The Break-Up Service
He wrote perfect endings for other people – until one was written for him
No good deed goes unpunished.
Tel est pris qui croyait prendre.
The one who thought he was doing the catching is caught. The hunter trips the snare, the dentist develops a toothache, the professional breaker of hearts discovers that hearts, once broken, do not necessarily go away. They may instead obtain your email address.
Julian Mercer founded The Last Kind Word because he could not bear to watch people become cruel merely because they were frightened.
He had seen it happen to friends. Intelligent men vanished from relationships by increments: first the delayed reply, then the cancelled weekend, then the full diplomatic withdrawal into an unexplained silence. Women who could manage companies, classrooms and emergency wards found themselves unable to say that love had gone, and so behaved badly until the other person said it for them.
Cowardice rarely presents itself as cowardice. It dresses as uncertainty. It says, I don’t want to hurt them. It says, This isn’t the right time. It says, P…
