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It was so strange, she acknowledged, the asymmetry of their relationship. He knew so much about their past. But they had both made so many assumptions, got so much wrong, that their last few years hadn’t been so different really. They must both have been wondering what had happened to the person who they had loved that summer. She must have been as much a mystery to Guy as he had been to her.
And she was keeping a secret too, a huge one. Because Guy hadn’t mentioned anything about the pregnancy. She was demanding honesty from him but couldn’t offer it in return and she couldn’t pretend that that didn’t make her uncomfortable. But if he didn’t know... She thought of the pain that she had felt, finding out that she’d lost a baby. And she’d not even had any context for that knowledge. She hadn’t known whose baby it was. Hadn’t known whether she had been happy or anxious to know that she was pregnant. Hadn’t known how she had felt about the father.
Guy had all that.
That baby would have a meaning to Guy that she might never be able to understand. And she had a choice about whether or not he should know. An option that had never been open to her—to keep something from him that could only hurt him. She had been angry when she’d realised that Guy had been doing the same thing to her, hiding things that he thought would hurt her, but, faced with telling him about the baby that they had lost, she knew why he had made that decision. Who would choose to deliberately hurt the person that they cared about? Especially if it was all in the past. If there was nothing that they could do about it.
She could spare him that.
She didn’t want to think too hard about why it seemed so important to her to protect Guy from pain. What that meant about how she felt about him. It could be purely human compassion, she considered, but knew that she was lying to herself. Regardless of the reason, she knew that she would do it. She would carry the memory of their baby by herself as the only person in the world who knew and cared that that life had existed, even for such a short time. She would treasure it, keep it safe, and she would spare Guy the agony of imagining what might have been, as she had so many times over the years.
Or at least she wished that it could be as simple as that. But it could never be, not between them. She sat on the ground beside Guy and looked out over the water.
‘Do you want to hear more?’ Guy asked, both their eyes fixed on the reflection of the moon on the gentle waves of the sea, the hush and swoosh of the water over the sand the only other noise in the night.
‘Yes,’ she breathed, wondering how much of her history she was going to rediscover tonight.
‘We sat here,’ Guy said, something wistful and distant in his voice. ‘Right here. We camped, just like tonight.’
Meena held her breath, wondering how far this was going to go.
‘We’d been struggling to find somewhere to meet,’ Guy continued. ‘You were living at home with your parents. We didn’t want to meet anywhere in the resort, because we were worried about your boss finding out. It wasn’t worth risking your job over. So we came out here, in your boat.’ He fell silent, staring out over the water, and she wondered if that was it. If that was all he was going to tell her.
‘That was the first time,’ he went on, and she knew exactly which first time he was talking about.
She felt a shiver completely at odds with the still sweltering temperature.
‘We’d been...close...before. But that night...was something else.’
He didn’t say it, and he didn’t have to. She knew exactly what he meant. She could almost feel it. Flashes of memories, or dreams, came back to her. His hands were on her beneath her sweatshirt. Her heart was beating faster, her breath coming shorter, and heat was rising in every part of her body.
Was that real? she wondered for the millionth time. Were those real memories, pulled up from a deep, damaged part of her brain that she couldn’t reach when she was awake? Or were they pure fantasy, drawing only on an overactive imagination and out-of-control libido? That was one answer she’d never get, she supposed. Guy couldn’t tell her what it had been like to be her in that moment. What she might have felt for him. How she might have felt when he had been inside her.
She looked out over the water, wondering if he was remembering it as she was. Or as she was trying to. Could he remember the touch of her fingers on his skin? The feel of the sand beneath them, the rush of the waves their soundtrack?
And then she remembered that he wanted to destroy everything that he remembered about this island. He was going to build a generic luxury resort here, in the place that he told her had once been so special to them, and it was like ice down her spine.
That was how much it meant to him, she reminded herself. The night that he was recalling here. He wanted to pour concrete over it, bury it. Destroy it, so that he no longer had to be troubled by it.
She must remember that, she told herself. They hadn’t come out here tonight to reminisce. They were here to complete her environmental survey so that Guy could continue with his work of building over everything that they had shared here.
‘It was a long time ago,’ she said, hearing the frost in her voice and wondering if Guy would recognise it. Had he had cause to hear it back then, she wondered, or had everything always been happy between them? A simple summer romance that never would have weathered the slightest storm. ‘I suppose it doesn’t matter any more. I don’t want to hear anything else,’ she said.
Despite what she’d said about having to fill in the gaps, the reminder that Guy wanted to destroy those memories took the shine off any new information. The past was important, but so was the present. And she shouldn’t get confused between the two. She was in danger of doing that, she realised. That was why Guy had wanted to keep this from her, after all. Because he assumed that if she knew what had been between them in the past she wouldn’t be able to keep herself from bringing that relationship into the present. From expecting him to act like someone who had loved her, rather than someone she simply had to work with. He had been right. She had to remember the boundaries between them.
‘It was a long time ago,’ Guy said, still sounding thoughtful. ‘But, sitting out here like this, I guess it doesn’t feel that way.’
Her gaze shot across to his, trying to catch the expression on his face in the moonlight. What was that supposed to mean?
‘Well, that’s the point of bulldozing this place, I guess,’ she reminded him. ‘So you don’t have to remember any more.’
He sighed and shook his head.
‘I thought that was what I wanted.’
Meena held her breath, waiting for him to say something more, to explain, but he didn’t. She couldn’t leave it at that, though.
‘Does that mean it’s not what you want now?’ she asked hesitantly, not sure whether she wanted the answer.
