Free Confessions of a Reluctant Recessionista by Amy Silver

a fund manager. She’s a rising star. She must be clever. He can talk to her, really talk to her, about what he does.
    How long has this been going on? Did this start at the party? Did something happen at the party? In my head, I rewound the tape. Dan and I were sitting together, having a drink. He’d been telling me about Ali and the French guy. Then he got up, said he’d beback in a little while and he disappeared. For an hour. And the next time I saw him, he had his arm around her.
    Oh God oh God oh God.
    He was with her at the party. And afterwards he went to bed with me. I went to the bathroom, threw up, brushed my teeth and went back to bed. I lay there, for hours, not sleeping, not reading, not watching TV, not anything, just feeling as wretched as it is possible to feel. As hard as I tried, I could not stop playing things over in my head, not just the moment that I saw them together at the party, his arm draped around her shoulder, but other things, too. His mobile ringing in the middle of the night a few weeks ago, and him getting out of bed to take the call, for example. He said it was Mick, but when I asked Mick the next day in the pub about it, he just looked at me blankly, before starting to babble about a problem at work. I thought about all the nights he’d been ‘too tired’ or ‘too busy’ to see me lately, the twenty-four long-stemmed red roses he sent, completely out of the blue, after he’d been ‘working all weekend’. The Louboutins. My beautiful Louboutins. It came to me like a slap in the face, a punch to the gut, the cruellest cut of all. They were a guilt gift.
    Seized by a terrible and all-consuming rage, I leapt out of bed, grabbed the shoes from my closet, marched into the kitchen and threw them in the bin. I ate everything in the fridge (including an entire block of cheddar, a jar of artichoke hearts and half a tub ofHäagen-Dazs), threw up again and then went back to bed.
    Ali called just after five.
    ‘I’m so sorry, Cass, I’ve had an absolute bitch of a day.’
    ‘Did you know, Ali? About her?’
    ‘There were rumours . . .’
    ‘You knew?’ I shrieked. Betrayal by him was one thing, by her, another matter altogether.
    ‘Rumours, Cassie, and there are always rumours about guys like him. I didn’t know anything. I was going to talk to you about it last week, but you were so happy, planning weekends away and everything . . . And I didn’t know anything for sure . . .’ Her voice tailed off. Then, in a more assertive, Ali-like tone, she said, ‘Get up, get dressed. I’m coming round and we’re going out.’
    I fished the shoes out of the bin and carefully wiped them down with a moistened sheet of kitchen roll.
    Ali rang again an hour later.
    ‘You ready? I’m outside, in a black cab.’
    We started off on the roof terrace at Shoreditch House. Then there was a bar, and then another bar, and another one after that. There were peach Bellinis, watermelon Martinis, cosmopolitans and Kirs. We ended up in the Crazy Bear in Fitzrovia where I got trapped in the ladies loos, which are entirely walled with mirrors, for a fifteen minutes. Eventually, Ali came to find me.
    ‘I couldn’t find my way out,’ I slurred at her. She giggled, leading me back out to the bar. I collapsed into an armchair next to the fire.
    ‘It’s not funny,’ I whined. ‘Everything’s falling apart.’ We were getting to the maudlin portion of the evening’s festivities. ‘I don’t understand why he did it. I don’t understand why I wasn’t enough for him . . . What did I do, Ali?’
    ‘You didn’t do anything, Cassie, he’s just a shit. I know that deep down you know that.’
    ‘He’s not a shit . . . He’s just . . .’
    ‘An arsehole.’
    ‘No, no. I must have done something to drive him away. I just don’t know what. You have to tell me, Ali, what you heard. You were suspicious, weren’t you? Why? Please tell me what you know.’
    ‘Cassie, it doesn’t matter now . . .’ she