Page 11 of All the Things We Never Knew

After we’d been to the hospital, the morning after Valentine’s Day, I drove Gray back to the hotel where he’d parked his car the previous night. How different it felt today, I thought, although the wheels of my car made exactly the same crunching sound on the gravel drive as they had the evening before.

It was daylight now, mid-morning, and I could see the golden stone and elegant proportions of the country house, which had been obscured by darkness last night. There were terraced gardens stretching away down into a valley where presumably a river flowed. There were yew trees pruned to look like peacocks and chess pieces. For all I knew there were actual peacocks.

I’d never find out now. If things had been different, we could have taken a walk in the grounds after stuffing ourselves at breakfast. We could have returned to our room and had a final, hasty, giggling shag before getting dressed and saying goodbye.

But the goodbye would have felt different. It would have been sad, of course, because our Valentine’s, our first night together, our special secret treat, was over. But we’d have been able to promise each other that we’d do it again before too long, that this was the first of many times.

We couldn’t do that now. We didn’t speak at all, from when we got in the car outside the A&E department to when I pulled up in the hotel car park, the crunch of the gravel beneath the wheels audible and familiar over the music on the car radio – ‘Same Old Thing’ by The Streets, which had me tapping my fingers on the steering wheel without really thinking about it.

‘Dvořák’s Symphony Number Nine,’ Gray said, speaking for the first time.

‘What? Is that a request?’

He half-laughed. ‘No. That’s a sample from the first movement of the New World Symphony.’

‘How do you—?’ I began, then I stopped and said, ‘Cool. I like it.’

I thought, I used to like it, but I won’t like it ever again. I’ll never be able to hear it without thinking of this moment.

I pulled my handbrake up. Gray unclipped his seatbelt.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘Thanks for driving me, Laurel.’

‘You were in no state to drive yourself. You probably still aren’t. I could take you back to London. We could get someone to pick up your car.’

He shook his head. ‘You know that’s not possible.’

I knew. The excuse of filming in Liverpool had seemed flimsy when he came up with it, but it wasn’t for me to question. It had become an unspoken deal between us: I never asked about his wife, his children, his other life, and he rarely told.

Don’t ask, don’t tell. We all know how that one worked out.

If he left his car here, he’d have to come up with a whole new cover story: a breakdown on the motorway. A prang that had led him to have to go to A&E (What do you mean, there’s no bump on my head?). Whatever he did, it would just have complicated things even more.

And we both knew they were about to get quite complicated enough.

‘Gray,’ I said gently, ‘you’re going to have to tell Anna.’

‘I know. But maybe not yet.’

‘When, then? Shit, Gray, she needs to know.’

‘About you, or about – the other thing?’

‘Both, I guess. But mainly the other thing. You’re going to have to have loads more tests. You’re not well. You’ll need support and she – it’s not fair not to tell her.’

‘I could wait until I know for sure.’

Frustrated, I unfastened my own seatbelt so I could turn towards him. I stretched out my hands and put them on his knees, feeling the hard muscles of his quadriceps beneath the worn denim.

‘Come on. I mean, it’s none of my business, but how would that be better?’

‘It might turn out to be a false alarm,’ he argued. ‘Then I’d have worried her for nothing.’

It’s not going to turn out to be a false alarm.

‘Gray,’ I said. ‘We could stop seeing each other. We could end this right now, today. Then at least you’d have only one thing to tell her. Or one and a half, if you decided to say you’d been seeing me but you weren’t any more.’

‘Like hell will I stop seeing you.’ He grasped my hands, almost roughly. ‘Not through choice, anyway. If you want to tell me to get the fuck out of your car and never contact you again, I’ll do it. But that’s what it would take.’