With or Without You Read online

  WITH OR WITHOUT YOU

  Shari Low

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  About this Book

  About the Author

  Table of Contents

  www.ariafiction.com

  About With or Without You

  Have you ever made a life-changing decision and then wondered if you made the right one…?

  When Liv and Nate walked up the aisle, Liv knew she was marrying the one, her soul mate and her best friend. Six years later, it feels like routine and friendship is all they have left in common. What happened to the fun, the excitement, the lust, the love?

  In the closing moments of 1999, Liv and Nate decide to go their separate ways, but at the last minute, Liv wavers. Should she stay or should she go?

  Over the next twenty years we follow the parallel stories to discover if Liv's life, heart and future have been better with Nate… Or without him?

  Contents

  Welcome Page

  About With or Without You

  Dedication

  How It All Began

  Prologue

  Without Him…

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  With Him: From 1st Jan 2000…

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  2017: With Or Without Him

  Epilogue

  After The Last Word Was Written…

  Acknowledgments

  About Shari Low

  A Letter from the Author

  Also by Shari Low

  Become an Aria Addict

  Copyright

  To J, C & B – Everything, Always.

  And to my aunt, Margaret Wallis, a wonderful woman who will always have a special place in my heart.

  How It All Began

  I think we’ve all had those moments in life.

  The crossroads.

  The should I, or shouldn’t I?

  Will I, or won’t I?

  The moments when you know that you have to make a decision that will affect the rest of your life. Do you take the new job? Do you buy the new house? Do you sell up and move abroad? Do you cut off the toxic friend who detracts from your happiness? Do you start a family? Do you tell a forbidden love exactly how you feel and damn the consequences?

  Do your choices affect the other people in your life? If you move a chess piece, does it change the game for other members of your family or your friends?

  The seeds of inspiration for this book were sewn during a conversation I had with my husband last summer. On a beautiful, balmy night in Florida, we were chatting about a moment in time, almost twenty years ago, when we’d considered going our separate ways. In the end, the parting was brief and we stayed together. Two decades later we have an incredible family and I couldn’t imagine finding more happiness in any other life.

  But what would have happened if we’d made a different decision?

  We speculated long into the night. Although I do confess to paying absolutely no attention to his theory that he may have become a rock star and married a supermodel. He’d look terrible in leather trousers.

  Next morning, I woke up and couldn’t shake the thought.

  What if your whole life was determined by one decision?

  By the end of that day, the outline for this novel was writing itself in my mind.

  This isn’t my story.

  It belongs to a character who’d been living in my head for a while, just waiting for her world to come along.

  Liv is a twenty-eight-year-old nurse who works in palliative care. She has been married to Nate for almost six years. It’s 1999 and the dawn of the new millennium is only minutes away.

  Her moment of decision?

  Should she stay in a marriage even though she feels there’s something missing?

  Or should she walk away from the man she has loved for many years?

  How can she possibly be sure of the right thing to do?

  If Liv leaves Nate, will she regret it in ten years’ time and mourn the loss of the man she will come to realise was the love of her life?

  Or will she go on to find another great love and discover that there’s a different happiness out there, one that she could never have imagined?

  Or, if we’re getting really deep and philosophical, would the outcomes be the same no matter what choice she made?

  Perhaps our lives and loves are predetermined, our paths mapped out, and it doesn’t matter what twists and turns we take on the road, we still end up exactly where we’re meant to be.

  Think about the crossroads you’ve had in your life. Did you say yes? Or no? Leave? Stay? Move forward? Or reverse right back to the situation you’d come from?

  Would you have wanted to know how each scenario played out, so you could have made an informed decision? Or is it better to step into the unknown and take a chance on happiness, on love, on life?

  I didn’t have the answers, so there I was, wondering, thinking, visualising.

  I wanted to know what would happen to Liv over the years from then until now, whether she opted to stay or decided to leave.

  So I started with the choice, the moment of decision and split the view…

  Two parallel lives.

  But which one would be the happy ever after?

  Prologue

  The Last Minute of 1999

  There were sixty seconds left of the twentieth century.

  Hogmanay. The biggest night of the Scottish celebratory calendar, when we eat, we sing, we dance, and we welcome in the New Year with the people we love. The music was blaring, the revellers were dancing up a storm, and glasses were being topped up with champagne, as I leant close to my husband’s ear.

  ‘I wish you’d had an affair,’ I said, my voice cracking. ‘It would be so much easier to do this.’

  Nate smiled, leaned in and kissed me, but not with any grand passion. That was part of the problem. We’d been together since midway through uni, and then married the year after we graduated, and since the day we’d danced up the aisle we’d had five years of contentment.

  Contentment.

  I hated that word. Imagine the obituary. RIP Liv Jamieson – a contented life. Worse, who wanted to be content at the age of twenty-eight? I wanted passion and excitement and maybe the odd little bit of danger, but contentment? It was like a scarf of boredom that got tighter with each passing year, until I could barely breathe.

  I loved Nate, but – clichéd as it was – I wasn’t in love with him anymore. There was no-one else, no drama, no big scandal or cataclysmic event. Just a gradual drifting apart. A disconnection. And, in a twisted demonstration of our compatibility, he had reluctantly admitted that – while he wasn’t as far along the road of acceptance as me – he knew there was something missing too.

  I loved him. He loved
me. It just wasn’t enough.

  Nate pulled back and pushed a stray curl of my red hair back from my face. ‘An affair? What if I told you I’ve had Kylie Minogue living in the loft for the last year because we’re having a torrid fling and she can’t get enough of me?’

  ‘I’d say please tell her I’ll let her have you – as long as she’s willing to trade you for her entire wardrobe.’

  Nate’s brown eyes creased at the side as he laughed. It was my very favourite thing about him.

  We’d tried. We really had. The previous January, just a day into 1999, we’d talked, and we’d agreed to give it everything we had for a year, determined to reignite the spark between us. We’d had weekly date nights. Lazy Sunday sex. Weekend breaks to quiet country cottages and busy city hotels. A fantastic holiday to Bali where we’d taken long moonlit strolls along the sands. We’d hung out with our gang of mutual friends and we’d laughed, celebrated, partied, and discussed it long into many nights.

  Yet, much as it destroyed us to admit it, we were still in that ‘best friends’ zone. My heart didn’t flutter when he entered a room. His gaze made me smile, but it didn’t make my libido throb with lust. And neither of us could shake the feeling that there was something – or someone – else out there for us.

  So we’d decided to call it a day. To wish each other well, split the CD collection and move on. That makes it all sound so simple, when the truth was that a piece of my heart felt like it was being surgically removed by a jackhammer.

  Nate wasn’t one hundred per cent sure. He didn’t like change. Preferred familiarity and stability to the unknown. But he said he loved me too much to make me stay in a marriage that didn’t make me happy. And if he were honest, our marriage wasn’t making him happy either, not like he should have been. I wanted more for me, for him, for both of us.

  Tonight was our last night together. It seemed apt. Fitting. The final day of the century, a chapter closing, and a whole new world out there for us to explore. And if I kept telling myself that this was a positive move; the right thing to do, it squashed the part of me that was terrified.

  I saw his lips move again. ‘Liv, are you…?’

  I missed the last bit. It got carried away on the wave of noise that suddenly engulfed the room.

  Ten…

  The lead singer of the band was counting down the seconds to midnight. Every year we headed to The Lomond Grange, a gorgeous stately manor hotel on the edge of Loch Lomond, about forty minutes from home, to bring in the coming year. Despite our sadness, we hadn’t wanted to bail out on the people who shared our lives, so here we were. One last hurrah. On the dance floor, our closest friends, Sasha and Justin stood next to Chloe and Rob, all of them with their champagne glasses in hand, party poppers at the ready, expressions oozing excitement, braced for the big moment.

  Nine… Nine seconds until my marriage was over.

  A wave of sorrow.

  Eight… ‘What did you say?’ I asked him.

  Seven… Seven seconds until my marriage was over.

  He had to lean right into my ear so I could hear him. ‘I said are you absolutely sure?’

  Six… A stomach flip of doubt. We’d discussed this to death. Yes, I was sure. Of course I was. So was he. We’d agreed.

  Five… Five seconds until my marriage was over.

  ‘Yes. Why are you asking now?’

  Four… ‘I think…’ I could feel his breath on the side of my face. ‘I think I want to give it one more try.’

  Three… Three seconds until my marriage was over.

  A sick feeling of panic rising to my throat.

  Two… ‘But Nate, we both know it’s time to move on.’ We did. Didn’t we?

  One… ‘One more try, Liv. We owe it to each other to give it more time.’

  Noooooo. This wasn’t the deal. We’d tried. It hadn’t worked. We weren’t right for each other. It was time to move on, to take different paths.

  A deafening cacophony of sound erupted in the room. Happy New Year. Streamers shot in the air. Bagpipes bellowed out a chorus of Auld Lang Syne to say goodbye to the past and welcome the twenty first century.

  We were entering a new millennium.

  But was I going to spend it with Nate…

  …Or without him?

  Without Him…

  Chapter One

  One Minute After Midnight.

  1st January 2000

  It felt like one of those arty black and white prints, where a couple stands in the middle of a room full of people, the crowd’s expressions rapt with excitement and celebration, while the man and the woman in the centre face each other, lost in the moment, frozen in time, oblivious to all around them.

  Everyone who looked at the picture had a different perception of what those two people were thinking, of what was going on in their lives that was so startling that it completely detached them from their surroundings.

  Now I knew.

  The bloke had just told his wife that he wanted to call off their separation.

  And the woman wanted to cry. Or scream. Or fall into his arms. To be honest, she wasn’t one hundred per cent sure.

  Actually, that’s not true. She was one hundred per cent sure about what she should do, she just wasn’t one hundred per cent sure she had the courage to go through with it.

  ‘Nate, I…’

  Before I could answer, the others crowded around us.

  Sasha smothered me in kisses. ‘Happy New Millennium gorgeous!’ I hugged her tightly. ‘You’re going to be great without that boring fart,’ she whispered in my ear. Sasha came from the ‘in your face’ school of life. She said what she thought, was completely fearless and, with her Morticia Addams hair and vampish make-up, you just knew that she was never going to be fluffy or dippy. It made some people run a mile from her, but I loved that she made no apologies for saying what she thought and living her life the way she damn well pleased. She’d supported my decision to call it a day with Nate right from the start, which sounds brutally harsh, but as one of my two closest friends, I knew she was only taking that stance because she truly believed it was the right thing for me.

  ‘He wants to try again,’ I hissed.

  ‘No surprise there. I knew he’d change his mind.’

  She had a point. In his working life as a PE teacher, Nate was organised and structured, but outside of the professional environment, my horizontally laid-back husband liked consistency and tended to avoid anything that could involve drama or uncomfortable situations. He’d have stayed married forever despite knowing it wasn’t right, just to avoid the hassle of splitting.

  Chloe moved in next and wrapped her arms around me, hugging me tightly. ‘Happy New Year!’

  If Sasha was Morticia, Chloe was her arch-nemesis in the fight for good, always looking for the positive in any situation and giving everyone the benefit of the doubt.

  If I ever decided to switch sexual preferences, then Chloe would be my perfect woman: funny, caring, smart, and tough enough to handle just about any situation. Having a friend like her could make a girl feel inadequate, but she would find that thought hilarious because she had absolutely no ego or awareness of her brilliance at all. She was beyond beautiful too. Thanks to the genetic mix of her Jamaican mother and her Irish father, she had a stunning Afro, piercing green eyes and the most banging, curvy body I’d ever seen. My 36B’s and apple-shaped figure just couldn’t compare.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Chloe’s mouth was still at my ear, so her words couldn’t be overheard, and neither could my reply.

  ‘He’s just said he wants to try again.’

  ‘I knew it! Say yes. Please say yes. You two belong together.’

  Chloe and Sasha hadn’t agreed on anything since the day we all met, so the difference in their opinions wasn’t exactly a newsflash.

  Chloe and I had got chatting on the first day of our nursing training at Glasgow Uni and instantly clicked, and been delighted to discover we were only one room apart in the halls of re
sidence. Sasha, who was studying business and planning to be a teacher, was in the room between us.

  We’d all bonded over a mutual appreciation of home-made cocktails and prayer that a balanced diet of cheap pasta and late-night snack-runs to the local takeaway wouldn’t damage our digestive systems for life. Over the next four years, we’d spent every day together, and many boozy nights contemplating the thought that cynical, dry, prone-to-bitchiness Sasha could ever be put in a position of responsibility for our future generations.

  I wanted to pull Sasha and Chloe to one side and have a conversation that would involve swear words and vodka, but, as always, Sasha’s boyfriend, Justin, the ultimate party animal, was leading the party celebrations and he didn’t allow interludes for heart-to-heart chats. He popped open yet another bottle of champagne, more New Year exultations were exclaimed and drinks were poured. Nate’s words had completely ambushed my mind, and the last thing I felt like doing was partying, but I didn’t want to dampen the mood for the others. I just wanted to grab Nate, sit down with him and talk it through. Or run as fast as I could until the pressure that was building in my chest subsided. Or drink until I couldn’t remember the problem. Instead, we all ended up back on the packed dance floor, swinging our bits to one of the many Steps songs that made me want to stick a fork in my hand to distract myself from the pain in my ears.

  Half way through, Nate signalled that he was heading to the bar. By the end of the song, I’d had enough. I decided to head back over to the table and saw that Nate was already there, his arm slung over the back of the chair next to him. He was watching me come towards him and the expectant expression on his lovely face told me that he wanted an answer I wasn’t ready to give.

  I couldn’t face him. Not here, not now.

  I needed a delay tactic. I considered giving my mother a quick call to update her on developments, then immediately dismissed the idea as madness, because Ida is… let’s just say ‘one of a kind’. If you crossed a Glaswegian housewife with the theatrical flair of Liberace, the need for attention of the average boyband lead singer, the self-obsession of a reality TV star, the self-awareness of a plant, and added unbridled shamelessness in the face of an audience, then dipped it all in a big vat marked ‘propensity for drama and martyrdom’, then you might get close to the gloriously eye-rolling, toe-curling, oh-dear-God-I-seriously-don’t-think-we-can-be-related, Ida. However, she has a huge heart, is never dull, keeps everyone around her thoroughly entertained and is great at a party. She’d tell anyone who would listen that she’d almost been a star. Glasgow’s Cilla Black, they’d called her back in the day. But she’d met my dad, Sonny – Glasgow’s James Dean, she said – when they were both twenty-two and gave it all up for love. I’ve no idea where the pendulum of truth swung in that version of events, but it was the one she’d stuck to, and repeated at least weekly since I was a child.