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I waited for the inevitable rush of sympathy, the undignified scramble for the right words that everyone resorted to in the face of someone else’s pain. But Leo was quiet, thoughtful, and it left me feeling oddly prickly. As though I’d been cheated of something I hadn’t wanted anyway.
“Come on.” I threw him an impatient glance. “Get on with it. Tell me how sorry you are. What a tragedy. Say what you’re supposed to say.”
He met my gaze undaunted. “What doyouwant me to say?”
“I don’t give a fuck.”
“Then…” God, Leo’s patience. Edwin would have been in tears by now, scared for me, and wounded because I was taking my own fear out on him. “Then why don’t you explain to me what this means for you?”
“What this means for me?” I repeated scathingly.
“Yes, I’m sorry. I don’t have Google in my head. I can’t look it up. Are you losing your vision or…?” He trailed off. His first act of cowardice.
“I might lose my vision.” And there it was. Another word that had ripped me open like Prometheus’s eagle. Plucked out my liver. Eaten my heart. “Might.”43
“Isn’t that better thanwill?”
“You’d think,” I muttered. “I mean, yes, of course it is. And what does it say about me that I still don’t know how to live with it?”
“It says you’ve received some news that would be hard for anyone to take.”
His gentle certainty was nothing that should have been mine. Icould almost have hated him, just then, for being so stupidly determined to be on my side. But mostly I hated how much I needed it. Especially because I hadn’t been able to find a way to be on my own. “There are two million people living with sight loss in the UK,” I told him. “Three hundred and forty thousand are registered blind or partially sighted.”
“Looked it up to hurt yourself, did you?”
Maybe. I shied slightly from the depth of his understanding. From a touch that never came. “My point is, this isn’t the end of my life. It isn’t the end of anyone’s life.”
“It’s still the end of awayof life.” Leo’s voice moved over me like the mist over the river, soft and substantial. “And you’ll find another way of life, along with the other two million people who have. But it’s okay to mourn the change. Or resent it. Or whatever else you want to feel about it.”
My eyes were wet. God, I was unbearable. “I’m being selfish. Even for me, I’m being selfish.”
“You’re not,” said Leo. And I didn’t know how to answer other than to turn the exchange into a pantomime.Oh yes I am. Oh no you’re not. Oh yes I am. He’s behind you. Which you haven’t noticed because you have limited peripheral vision. “How did you find out?” he tried when it became clear I had nothing to say.
I shrugged. “Edwin—my ex—made me see an optician. He was convinced my night vision was getting worse. I wish I’d never gone.”
“He was right. It’s better to know.”
I threw a hopeless laugh up into the pastel sky. “Knowing has ruined me, Leo.”
“Because”—he sounded uncertain now—“it ended your relationship?”
“No, I did that. Edwin had no idea.”
Leo made a hastily swallowed sound. “You didn’t tell him?”
To this day, I didn’t fully understand why. At the time, I had felt like Icouldn’t. Retrospectively, I wondered if I just didn’t want to. I shook my head.
“You did tellsomeone,though?” He paused nervously. “Didn’t you?”
I let the silence speak for me.
“Oh, Marius.” I was sure that was pity. And it was a sign of my utter dissolution that I couldn’t find the strength to reject it. “When did you find out?”
“Uh, about eight months before I broke up with Edwin. Give or take.”
“And you’ve carried it with you all this time?”
“What use is talking about it? What can anyone do?”
