What Might Have Been

by Holly Miller

  Stupidly, I scanned the room for a note—There’s been a misunderstanding, he’s taken my bag by accident, he’s just popped out for breakfast and he’ll come back soon with croissants and coffee like they do in the films—before the dark thump of reality struck. Nate was gone, and so was everything else.

  * * *

  —

  I felt so shocked and dazed that I started to wonder if I had somehow acquired a head injury. I chugged a bottle of water, attempted to clean up the bathroom—whose vomit was this?—then headed down to the lobby to check out, vaguely aware that if I just walked out, it might constitute theft of some kind.

  I was too embarrassed to say anything at reception. I just took the bill for the early-morning room service and shedload of alcohol I’d apparently ordered, and got out of there.

  At first, I thought I’d got so drunk that Nate had checked me in himself then left me there, embarrassed on my behalf. The business card he’d given me was nowhere to be seen, so I couldn’t even call him to apologize.

  Things got worse when I returned to the hostel. Whoever had stolen my bag had used my room key to steal the stuff I had there, too. The only thing they’d left behind was the notebook under my pillow.

  Every cell in my body was screaming to leave the country, go home, feel safe. So I called Jools. I must have sounded another level of frightened, because we’d barely exchanged more than a couple of sentences before she insisted on booking me a flight home, talked me through getting emergency travel documentation, and said she’d take care of canceling my cards.

  I flinched from the thought of going to the police, the idea of it like pressing bare skin against something hot. Because what, actually, was my story? I had no proof Nate had stolen my things. How could I accuse someone of that, with no memory of it? Maybe I’d just left my bag in the bar. Maybe he’d checked me into that hotel so I’d be safe. I’d clearly been wasted to the point of blacking out. What crime would I even report?

  Later, though, I concluded it must have been him. Because my bank account was empty and my credit cards maxed out, and he was the only one who could have discovered my PIN. He must have asked for it while I was hammered—or perhaps he’d watched me use it, at some point during the course of the night.

  Anyway, he got lucky, because I used the same number for all three of the cards in my wallet.

  * * *

  —

  It was only a week later, once I was back home in Shoreley, my travels cut short by two months, that Jools asked if I thought Nate had drugged me.

  I’d told her all I could remember about him. Which honestly wasn’t much. I felt so embarrassed, so naïve, so unsure of what had taken place.

  But in an instant, what had been baffling and unsettling me for so many days snapped sharply into focus, like wiping dirt from a lens.

  “I mean,” Jools said gently, “you never black out when you drink.”

  And she was right. Now that I thought about it, that night with Nate had been the first time I’d ever experienced all my memories cutting off at a certain point. It was so weird, so unlike me.

  And right then, in my heart, I knew. Nate had slipped something into my drink.

  To this day, I still don’t know if we had sex in that room.

  I mustered up the strength to visit a clinic, where I got checked out and took a pregnancy test, but everything came back clear. And I never told them the truth.

  But once I’d done that, of course, I realized I had to tell the police, because Nate was most likely a monster on the loose. Although at that point nearly a month had passed, I was out of the country, and the chances of catching him were virtually nonexistent. Still, I contacted the police in Sydney and told them everything I knew. Or thought I knew.

  In the weeks that followed, I spent entire days fixating on what had happened, straining to remember until my brain hurt. I knew I was fully dressed when I woke on that awful morning, but had I felt anything, physically?

  I searched obsessively for him online too, but turned up nothing, of course. Because Nathan Drall, as I well knew by now, wasn’t real.

  I was tormented by the whole thing, sleeping only in brief, fevered snatches. And when I did manage to drop off, I would wake a couple of hours later like a bolt had ripped through me, convinced Nate was standing at the foot of my bed.

  I didn’t have sex for almost two years afterward, and I haven’t touched a drop of alcohol since that day. For a long time, my ability to concentrate was shot to pieces, as was my sense of humor. I became snappy and irritable, the worst kind of company.

  I told my family I’d come back early because I’d run out of money, had been mugged for my camera, was sick of traveling. That for me, jet-setting obviously just wasn’t meant to be. Tash remarked more than once that I’d returned from Australia a completely different person: that I’d forgotten how to have fun, be spontaneous, take pleasure from life. And I could tell from the way that she said it—sadly, so gentle—that, somehow, she knew I’d lost more than my stuff out there.

  After I reported Nate, I longed so desperately for a call to say they’d caught him—so I’d know that through my shock and failure to act during those first weeks, I hadn’t unwittingly endangered someone else.

  But the call never came.

  * * *

  —

  Max stares at me, his eyes budding with tears. “God, Lucy. I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s why I’ve found it . . . quite hard to trust.”

  I can tell the irony isn’t lost on him. His face pales, and he looks away from me. “I just . . . I can’t believe this. Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  I hesitate, draw shapes against the cushion I’ve pulled onto my lap for comfort, like a child. “I mean, I still don’t even know what really happened.”

  “I think you do,” he says, softly.

  Yes, I do. But as Max is so fond of saying, instinct isn’t evidence. “I know he stole my stuff. But I don’t know . . . the rest. Not for sure.”

  The sound of a speeding motorbike shoots through the room from the road. It sounds like it’s going so fast, I wait for the ensuing sirens, but for once they don’t come.

  “That’s why you don’t have any pictures,” he says, slowly. “You keep making excuses not to show me, but you don’t have any. He took your camera.”

  I nod, feeling my forehead knit together. “The worst thing is having no way to find out the full story. It makes me feel sick, if I think about it too much. It’s why I don’t drink anymore. The thought of ever losing control like that again . . .”

  Listening to every beat of regret between us now is one of the saddest sensations I’ve ever known.

  “Did they investigate?”

  I nod. “As far as they could. He was on CCTV, so they know it was him that stole my things. But they don’t know the rest. And they never caught him.”

  “Have you ever talked to anyone about this?” Max is fiddling with a pinecone, turning it over and over in his hand. It must have fallen from the little pile I’ve balanced in the grate of my redundant fireplace.

  “Only Jools knows.”

  “Not your family?”

  I shake my head.

  “Not a professional?”

  “Nope.”

  “I think you should. It’s really serious, what happened to you.”

  “I don’t want to go over it all again. I actually just want to forget it.”

  A few more seconds tick by. “God, Lucy, I’m just . . . so sorry.”

  He doesn’t say what we’re both thinking: that if he’d not slept with Tash, we might never have split up, I might never have gone traveling, I might never have met Nate . . .

  If . . . if . . . if . . .

  But the truth is, I don’t want Max to feel guilty. Not about Nate. There are plenty of other things I could blame him
for. But not that.

  From downstairs, a cheer erupts, like they’re about to start a conga, or someone’s just lost at strip poker. It makes me smile, despite myself.

  “I take it . . . it wasn’t really him you saw tonight?” Max asks me, gently.

  I shake my head. “He’d be ten years older by now. He’d look different. It was just my mind playing tricks on me. It’s happened a couple of times before.”

  Once in a restaurant, with my parents and my ex-boyfriend. And once at Figaro, when I walked into a meeting room to encounter a new client, who just happened to be Nate’s double. On both occasions I fled, locking myself in a toilet to throw up, thereby convincing most of the people involved I was pregnant.

  Max comes over to the bed and takes my hand, and then we just lie down next to each other, breathing in sync and not speaking. And when I next look around it is morning, and for a horrifying moment I think I’m back in that hotel room. But then I turn my head, and it is Max by my side and I am wrapped in his arms, both of us still fully clothed. And in this moment, to know I’m safe is the most precious feeling on earth.

  Fourteen

  Stay

  I’m swimming with Caleb, a Saturday morning in November. Well, I say swimming: I’m actually just floating, face-up to the sky as I scull with my fingers, staring into the vastness of another mottled dawn. The cold clings to my skin like frost to the earth, and every now and then I feel the deep, electric strike of it afresh as the water shifts around me. The water is pearl-gray, the sky dappled with brightness and cloud, like a marble lifted to the light. Occasionally, birds make a dash for clear sky above our heads—snow buntings and knot, bar-tailed godwits and sanderlings. On the beach, other waders dabble tentatively at the shoreline, as if the water’s too bitter today even for them.

  But the cold’s doing a pretty good job of invigorating me. I need waking up—we were out late last night with my sister, Simon, and my parents, celebrating Simon’s recent promotion.

  I couldn’t help sneaking the occasional sideways glance at Simon last night—finding myself wondering, as he poured the wine and joked with my mum about golfing his way to that promotion, whether it’s really true that once a cheat, always a cheat.

  I noticed, as my mum was laughing at something Caleb had said to her, that she wasn’t wearing her wedding ring. “Where’s your ring, Mum?”

  “Oh,” she said. “I’ve lost it.”

  “Lost it?”

  “Shh, shh. It’ll turn up.”

  “But Mum . . . it’s your wedding ring.” I glanced over at Dad—I knew he’d be devastated.

  “I know. Ssh. I’m sure it’s in the house somewhere.”

  Unexpectedly, I felt my eyes cluster with tears. “Mum, you can’t lose your wedding ring. After all these years—”

  “I told you, Lucy. It’s in the house, somewhere.” And then she turned back to Caleb. “Actually, no, I’ve never been to Newcastle. What’s it like?”

  Beneath the table, Caleb rested a hand on my leg, just high up enough to make concentrating on my goat’s cheese starter a near-impossible task.

  My parents adore Caleb. The first time they met, he spent a full two hours talking to them about their jobs and politics—their two favorite subjects in the world (and I hadn’t even briefed him beforehand). It was nearly time for us to go home before they eventually looked up and seemed to notice I was there.

  Last month, Caleb and I headed to Devon, so I could meet his dad, stepmum, two older stepbrothers and their wives and kids for the first time. We stayed in a motel just outside Exeter, meeting his family at an Italian restaurant on our first night. The whole thing was very polite and civilized, with lots of passing the bread and friendly questions about Shoreley and my novel and my own family. But I could see what Caleb meant about feeling like something of an outsider: he was so different to everyone else around the table, with their cars and second homes and investment portfolios and opinions on the best places to play golf in Europe.

  “Not that there’s anything wrong with all that,” Caleb said afterward, “but it’s just hard to feel like I have anything to add to conversations about skiing and show jumping, you know?”

  * * *

  —

  As the weather’s got colder, we’ve tried to keep up our habit of swimming a couple of times a week, albeit in wetsuits now to deflect the worst of the cold. Still, the first minute or so is pretty hard—that initial, masochistic act of plunging a duvet-warm body into glacial water. But once I’ve adapted, and my breathing’s found its rhythm, I can stay in for around fifteen minutes, the ultimate effect of which is pretty similar to downing a couple of strong espressos. We see seals in the water some days, and if we swim after dark, one of my favorite things is looking back toward Shoreley from the water, at the town’s lights glimmering, like a cruise ship docked at night. Afterward, we cross the shingle back to the beach hut, where we shiver together under a blanket and share mugs of hot tea.

  Beside me in the water now, Caleb touches my arm. “Think I’m done.”

  I bob back into an upright position. “Okay.”

  “I need to talk to you about something.”

  I smile cautiously. “Sounds serious.”

  He finds my hand beneath the water and squeezes it. “See you back at the hut?”

  I nod. “Okay. Five minutes.”

  * * *

  —

  We go back to the cottage for breakfast, because it’s so cold today that the lure of the wood burner is just too strong. Caleb chops the wood, while I make tea and a plateful of buttered toast with the loaf we picked up from the bakery yesterday.

  After he’s lit the fire, I set down the toast and two mugs of steaming tea, and we sit on the sofa together, watching the flames gyrate hypnotically through the glass.

  “So, what’s up?” I ask him, sipping my tea. He’s not said much since we got home, his demeanor seemingly a jumble of preoccupation.

  “Helen messaged me yesterday. She’s agreeing to the divorce.”

  Though my heart does a little somersault, I know this is hardly the moment for a fist pump or high-five. So I just keep my face straight and nod. “How do you feel?”

  He slings his head briefly back against the sofa cushions and exhales. “Yeah. I feel . . . well, good’s probably not the right word. Positive.”

  I put a hand on his leg. “Sorry. I don’t know whether to . . . congratulate you, or . . .”

  He looks across at me and smiles. “You can if you like. It’s not as if I’m . . . you know, mourning the death of my marriage, or anything. But anyway. It got me thinking. About what to do next.”

  I feel a pendulum of fear swing through me. Here it is—the conversation I’ve been dreading since he first brought it up, seven months ago now.

  “I’m loving being back in Shoreley, and work’s going well, and you . . .” His smile shoots straight to my toes. “You are amazing.”

  “But?” I say, forcing myself to smile back, even though my body’s telling me to do the opposite.

  He holds my gaze. His cheeks are tinged slightly crimson from the heat of the fire. “I got chatting to someone on a job this week. He’s just got back from a round-the-world trip. And it got me thinking. I was wondering . . . if you’d fancy taking off somewhere.”

  I swallow. “Where were you thinking?”

  He hesitates, takes a bite of toast. “Haven’t exactly thrashed out all the details yet. I guess I just wanted to know if in principle you’d fancy going traveling for a bit.”

  “A round-the-world trip?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  I feel my forehead pinch together. “So . . . do you mean a holiday?”

  He shakes his head. “I was thinking more like . . . six months or so.”

  A silence settles between us.

  “Okay,” Caleb says e
ventually, laughing lightly. “I’m not sensing overwhelming enthusiasm here . . .”

  I resist the urge to clamp my eyes shut and deep-breathe for a few moments. “I’m not sure.”

  Another pause, the seconds ticking ominously.

  “Well,” he says, “how about if we picked up where your trip left off all those years ago? We could go to all the places you never got to see.”

  The rest of Australia. New Zealand. North America.

  Caleb doesn’t know the real reason I cut my trip short—only that I ran out of money. Which, technically, was true. Every time he’s asked to see my traveling photos, I’ve made an excuse, gabbled something about the memory cards being in Tash’s loft.

  I hesitate, trying to work out what I should say. There are plausible reasons for me not to go: I’d be reluctant to abandon my novel—being a writer is what makes sense to me, right now. Coming home each day exhausted and creatively spent, but kind of high on it, feels almost spiritual some days, like . . . I’ve found myself. Some people, like Caleb, might want to travel halfway round the world to do that, but I’ve done it right here in my hometown. And what if I got longlisted for that first chapter competition (I eventually entered at the last minute, following unrelenting pressure from Ryan and Emma)?

  But realistically, I know I can write from anywhere. Isn’t that supposed to be the beauty of it? And even if I couldn’t, taking six months off wouldn’t be the end of the world, would it? If I really wanted to go away with Caleb, none of these would actually be reasons, and he’s smart enough to know that.

  “I think,” I say carefully, “if you want to travel, you should definitely do it.”

  “Okay,” Caleb says, searching my eyes for something more. “But I’m asking if you want to do it.”

  Unable to articulate everything that’s going through my mind, I shake my head. “I don’t think so.”

  He nods, but slowly, like he’s trying to understand and can’t. Unsurprising, considering I’ve not offered up a single reason so far for turning him down.