Page 75 of The Ghost of Exes Past

‘Ten years and you still steal all the duvet,’ I whisper. The way he smiles back is not quite right.

He kisses my head and we watch the window.

‘Is there a way we can go back?’ I ask softly. ‘Can you take us back to our first memory? Back to our first summer together? We could stay there.’

I look up to him. His nose in my hair, his arm around my back, settled on my waist.

‘I wish … I wish.’ He pulls me closer towards him.

‘But we could try?’

I feel the slow shake of his head.

‘Here, take my hands, we have to try,’ I say, sitting up, pulling my pillow onto my lap as he uncurls his arm from my waist.

‘No. It won’t work.’

‘Why not?’

‘I had strict instructions. Once my mission is complete, I’ll be delivered to the next life if I pass.’

He can’t look at me, so we both stare at his hands instead. He’s picking the skin around his thumb nervously.

There has to be something I’m not thinking of … some other angle. I’m good at angles. I find them for a living. If we can’t go back, maybe there’s another option.

‘If there’s an in-between, there must be a way … some kind of, I don’t know, loophole? There’s always a loophole.’

‘Belle,’ he says and there’s something in the way he says it – not harshly, but with a kind of finality – that makes my stomach drop.

‘I’m serious. I don’t want to lose you again.’ My hands flop to the pillow. ‘I’ve just got you back.’ He’s quiet, which makes me feel stupid, like I’m arguing with myself. My cheeks burn hot and I can tell they’re probably beetroot red, but I don’t care.

He wraps the duvet around his waist and looks at me properly for the first time since we collapsed together. There’s something in his face, hard and stern, that I haven’t seen before.

‘So what’s the alternative? Pretend tonight didn’t happen? Marry Timothy?’

‘Belle,’ he says simply, matter-of-factly, with no hesitation. ‘I watched it tonight, you and Timothy. I saw how he looks at you. You built something real with him, Belle. Don’t ruin it for a ghost.’

I fight the urge to look away from his face but it’s there in his eyes. A sadness, a knowing, and I know deep down he’s right. And the fact he can see it, that he can even say Timothy’s name without flinching – that’s new. That’s not the Jake who made that video or laughed in my bedroom.

So, Timothy. That’s my alternative. A man that will hold my hand at dinner parties and remember which of my colleagues I don’t like and say the right thing at the right moment, but who will never make me howl with laughter. Who has never really looked at me as Jake has, like he can’t believe that I’m his.

Could I really continue living a half-lie?

I picture the chairs already laid out for the ceremony. The flowers already in water downstairs. Jules’s dress, which she bought especially, the tags cut off because she was so certain. Timothy’s mother, who I’m sure has never thought I was good enough – the look on her face, like she knew this was coming.

If I did call it off, what then? I’d be alone. I’d start again. I’d meet prospects at industry dinners, have them slide into my LinkedIn DMs. I’d be introduced to friends of friends and spend the rest of my life doing this quiet automation of comparison that I can’t really explain to anyone. Holding each one up against something that doesn’t have a name. Against this.

‘I’d rather have one real thing in my life, than fifty years of just fine,’ I say, unsure whether to myself or to Jake.

‘Belle.’ His jaw is locked. ‘You’re not thinking rationally.’

‘Don’t patronise me,’ I snap before I have a chance to think. I know he’s not wrong, but I can’t locate the part of me that cares about that right now. ‘I don’t understand why you don’t want to fight for a chance to keep us together.’

‘Because even if it was possible …’ He stops and looks at me as something moves across his face that he doesn’t manage to hide in time. ‘I wouldn’t let you.’

We sit in silence.

I’m waiting for the part of me that would think clearly, weigh this up, talk myself down, remind myself what I’m willing to throw away: a three-year relationship, a new house with a pantry that we’re about to put an offer on, a man who has never made me feel small. I wait and she doesn’t say anything.