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I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. There was no hiding from him now. I was just me. Unenchanted, unenchanting me, with my bread and my books and my unfinished story. “It’s just a bit of a shock,” I said at last. “W-waking up one morning to discover you’ve been living a totally different life from the one you thought.”43
His hand crept across the table again, but I slid away from it. “That doesn’t make it meaningless.”
“Yes, it does. He destroyed everything with a single secret.” Actually, I hated that word. Thecwas a nail, driven jagged into a wall, waiting to catch at you and tear you skinless. “And sometimes I wish he’d kept on lying. I th-thought we were happy. How is that different from being happy?”44
“Well—operationally speaking—it arguably isn’t.”
“P-pardon?” I thought he might have been mocking me, but there was no trace of it on his face. As far as I could tell in the uncertain light, he looked much as he ever did: intent, thoughtful, with the promise of mirth in the curve of his mouth.
“Feelings only exist in your head. Thoughts only exist in your head. I’m not sure how you draw the line between thinking about feelings, and feeling about feelings, or even just having feelings.” He shrugged. “Basically: if you think you’re happy, you’re happy. Problem was, you thought both of you were happy, and it turned out he thought he wasn’t.”
I nodded. What could I say? Because there it was: the entire truth of my relationship distilled into a single sentence.
“And,” he went on softly, “you wouldn’t have really wanted to go on like that, would you? You wouldn’t have wanted him to stay?”
“S-sometimes when I feel very alone, I think yes, but I don’t mean it. Of c-course”—and now c’s were getting their revenge—“I don’t. I just wish…there was s-something else, you know, something less…something more…”
He waited until we were both certain my words had sputtered out, before asking, “How do you mean?”
“Marius c-cried when he told me. I almost hate him for that, for not letting me make him a villain.” Oh God, what was I saying? And yet I kept talking, pouring out these poisonous things. “It w-would have been so much easier if he’d done s-something, betrayed me or cheated on me.”
“You think?”
I sighed. “I don’t know. Probably not. But it would have beenthe sort of ending life prepares you for. S-something loud, not something as quiet as the click of a closing door. And I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to do this to you.”
“Do what?” He flashed me a grin. “Talk to me?”
“Talk to you about this.”
He eased a hand into the pocket of jeans and pulled out his wallet. “Here.”
I caught it from the air as he tossed it over. “What’s this?”
“Thing I regret most in my life. Well, no, it’s my wallet. But open it.”
There was a creased and faded photo tucked into the inside pocket. It showed a narrow, terraced street of huddled redbrick houses set against a slate-grey sky. A woman, a boy, and two younger girls stood on a doorstep smiling in that slightly strained, squinty eyed way that people do in the presence of a camera. It was an ordinary memory, but an intimate one. I smiled at him, just a little. “You look like the Weasleys.”45
“Oi. My mam’s blonde.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay, everyone says it. My sisters are carrot-heads too, and my dad was. He took that photo, but he died a few months after. Heart attack.”46
I stared at him helplessly, and then at the long-limbed, orange-haired boy in the photograph, with his goofy, gap-toothed grin. “Oh.”
“It’s not as bad as it sounds. I was nine. I don’t remember him well at all. I just remember what his absence felt like.”
He stood up a little abruptly and came round to my side of thetable, leaning over me so that his warmth—and the scent of him—rushed over me too. “That’s Myfanwy.” He tapped one of the tiny, redheaded girls. “And Siobhan.”
“Um?” He’d pronounced itSeeoban.
He turned slightly, grinning, his lips almost brushing the edge of my cheek. “Yeah, she hated her name. Said it was stupid and spelled wrong. So we used to call her Seeoban to take the mick, but it stuck.”
“I’m…s-sorry about your father. It must have been hard growing up without him.”
“Probably hardest on Mam, to be honest. She was the one stuck trying to bring up a family on her own. She worked three jobs until I turned sixteen and could lend a hand.”
I couldn’t help myself, I leaned against him, just a little, just enough to soak up some of his heat and some of his strength, the heart he had opened to me when I’d shown him the wounds on mine. “But you said…it was the thing you regretted.”
