit jacket, smart jeans and white T-shirt, and able to meet me in Beached Heads at 3 p.m. Her fingers are bare of rings of any description and she has ordered a double espresso without even thinking what she’d like. From that I’ve guessed that she doesn’t have children and works flexible hours in a fairly well-paid job. I’ve also guessed she’s not married, engaged or in a long-term relationship. The double espresso makes her my kind of person.
    ‘Yes, you are,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry to contradict you, but I know you are. Everyone is. And it’s the people who say they’re not interesting who generally are the most interesting.’
    ‘OK. Erm …’ She raises her gaze up to the ceiling while she thinks. ‘Well, one of the things about me that people do think is interesting is that I was adopted.’
    ‘So was I,’ I say.
    Her brown eyes, cautious and guarded before, are now alight with curiosity, wondering if she’s found a kindred spirit. ‘Really? What age were you adopted at?’
    ‘Birth. What about