Terrible Wonderful

Chapter 1: The Post-it

The Post-it note was yellow. Not even a good yellow—not sunflower or marigold or any of the yellows that poets bother with. It was the jaundiced, institutional yellow of a stationery cupboard in a building with fluorescent lighting, which was fitting, because it had been stuck to Lucy Newton's kettle at 6:47 a.m. on the morning of her thirty-fourth birthday, and it read:

Sorry. Think we both know this isn't working. Took the PlayStation. —D

Lucy stood in her kitchen in Clapham, barefoot on cold tile, wearing the oversized Guns N' Roses T-shirt she'd stolen from Darren's side of the wardrobe three years ago, and she read the note four times. She turned it over. The back was blank. She checked the fridge for a longer letter, perhaps a supplementary document with footnotes and an appendix. Nothing. She opened the cupboard under the sink in case he'd hidden an apology hamper behind the bin bags. He had not.

What Darren Mosby had done, with the efficiency of a man who had clearly been planning this for some time, was remove himself and every trace of his existence from her flat between midnight and dawn. The PlayStation was gone. The charging cables were gone. The protein powder was gone. The only evidence that a six-foot-one quantity surveyor had lived here for the better part of four years was a dent in the sofa cushion and a ring of limescale in the shower where his ridiculous body wash had sat.

Lucy sat down on the kitchen floor, which was something people did in films and which turned out to be genuinely uncomfortable. The tile was freezing. Her tailbone objected. She sat there anyway, because it seemed like the sort of gesture the moment required.

Her phone buzzed. She looked at it with the wild hope of a woman who had not yet accepted reality.

It was her mother.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DARLING!!!!! 🎂🎂🎂 Dad says happy birthday too but you know he can't work the emojis. Are you and Darren doing anything nice? Love Mum xxx

Lucy put the phone face-down on the floor and stared at the ceiling. A spider was building a web in the corner above the extractor fan. It seemed purposeful. Industrious. Lucy envied it.

She picked up the Post-it note again and examined Darren's handwriting, which had always been atrocious—the penmanship of a man who'd peaked in Year Six and never looked back. "Think we both know this isn't working." Did they both know? Lucy had bought him a birthday present. It was in the wardrobe, wrapped in paper with little foxes on it. It was a watch. Not an expensive watch, but a nice one, the kind you buy when you're trying to say something without actually saying it. She'd had the back engraved: To D, for all our time. Love, L.

She was going to have to return a watch with a romantic engraving. She was going to have to stand at a counter in a department store and explain to someone that actually, the time was up.

Lucy allowed herself ninety seconds of complete stillness. Then she got up, made tea, and called Holly Barnes.

Holly picked up on the second ring, which was unusual for 7 a.m. on a Tuesday. "Happy birthday, you gorgeous—"

"He's gone."

A pause. The sound of Holly sitting up in bed. "Gone where?"

"Gone gone. Left me. Post-it note on the kettle."

"He did not."

"Yellow Post-it. Six words. Took the PlayStation."

"I'm going to kill him."

"He didn't even take the fancy mustard I bought him. It's still in the fridge. Whole-grain. Seven pounds fifty."

"Lucy."

"I'm fine."

"You're not fine."

"I'm on the kitchen floor."

"I'm coming over."

"You don't have to—"

"I'm already putting on trousers."

Holly arrived forty minutes later with croissants, orange juice, and the particular expression of a woman who has been waiting to say "I told you so" for approximately two and a half years but is too decent to say it on someone's birthday. She was small, dark-haired, relentlessly organized, and she worked as a production manager at a theatre in Southwark, which meant she was accustomed to managing crises involving large egos and small budgets.

"Show me the note," she said, dropping the croissant bag on the counter.

Lucy handed it over. Holly examined it with the gravity of a forensic investigator.

"'Sorry. Think we both know this isn't working.' He didn't even write 'I think.' He wrote 'Think.' Like it's a text. Like he's confirming a dentist appointment."

"I noticed that."

"And 'Took the PlayStation.' Not 'I've taken my things' or 'I'll collect the rest later.' Just the PlayStation. That's what he wanted you to know. That the PlayStation situation had been handled."

Lucy laughed despite herself, and then the laugh turned into something else, and Holly held her on the kitchen floor for ten minutes while Lucy cried into a croissant.

By 8:30 she had to get ready for work, because the world does not pause for Post-it breakups, and because Lucy had used her last sick day in January when she'd had actual flu and Richard Platt, her boss, had sent her three emails while she was delirious asking about the Q1 content calendar.

She showered. She put on a dress that she'd been saving for her birthday dinner—the dinner that Darren had presumably never intended to attend. She put on mascara and then took it off because she looked like she was trying too hard. She put on different mascara. She ate the second croissant standing at the counter, reading the Post-it note one more time, and then she folded it into a tiny square and put it in her coat pocket, because she wasn't sure what else to do with it.

The bus to work was twenty-two minutes of staring out the window at a grey London morning, thinking about all the signs she'd missed. The way Darren had stopped asking about her day. The way he'd started sleeping on the far edge of the bed, as if proximity to her was a health hazard. The way he'd said "Yeah, sounds good" to everything she suggested for the past six months, in the tone of a man who was already mentally elsewhere.

She arrived at Dewberry & Lane, the mid-range skincare company where she'd worked for three years, and she sat at her desk in the open-plan office on the fourth floor and she opened her laptop and she stared at an email from Richard Platt with the subject line "RE: RE: RE: RE: Moisturiser Launch Timeline (URGENT)" and she thought: I am thirty-four years old, single, sitting in an office that smells like toner ink and someone's leftover pad thai, and the most important relationship in my life just ended in fewer words than a parking ticket.

Happy birthday to me.

"Lucy!" Richard Platt appeared at her desk like a weather system. He was fifty-one, ruddy-faced, wore suits that were slightly too tight and ties that were aggressively patterned, and he managed the marketing department with the confident incompetence of a man who had failed upward for three decades. "Need the social copy for the Radiance Renewal Serum by end of day. Also, the font on the last Instagram post was wrong."

"What was wrong with it?"

"It was too... fonty."

"Too fonty."

"You know what I mean. Fix it." He started to walk away, then turned back. "Oh, and happy birthday. Janet in HR sent round an email."

Janet in HR had indeed sent round an email. It said: "Happy birthday to Lucy Newton in Marketing! 🎂" Seven people had replied all to say happy birthday. Two of them had spelled her name wrong.

Lucy spent the rest of the day writing copy about a moisturiser that promised to make you look twenty-five, which felt like a personal attack. At lunch she sat in the break room and ate a sandwich she couldn't taste and scrolled through Darren's Instagram, which he had not updated, which was somehow worse than if he'd posted a photo of himself looking liberated and joyful on a beach somewhere.

At 5:47 p.m. she got on the bus home. At 6:15 she walked into her flat, which was quiet in the specific way that a space is quiet when someone has been subtracted from it. She opened a bottle of wine that she and Darren had been saving for a special occasion. She drank two glasses standing at the kitchen counter.

Then she sat down at her laptop, and she started to write.

She didn't know what she was writing at first. It wasn't a diary entry. It wasn't a letter to Darren. It was something else—an account of the day, told with the distance of a nature documentary narrator observing a particularly unfortunate animal.

"Field Notes from Rock Bottom," she typed at the top. "Entry One: The Post-it."

And then she wrote about the note, and the spider, and the fonty font, and the birthday email with her name misspelled, and the moisturiser that wanted her to be twenty-five again, and the particular horror of eating a sandwich you can't taste in a break room that smells like microwaved fish. She wrote about standing in the shower where Darren's body wash used to be and feeling the limescale ring with her toe like a chalk outline at a crime scene. She wrote about the engraved watch still sitting in the wardrobe.

She read it back. She laughed at three separate parts, which seemed like a good sign or a very bad one.

She opened WordPress. She created a blog. She chose a simple template. She pasted in the text. She selected "Anonymous" as the author name, then changed it to "The Woman on the Kitchen Floor," because it felt right.

She hovered over the Publish button for eleven seconds.

Then she pressed it, closed the laptop, finished the wine, and went to bed.

By morning, the post had forty-seven thousand views.