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She walked from room to room, wondering where on earth she should start on packaging up Eddie’s belongings and removing every trace of him from her flat and her life. It was hard to know where to begin exactly. She spotted the roll of black refuse bags that Pete had left in the hall. She’d tackle the bedroom first. She flung open the window and pulled the sheets off the bed, loaded them into the washing machine and made it up with fresh linen that she’d picked up a few years earlier on a trip to Belfast with Maya. She smiled as she ran her hand along the soft material; somehow, even if she’d never have admitted it before, these pristine bed linens had always seemed too good to use when Eddie slept here.
Then she turned her attention to the wardrobe and began to empty out every stitch of clothing that hung there belonging to Eddie. She folded each item before placing it in a refuse bag. Old habits die hard, obviously, and there was no point creasing things if she could help it. His collection of trainers took up three huge bags and the room felt as if it was somehow lighter just knowing that she had freed up all that space under her bed without them there.
She was about to run the vacuum under the bed when she spotted something just beneath the head board. Her first thought was, please let it not be mouse droppings. She wouldn’t be hugely surprised, since Eddie had a habit of lying in bed on his days off, glued to his iPad while mindlessly eating breakfast, lunch and dinner if he had the chance. She squinted now, trying to make out the hardly distinguishable shape. It was hard to know what it was, probably a huge ball of dust. She didn’t want to think about how long it was since she’d actually been able to give it a good cleaning under here. She grabbed her phone and shone the torch before reaching in and pulling out what looked like an old chain.
Rachel’s locket. Liv held it in her hands for a moment, hardly believing that she’d actually found it after all this time. She dropped back onto her knees, picking pieces of woolly dust from the chain and the clasp, rubbing off the tarnished silver with her sleeve. She traced her thumb along the intricate inlaid design.
It had belonged, once, to their grandmother. It must be, she reckoned, well over a hundred years old and it had the worn and smooth feel of having been touched often and treasured for many of those years. Liv remembered exactly when it had gone missing.
It was that first night, with Eddie. They’d both been drunk; fell into bed together, making love in a weary, automatic sort of stupor. She’d woken in the morning, not sure of anything anymore. She’d never been the sort of person to get drunk and fall into bed with someone. It left her with an odd mixture of emotions. Looking back, she wasn’t sure that any of them were good. At the time, she’d pulled herself out of the tangled array of sheets and into the bathroom, taking her clothes with her and quickly shrugging into them. She’d wanted to shower, but in her fragile state was afraid that the rattling of the old pipes would wake the whole building and not just Eddie. Instead, she’d sat at her small kitchen table and drank tea for over two hours while Eddie snored oblivious to the mounting stress that she was feeling.
And now she looked back on it, she could see so clearly what she’d worked so hard to hide from herself that morning – it was never right between her and Eddie. None of it was ever going to fit. They were just too different – oil and water, sugar and vinegar. She would never have picked out Eddie Quirke as someone she’d want to spend five minutes with, never mind truly consider agreeing to marry him one day. Actually, hoping and wishing for him to propose to her – God, what on earth had happened to her?
She wondered this briefly as she opened up the locket in her hands.
Was it grief, desperation or loneliness? Yes, she could admit, a little of all three probably propelled her into a relationship that she knew wasn’t right from the start. Looking back, she probably knew that Eddie had never bargained on anything more than a convenient shag and a free roof over his head. That was all it had been for him, an open pass and she’d been the one who’d made it into something it was never meant to be.
This was, all of it, in many ways, a disaster of her own making. She looked down at the photograph in the locket. It was a copy of one that they’d had taken years ago, she and Rachel – identical twins looking out at her as if surveying her from another world. If Rachel had been alive, there would have been no room for Eddie. If Rachel were alive… How often had she wished for that?
And now, it seemed as if finding this locket, she’d somehow come full circle. As if Rachel was still clearing the way for her. She examined it carefully. It seemed almost strange holding it in her hand, as if it had been shot through time, an arrow hitting its bull’s-eye; making reality stand still and yet, so much had changed since Rachel had given it to her before she died.
She remembered it so clearly. It was Christmas and she really only had days to live. It had been the sweetest and saddest Christmas of her whole life. Liv felt the familiar tears build up behind her eyes. She wiped them away, a little angrily, snapping closed the locket. It wasn’t fair. Surely, it was time to think about these things with feelings of happiness and gratitude instead of this eternal overwhelming feeling of sadness and loss.
She turned the locket over then as another memory tried hard to push itself up into her brain. The clasp was new. Pete had taken it to the jeweller’s and had it mended one afternoon while she slept across Rachel’s hospital bed. The original clasp had been weak, worn out with time and wear. Liv smiled; she’d forgotten that. She held the locket up towards the light, inspecting it with fresh eyes. Pete. He’d managed to find a jeweller who made the new clasp perfectly to sit into the locket; you’d never guess that it had been replaced.
And the chain. Another little voice was nudging past her tears, as if trying to unsettle her ability to wallow for too long. Yes. Pete had replaced the chain. It had snapped when they were at a gig – she’d never know how he managed to spot it. But he picked up the locket from the floor where it had fallen from her neck. This was a good six months after Rachel had passed away. They’d gotten tickets that neither of them wanted to use, but in the end, he’d convinced her. It was Rachel’s favourite band. They’d spent the following day trailing around Dublin jewellers to find the perfect replacement chain. Pete had insisted on buying it for her. Liv found herself smiling.
This might have been Rachel’s locket, her sister’s gift to her, but there was no doubt that Pete had been the one to hold it together. She drew her breath in sharply, feeling for a moment as if Rachel herself had whispered something in her ear, but she was much too far away for her to hear her words distinctly.
It was almost two o’clock in the morning by the time she’d emptied everything from the bedroom and hoovered and scrubbed all trace of Eddie from this space.
Even if the rest of the flat still felt like a collision of the past and an uncertain future, at least, Liv thought, she could fall into bed and feel as if the world was somehow tipping over into its rightful place again.
As she drifted off to sleep that night, Liv found herself smiling. She’d put the locket on; double-checking the chain was securely fastened. Even now, as she wrapped her fingers around the cold silver, she could remember all too clearly how bereft she’d been all those years ago when she thought she’d lost it forever. Now she had it back, she couldn’t dampen this feeling that somehow, her past and present were once more in alignment. Tomorrow she would ring Pete. She would tell him about finding the locket and he would help her to get the flat sorted out. Tomorrow, she would ring Pete and they would start again.
The optimism that had surrounded Liv as she’d fallen asleep the previous night seemed to have evaporated when she woke the following morning. Her alarm not going off wasn’t the best start she could hope for to the day. And then, a missed bus, the wrong shoes and the avenue coated with a thick veneer of ice had all culminated in her landing on her bottom as she’d tried to race to work so she wasn’t too late for her shift.
*
By five o’clock the following morning, Liv knew, it was time to give up the pretence of trying to sleep. She’d lain awake for hours, going over the previous night at Pete’s apartment. Anya standing there, as if she somehow belonged more in Pete’s world than Liv did. Which, as the sleepless hours wore on, Liv knew with growing certainty was quite ridiculous.
Anya would not make Pete happy. In fact, Anya would do quite the opposite. But then, maybe she and Pete were not as ill-suited to each other as Eddie had been to Liv. Perhaps they found the same things funny or just enjoyed each other’s company? Maybe. But there was no way that they could ever have the same deep connection that Pete had shared with Rachel.
This was the lightning realisation that had shot Liv’s eyes wide open in the all too early hours of the morning. How on earth had she not seen this before? How could Pete not have seen it? She tossed and turned for as long as she could force herself to stay in bed, one overriding, unacknowledged truth passing through her. Rachel knew.
Rachel had always known. Hadn’t she as good as said it before she passed away?
Finding Rachel’s locket that morning was like a bolt from beyond. It had literally floored her. She had been reaching beneath the bed, as far as she could stretch, to pull out the matching high-heeled shoes Maya had given her the previous summer when the tip of her finger ran against the slim metal of the chain.
She knew exactly what it was before she’d even pulled it out. But seeing it, in her hand, made her gasp. She pushed herself back against the wall, her legs folded into her, as if averting an oncoming heart attack. And that was what it felt like – a full-frontal, brutal attack on her heart.
Once more, it seemed Rachel had the power to reach beyond time and mortality to touch her in a way that made the pathetic mess she’d made of things seem insignificant and it was as if everything was suddenly clear. It was all perfectly fixable.
This locket – so old, so precious – stood for everything between them. Not just her and Rachel, but all three of them – Pete as well. Wasn’t it Pete who’d fixed the delicate clasp? Wasn’t it Pete who’d rescued it from the floor of a heaving nightclub? Wasn’t it Pete who’d bought her the new secure chain on which it now hung? Wasn’t it Pete who’d held the delicate locket together? It was. The truth was, it was Pete who’d held everything together after Rachel died. In fact, it was Pete who’d held them all together when Rachel was alive too and he’d been doing it ever since. He’d been buoying Liv up with thoughtful texts, dropping off little gifts when she needed her spirits lifted, always being there if she was stuck. Even when she didn’t realise she needed help, he supplied it, quietly, seamlessly, without any expectation of thanks or compensation.
A wave of something between nausea, migraine and yes, grief, washed over Liv. It was her turn to save Pete. Anya was in his apartment. They were getting back together. Hadn’t Anya said so? Hadn’t that been the insinuation when she’d looked at her with those catty green eyes? She couldn’t let that happen. Anya didn’t love Pete, not the way he deserved to be loved. That was a sobering thought.
She had to try for Rachel. Rachel had adored him; they’d just never had the time, soul mates pulled apart cruelly. Liv loved him far too much to sit back and see him ending up with Anya. Even if he never spoke to her again, she couldn’t see him set up for a lifetime of being used. He deserved so much more. He deserved to know what it was like to be loved, really loved, and not just because he was generous and thoughtful, or because he was good-looking – yes, he really was very attractive. She wanted to cry with frustration, but she knew she’d done enough crying. It was time to put aside the mistakes of the past and figure out a plan for the future.
