Free This Is How It Ends by Kathleen MacMahon

she gathered up his stuff and packed it into a cardboard box. There wasn’t much to pack, just a few T-shirts, a couple of pairs of black denims, and some threadbare socks. There was a thin woolen scarf of his that she’d always liked, so she hung on to that. A painting of his he’d given her one Christmas. She took it down, wrapped it up in bubble wrap, and stuck it in the boot of her car. She was thinking she might return it to him. Or maybe it would be easier just to drop it off at a charity shop.
    She drove around with the painting in the boot of the car for a few weeks. Then one day on the spur of the moment she pulled over and chucked it into a roadside skip. It wasn’t anger that made her do it, or bitterness, or heartache. It was just that she’d never liked the painting in the first place. She’d only ever hung it on her wall out of politeness. She was absolutely certain it would never be worth anything.
    “Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Della would say whenever he came up in conversation.
    “David, who was David again?” That was Simon, trying to be sweet.
    “I saw him off,” Hugh would say proudly. “I put a stop to his gallop.”
    And it wasn’t that Addie was sorry he was gone, because she wasn’t. She knew he was no good. She knew he’d failed the test. It was just that nobody had ever thought to ask her.
    It never even occurred to any of them to ask.
    Did she ever love David? In retrospect, she would think not. She certainly fancied him. He was her type, long-haired and lanky and unreliable-looking. She had been flattered when he had first asked her out. She had been unsure what it was that he had seen in her, but it had been reassuring to think that there must have been something.
    She fell easily into step with him. They slipped into a round of gallery openings and club nights. They went to dinner parties where people smoked joints openly at the table and drank copious amounts of red wine. At the weekends they lounged around nursing their hangovers. They ate a lot of takeaways and they watched a lot of TV. And in between the parties and the hangovers they managed to squeeze in some work. Neither of them had high expectations for the other, and that was a nice safe feeling. But no, she had never for a moment been under any illusion that she was in love with him.
    The worst of it was, she wasted six years of her life on him.
     
    AFTER SHE BROKE UP with David, Addie threw herself into her work. That was her way of escaping it, she worked and she worked and she worked.
    There was a craze out there for extensions. The world and his wife seemed to want an extension. They all wanted the same extension. They wanted light-filled American kitchens with worktop islands and glass doors opening onto what was left of their meager gardens. They wanted Velux windows and chalky paint colors and designer tiles. So Addie gave them exactly what they wanted.
    Then, almost overnight, the work dried up.
    The first week in August, the phone stopped ringing. Addie thought maybe everyone had gone away on holidays, but then September came round and still nothing. Addie supervised the building work on her last few jobs and she signed off on the snag lists and then she had nothing left to be doing.
    To her surprise, she found that she didn’t mind in the slightest. She would sit down at her drawing board every morning just like she always did, and the only difference was that she wasn’t bothered by the phone. She was spared all those ghastly consultations, the bottomless pots of fresh coffee and the endless poring over Farrow and Ball paint charts and the interminable discussions about the suitability of travertine marble for a kitchen floor. It used to take all her self-control to keep her sitting there, nodding away as if she gave a shit. It was all she could do, to stop herself jumping up and screaming. It doesn’t matter, you silly cow. That’s what she always felt like saying, what does it fucking