AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I assumed so,” Josh says drily. “You’ve never seemed completely brain-dead before.” He tips his head. “Why wouldn’t you admit it?”
I look flatly at the ring shining in my palm. I’ve had this empty feeling in my chest ever since the wedding. I thought finding the ring would fill that hole. But no. I still feel like crap. It still feels like something is missing.
“Do you remember what she looked like?” I ask eventually.
Josh goes very still. “Emily?”
I nod.
He shrugs a shoulder. “Yeah. We have pictures.”
“Not in pictures. Do you remember what she actually looked like? When she was talking, or laughing, or… I don’t know, tying her hair up?”
He shrugs again, his expression shuttered, and something in me dies.
If anyone would remember Emily, it would be Josh. The two of them were never super close, but they were friends, by proximity if nothing else. Both of them were usually round my house on any given day of the week. I know Emily thought Josh was kind of stuck up, and Josh was wary of how fast our relationship was going. I flip the ring over in my palm, remembering.
When I was seventeen, a couple months before our exams, I told Josh that I was going to propose to Emily, and he chewed me out. Told me that we were too young, and it was a terrible idea. I was so mad that we didn’t talk for a week. Then we had a parents’ evening at school, and his mum turned up looking all frail and red-eyed. I remember hanging back with my mum and dad, watching as Josh’s father barked at his wife, shouting at her in front of all the other parents. I remember Josh’s closed, blank, utterly emotionless face as people turned and stared at him.
I’d known Josh almost all my life, but that was the first time I really understood why he was the way he was. So reserved and closed-off and alone.
Josh is watching me intently. “You still love her,” he says quietly.
“I don’t even really remember her,” I admit, my voice cracking. “I can’t even picture her face anymore. I can’t remember her voice. I don’t…” My eyes suddenly blur. “When I die, my Wikipedia page will still be online. People can watch reruns of my matches. They can listen to the podcast. Emily has none of that. If I forget her, then she may as well not have bloody existed. And she was important. She was so much better than me, and I…”
My lungs collapse inward. I put my head in my hands and try to breathe through the waves of emotion slamming through me, but I can’t get the air in. Josh doesn’t say anything, waiting patiently as I fist my hands in my hair, yanking. “Dunno what’s happening with me,” I finally get out. “I don’t know why I feel like this.”
“You’re grieving,” Josh says, as if I’m a bit thick.
I kick the stone step. My bad knee jolts, pain radiating through the joint, but I don’t care. I want to smack my foot against the concrete. I want to hear the bones crack. “I’m not grieving. She died twelve years ago.”
“Does it feel like she died twelve years ago?”
“Feels like it was yesterday,” I mutter. “And a million years ago at the same time.” Pain shudders in my chest, and I shove it down. “I’m not grieving,” I repeat. “I don’t have the damn right to grieve.”
He frowns. “Of course you do.”
“I don’t,” I say into my hands. “I really, really don’t.”
“But—”
“You don’t know what I did,” I cut him off. “After I left for training. You don’t know what I did to her.”
***
SEVENTY-ONE
***
JOSH
I go quiet. I don’t know what to say.
We’ve never talked about this. Almost thirty years of friendship, but we’ve never talked about the seven years of utter radio silence after he joined the national rugby team. We’ve never talked about why he suddenly cut me off, or why I found him, all those years later, drinking himself to death in a hotel room.
“I’m sorry I ignored all your calls,” he mutters, his head bowed. “Wasn’t personal. I wanted to talk to you. Jesus, you were the only person I could talk to. But—”
“Emily,” I surmise.
