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‘Spoken like a man who still thinks with his penis.’
‘You kissed me back, Hal.’ He shot an accusatory finger at her. ‘And I’m not the one who just mentioned her vibrator.’
‘Fabulous. How clever of you. You’re absolutely right. I still desire you. I always have.’ She snapped her fingers in front of his face, the loud click ricocheting off th
e surrounding trees. ‘We could screw like rabbits right now and I’d enjoy it. But I’m not sixteen years old any more. So I can’t just screw you and forget about it. Because letting off steam, as you so charmingly put it, is not going to make all the baggage magically disappear.’
‘Who cares? Why would you even want to unpack baggage that’s over sixteen years past its sell-by date?’
Is he actually that clueless, or has he had a lobotomy?
‘I’ll tell you what the bloody point is. The point is, I’ve been lugging that baggage around with me for sixteen years and I want to dump it now. It’s always been there, dragging me down, making me think less of myself as a woman and question my abilities as a mother. It’s the reason why I can top the Sunday Times bestseller list six weeks in a row, and why A-list stars will pay fifteen thousand pounds for a birthday cake from my studio, but why I can’t have an honest conversation with my daughter about why she’s lost two stone in six months without getting a two-hundred-pound-an-hour therapist involved.’
‘What if I don’t want to talk about it?’ He cut her off, desperation edging out the temper. He grasped her arms, his fingers digging into her biceps. ‘Can’t you see? Lizzie’s the only thing that’s still relevant between us. We don’t have to rake through all that shit any more. We’re both past it.’
‘You may be, but I’m not.’ It took every ounce of her courage to admit it. But she was past caring now. And past pussyfooting around and letting her pride and her fear of humiliation get in the way of getting the closure she needed. ‘We made love that morning, you know. The morning you left.’
The knowledge flashed in his eyes. ‘Yeah, I remember. We woke Lizzie up.’
‘Then I made you a sandwich to take on the train,’ she continued. ‘Your favourite, ham and cheese on my home-made poppy seed bread. You kissed Lizzie on the forehead and called her your Best girl the way you always did. And you told me how excited you were, that this was it. That you were going to ace the interview. And I was so excited, too. And then you walked out the door and I never saw you again.’ She gulped air. She mustn’t cry. How could the memories of that day still be so vivid? When she thought she’d buried them so deep? ‘You didn’t even contact me to talk about seeing Lizzie for two whole months.’
‘Jesus, Hal. I know. And I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. But I wasn’t thinking straight. I wasn’t really thinking at all. Not for a long time.’
‘You made me feel like nothing. For a very long time. Can’t you see an apology isn’t enough to take that away? I need an explanation. About what happened to you that day.’
The question hung between them.
He turned his head towards the river, the wet hair sticking to his forehead. ‘OK, I guess I owe you that.’
Finally!
She held her breath, not entirely convinced he was really going to give up the information.
He didn’t look at her, but after a pause of several never-ending seconds, he finally started to speak in a rough monotone.
‘Amelie and I went to some seedy club that night in the Pigalle, after the assignment.’ He focused on her at last. ‘The interview had gone OK. I’d got some good quotes. We drank too much and I got into a fight with one of the bouncers. I woke up the next morning in her spare room, with a black eye and an unexplained bite mark on my shoulder and the worst hangover of my entire life. I’d missed my train.’ He dug the toe of his boot into the pebbles, concentrated on it as he continued. ‘I got dressed, got to the Gare du Nord to buy another ticket. To come home to you and Lizzie.’ He cleared his throat. ‘And I just …’ The hesitation turned into a weighty silence.
A million questions slammed into her brain, but she refused to voice them. Imagining herself back at their flat, already worried because he hadn’t called, but having no way of knowing the horror that was about to unfold, when the communication never came.
‘And I just couldn’t buy the ticket,’ he said. ‘My head felt like a wrecking ball had smacked into it and my shoulder stung like a son of a bitch and my hands were shaking as if I had the DTs. And that’s when I started to cry.’
His voice cracked on the word. And she wondered if she’d heard him correctly.
Luke crying? But Luke never cried. That couldn’t be right.
‘It was a really weird feeling at first, probably because I’m pretty sure I’d never cried before in my life.’ He planted his fists into the pockets of his wet shorts. ‘Afterwards, during therapy, I figured out those tears were ones I’d been storing up for years. But at the time, it felt like it wasn’t me doing it. That I was looking at myself, shouting, “Snap out of it, Best.” But even so, once I’d started, I couldn’t stop.’
He braced his shoulders, digging his fists further into his pockets as a shiver ran through him.
‘Eventually, though, I ran out of tears. So I sat there until a gendarme came and told me to leave the station because it was closing. It was after midnight. I’d lost my bag, with my mobile and my wallet. I suppose it had been pinched. I wandered around in a daze and eventually found my way back to Amelie’s around dawn. She let me get back into the spare bed.’ Finally, his eyes met hers and she saw the hollow look she’d seen so often in the weeks, the months before he’d left. ‘And I didn’t get out of it again for two weeks.’
A million questions hung in the air.
Hadn’t he thought about her, about Lizzie? Not once? Why didn’t he ask for her help? She could have saved him. Because she had loved him.
But all those questions were in the past now. Futile and pointless.
A shudder ran through her, her damp clothes chilly against her skin. The sunlight unable to penetrate the icy haze of shock.
