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He pursed his lips. ‘Harsh. Very harsh.’
‘But true. You’re only irreplaceable when you’re in one piece.’ She slid towards the edge of the bed and flapped her hand to shoo him away. ‘Now, go and do nothing for ten minutes while I get a shower...’
* * *
Monday morning with no work to do wasn’t as daunting as she’d thought it might be. A leisurely breakfast and then they divided the Sunday paper between them. Argued over the crossword, Sam filling in the answers while Euan reclined on the sofa.
‘What are you doing there?’
She hardly knew. It had been years since she’d made one of these. ‘You fold the paper like this, and it makes one petal.’ She held the results of her labours up for him to see. ‘Then you put the petals together to make a flower, and the flowers together to make a ball. It doesn’t work so well with newspaper.’
‘Better with the supplement.’ He slid the magazine out from the cushions beside him, and handed it to her.
‘Oh, yes, it will be. Got any glue?’
‘In the kitchen drawer.’
He watched lazily while she cut and folded the paper, gluing it to make the first of her paper flowers. ‘See...’ She held the flower up.
‘That’s nice. How many do you need to make for a ball?’
‘Twelve.’ She laid the flower down on the carpet beside her, staring at it. ‘We used to make these all the time when we were kids. Sally and I.’
He didn’t ask, but he was waiting. Somewhere, in the warmth of the silence between them, there were still so many questions waiting to be answered.
‘We used to hang them up on the ceiling. Sal’s father brought us some fluorescent paper and they used to glow in the dark, like weird planets.’
He chuckled quietly. ‘Sounds like fun. That’s a good memory to have.’
It was. Sam hadn’t brought it out and enjoyed it for a long time now. Suddenly it was too much to bear, and she brought her palm down on the flower, flattening it.
He flinched, as if she had driven her fist into his wound. ‘Right now, the good memories can’t break through the bad. That won’t always be the case.’
‘You mean time heals everything?’ She knew that wasn’t true, and she was daring him to say it was.
‘No. It brings a sense of balance.’
‘If there was any balance to any of it, then I would have been the one who died.’ She could hear the resignation in her own voice.
He shook his head. ‘You don’t really believe that?’
‘No. I can’t wish away my life. But Sal had a lot more people to mourn for her than I do. I don’t know that my mother would ever have known or cared, I haven’t seen her for so long.’
‘I think that I would have cared.’
‘You wouldn’t have known me. I wouldn’t even be here now if...’ Maybe in some strange twist of fate it would have been Sally, sitting here on his lounge floor, making paper flowers.
‘You would be. I’d get a glimpse of you from time to time out of the corner of my eye.’
‘That doesn’t make any sense.’ She twisted round to look at him, suddenly glad that she was here. If Sally couldn’t be, then she would take the moment for herself. ‘You can’t see all the million things that might have happened if things had been a bit different in the past.’ She stopped to think for a moment, trying to compute the odds. ‘Trillions, probably. In fact, it’s almost certainly an infinite number...’
‘Stop being so literal. Can’t you take a compliment when it’s offered?’
So that’s what it was. ‘Well, in that case...’ Sam tried to pretend that the world wasn’t suddenly warm, full of promise. ‘Thank you for thinking that you might have known me if I hadn’t existed.’
He chuckled. ‘Missed. Not known.’
Suddenly something slotted into place. The great gap in her heart that had always been there always made her feel that she had something more to prove. Someone would have missed her. The thought almost made her choke.
