by Fiona Lucas
Anna laughed along with him. Not a full-on belly laugh, more a soft chuckle, but it shocked her so much she fell silent again almost instantly. The sound was foreign to her ears, the gentle juddering of her shoulders, alien. How long had it been since she’d last laughed? She wanted to answer “days,” but that would be bare-faced lying. “Weeks” was also probably a tad optimistic.
Maybe that was why she threw herself into the conversation with this nice man more fully, why she found herself not just standing there, smiling and nodding in the right places, but talking back, sharing little bits of information about herself. Maybe that was why, when he told her about the salsa classes and said he’d brave them again should she wish to go and not want to walk through the door alone, she said she’d think about it.
It struck her, as she steered the conversation toward another subject, that Gabi had picked well. Very well. Because in another life, another reality, she might be feeling butterflies at the thought of dancing with Jeremy, at the thought of placing her hand in his, feeling the brush of his palm against hers when they moved. As they leaned on the deck railing, Jeremy kept looking at her, and every time he did, delicate wings tickled her inside.
But Anna knew not to pay much heed to the fluttering. Butterflies were short-lived creatures and, given the frost hardening the depths of her soul, they’d probably be dead soon. Frozen stiff, poor things.
Even so, when Jeremy took the glass of warm, flat champagne from her hand to get her a fresh one, their fingers brushed, and the butterflies started to panic.
That brief touch tripped a secret alarm inside her, like a cashier pressing an under-the-desk button during a bank raid. Red lights flashed in the vault of her heart every few seconds. Sirens blared inside the confines of her skull as Jeremy pushed his way through the crowd back toward the kitchen.
Don’t care if he’s nice-looking, the alarm yelled. Even really nice-looking. He’s not Spencer.
Don’t care if he’s intelligent, sensitive and gently serious in a way that’s appealing, in a way Spencer never was. Don’t care that this Jeremy person would never crack a joke every time you tried to talk about something deep or important. He’s not him. Never will be.
Anna tried to ignore the nagging alarm when Jeremy returned. She tried to listen to an anecdote about a particularly demanding design client he’d had, but the pulsing warning was there in the back of her head as his gaze began to linger longer on hers, as a little bubble of intimacy began to close around them.
Oh, heck. She knew where this was going.
In less than half an hour, he might gently touch her arm whilst making a point. Maybe, when Big Ben’s chimes rang out across the nation, he’d lean in and kiss her softly on the lips. Her stomach plummeted at the thought. She felt hot and prickly all over.
Not Spencer, the warning flashed again. Not Spencer. Not Spencer. Not Spencer.
Anna tried to smile and nod as Jeremy kept talking, but she felt sick and giddy at the same time. This really wouldn’t do. She had to find a way to make it all stop.
But then Jeremy segued into a story about a stag do he’d been on, where he and his pals had spent an afternoon driving racing cars at Goodwood. Anna grabbed the lifeline he offered without hesitation.
“I bought my husband one of those experience days for his birthday,” she said. “Supercars . . . He was mad about Aston Martins.”
Jeremy opened his mouth to say, “Oh, really?” but then her words caught up with him, and he faltered. He nodded a couple of times, a filler action, she guessed, designed to give him time to regroup. “Aston Martin?” he finally said, his head still bobbing. “Good choice.”
He was momentarily stalled, she realized, but not shocked at the mention of a husband, as most men might have been if a woman at a party had been talking to them exclusively for more than an hour with no sign of a significant other.
“Gabi told you about Spencer,” she said. A statement, not a question.
“A little,” he replied, and she had to give him credit—he maintained eye contact, didn’t look away or do the invent-a-friend routine. Up until then, their conversation had been plain sailing, but he didn’t run when the waters got choppy. He stayed and navigated the lurching awkwardness that followed her revelation. The man had class.
But Anna couldn’t let that make a difference, so she launched into the story of what happened two years, nine months and eight days ago: How her husband had gone out one evening to the corner shop to buy a bottle of wine. How he’d never returned because someone else had drunk too much wine the very same evening, and then that person had got behind the wheel of a car. It had only been a three-minute walk to the shop.
She’d told Jeremy how she’d heard the sirens as the ambulance arrived and how she’d just known that something was very, very wrong. How she’d left the front door open and had run out of the house in her bare feet, even though it had been March. How she’d seen Spencer lying in the road, surrounded by paramedics. How their faces had been white. Grim. How he’d been pronounced “dead on arrival” when the ambulance had made it to the hospital.
She told Jeremy every last detail while he watched her, not horrified or embarrassed, but with compassion in his eyes. True compassion, not pity.
And that was why Anna made sure every word was a brick, and that she built each brick into a wall. A boundary line. And when she had finished her tale, she was on one side, and Jeremy was on the other.
Still he didn’t turn tail. Damn him.
“About the salsa lessons . . .” he began. “I get the feeling they’re more Gabi’s idea.”
“They are,” she said simply. Truthfully.
He nodded, understanding there would be no salsa-ing for the two of them any time soon. Probably not ever.
“It was nice meeting you, Anna,” he said gently, looking her straight in the eye. Not in a romantic way (she’d definitely squashed that vibe) but in an honest way, letting her know he really meant it.
Anna nodded in reply and swallowed down the stray words forming in her throat, afraid they might form a request for him to stay, to keep talking to her as if she was a human being and not a walking tragedy that needed gentle handling.
He glanced toward the house. “There’s someone I need to . . .” He didn’t finish the sentence but gave her a rueful smile before turning and walking back indoors. Anna watched the back of his head appearing and disappearing as he made his way through the crowded kitchen.
He’d fallen back on the old invisible-friend routine after all, but far from hating him for it, she was grateful. He’d done it to save her any further discomfort, not himself. Jeremy had seen her bricks, he’d seen her wall, and he’d respected them. Tears sprang to her eyes.
She was still standing there, staring blurrily through the vast folding glass doors into the house, when Gabi bounded up. “Where’s Jeremy?”
Anna was pretty sure her friend was here asking her this question because she’d spotted him back inside the house on his own. “He had someone he needed to talk to,” she said, and ignored the flicker of warmth at the idea of being connected to him through this little white lie, a secret just between the two of them. She turned to face the lawn and stared out into the darkness.
Gabi looked crestfallen. “But . . . But it looked as if you were getting on really well.”
“We were.”
“You were talking for ages.”
Anna nodded again. She felt a stab of guilt in her stomach. She really hadn’t been fair to Jeremy, chatting to him for so long. And then the knife of guilt, only a flesh wound at that point, plunged itself deeper, twisted and turned. She hadn’t been fair to Spencer either. “What were you thinking, Gabi?”
Gabi feigned ignorance for only a split second before she crumbled. She looked beseechingly at Anna and shook her head. “I don’t know . . . I was just thinking that he’s a nice guy and that . . . And that . . .”
Anna’s jaw tightened. “If you say I need to move on, I’m
going to dump this glass of champagne right over your head.”
Gabi’s expression grew earnest. “But you do need—”
That was it. Anna had had enough. She didn’t make good on her threat, but she did fling the glass over the railing of the deck and onto the lawn, where it rolled down the slope and landed under a bush. Vanessa would kill her if she ever found out.
“I don’t need to move on!” she yelled. “It’s only been two years!”
Gabi opened her mouth, and Anna knew she was going to—quite correctly—point out that it had been closer to three, but she took in Anna’s warning expression and shut it again.
“What am I supposed to do? Just snap my fingers and say, Oh, well! The love of my life, the man I adored with every fiber of my being, is gone, so I’d better just pick a replacement? As if he was last year’s fashion trend?”
“Okay, no . . . I . . .”
Anna could see the hurt in her friend’s eyes, but it didn’t slow her down one bit. Too bad, Gabi. You’re the one who pushed and pushed, the one who prodded this tiger out of its numb sleep, and now you’re going to hear it roar!
“When you’ve had a relationship that’s lasted more than eighteen months, maybe then you can start telling me how to live my life!”
Gabi flinched. Anna knew she’d hit below the belt, that she was going to feel horrible about this when she calmed down, but she had to make Gabi stop. She had to make her see.
There had to be an end to the Italian lessons, to the jewelry making and the salsa dancing. To the Jeremys. Because Anna knew there would be more of them paraded out for her to meet if she didn’t stand up for herself now. She had to make Gabi understand that she wasn’t going to magically get over Spencer if she learned to conjugate the verb essere or perform a perfect “side basic.” She wasn’t going to get over him ever.
“So don’t tell me to move on. Because you don’t get it. You don’t understand! Not until you’ve lived through it!”
And, before Gabi could offer any words in her defense, Anna turned and strode across the deck, heading for the gate at the side of the house. Thankfully, it wasn’t locked. She couldn’t have faced pushing her way back through all those people inside.
You couldn’t face having to turn around and see Gabi standing there, silent tears stinging her eyes, a little voice inside her head goaded, but Anna drowned it out by wrenching the gate open and slamming it shut behind her hard enough to make the latch rattle. And then she marched to the cul-de-sac where she’d parked her car, climbed in and drove herself home.
Chapter Three
Anna didn’t bother turning the lights on when she got back home. She headed straight up the stairs and into the master bedroom. The digital alarm clock on the bedside table blinked the time: 11:36. She turned away from it.
If she didn’t look at it, she couldn’t see the numbers getting higher and higher, finally reaching that dreaded row of zeros. And if she couldn’t see them, it wasn’t real. Midnight was a threshold she didn’t want to cross. Not just this particular midnight, which loomed over her like a threatening shadow, but every midnight. Every day without him was one too many.
Anna had developed little rituals to help her get through the days and nights, and she needed one of those now. She walked over to Spencer’s built-in wardrobe. After dropping her handbag on the floor, she curled her fingers round the handles and eased the doors open. All his suits and shirts were still hanging there, just where he’d left them. She knew it was a horrible cliché, but she couldn’t bring herself to throw them into a bin bag or take them down to the charity shop.
She sighed and pulled the sleeve of the nearest shirt toward her, held it up to her face and breathed in. His scent was no longer there, even though she refused to wash any of them, but she pretended it was. Every time she did this, she tried to recall it precisely, but it was getting harder and harder to do.
Spencer would have laughed at her for being so sentimental, but then Spencer had laughed at everything, made a joke of everything. It had charmed and infuriated her in equal measures. He’d even done it the first time she’d told him she loved him.
That frosty November evening nine years earlier had been magical. They’d been out to dinner in central London to celebrate their two-month anniversary, but instead of catching the Tube back to Charing Cross, they’d opted to wander beside the Thames, strolling along the Victoria Embankment, with its sturdy stone walls, globe-like lamps decorated with ugly, bulbous-headed Victorian fish and wooden benches with strange mythical creatures woven into the wrought-iron supports. The lights of the Festival Hall and the Southbank Centre had twinkled across the water at them, and the London Eye, glowing bluish white, had kept watch.
Spencer had pulled her into his arms and kissed her, before holding her face between his palms, looking deep into her eyes and saying, so simply, so seriously, “I love you.” Then his face had broken into a huge grin. “I’m sorry,” he’d said, laughing, “I just couldn’t hold it in any longer.”
She’d felt dizzy and breathless. Spencer had a way of doing that to her, of making her question if up was down and down was up; he was the magnet to her compass needle. “I love you too,” she’d whispered back, and his smile had grown even wider, but then the edges of his mouth had turned downward. “I beg your pardon?” he’d said, mischief twinkling in his eyes. “I don’t think I quite heard you.”
She’d laughed softly, then had cleared her throat and tried again, louder this time. “I love you too.”
Spencer had cupped a hand to his ear. “Nope! Still can’t hear you.” She’d punched him playfully on the arm. He’d kept moving closer and closer until their lips had almost touched, then he’d suddenly let go of her and had leapt onto one of the benches facing the river, feet planted wide, arms outstretched. “When you love someone,” he’d shouted, “you don’t say it quietly, you proclaim it from the rooftops! Like this . . .” And he’d bellowed to the seagulls sitting on the ropes of lights between the lampposts. “I love you, Anna Mason! I’ve loved you since the day I met you and I always will!”
He’d held out his hand to her and she’d taken it, let him help her up onto the bench so she’d been standing beside him, trying not to let the heels of her boots get stuck between the wooden slats. He’d grinned at her, waiting for her to follow suit, and she’d almost yelled her own declaration of love into the night air, but something had stopped her. Instead, she’d turned to face him. Sometimes, Spencer needed to know that his way wasn’t the only way.
“You heard, you idiot,” she’d mumbled into his ear, and then she’d kissed him just as softly and just as sweetly as he’d kissed her.
After that, it had become their “thing”—if she said “I love you” first, he always responded with “I beg your pardon?” and then she’d cap it off by whispering, “You heard, idiot.” She’d imagined them saying it to each other well into their eighties . . .
A sob escaped her lips and she sank to the floor of the wardrobe, taking both shirt and hanger with her, and then she buried her face in the blue-and-white striped cotton and cried until there were no tears left.
How was it possible to ache for someone this way? Not just metaphorically, but literally? Now she understood why people talked about having a broken heart, because she knew it was entirely possible for it to throb in pain along with every single beat.
She lost track of time, curled up on the wardrobe floor with Spencer’s shirt clutched to her chest. Eventually, though, she blinked, regained the sense of where and who she was. The ache didn’t stop, though. It never stopped.
She reached out to retrieve her bag from the bedroom floor and then returned to the wardrobe. Once she was huddled with her back against the wall, she pulled her phone out and pressed a button to wake it up.
Eleven fifty-six. It was almost midnight.
Anna closed her eyes and tried to stop time through the sheer strength of her will. Four minutes. Probably less than that—three and a bit—was a
ll she had left of this year before it slid away, taking another piece of Spencer with it.
It didn’t work. When she opened her eyes again, another minute had evaporated. She stared at the phone as an inner battle began to rage. There was another ritual, you see. One that was even less healthy. In the sane part of her head, she knew that. That was why she’d banned herself from doing it. She was trying, even if Gabi didn’t think she was.
Put the phone down, she told herself. You promised yourself you wouldn’t do this again, remember? It had been months since she’d been this weak.
But she didn’t put the phone down. Slowly, deliberately, she pressed the screen and pulled up her contacts and then, just as slowly, just as deliberately, she located Spencer’s name and hit “call.”
Even before it connected, she could hear the message—hear his voice—in her head: Hey! This is Spencer. I’m off having fun without you right now, but if you really have to leave a dull and boring message, you know what to do . . .
Oh, how she longed to do just that, to pour it all out to him, but she didn’t. It wasn’t enough. She wanted to talk to him, yes, but she didn’t want an empty, one-sided conversation. She wanted to hear his voice, his real voice, not a tinny recording from years ago. She wanted him to talk back to her. And then she could finally say what she should have said to him that last evening before he’d walked out the front door to go to the corner shop, something more meaningful than, “Can you grab a pint of milk while you’re there?”
Her thumb hovered above the “end call” button. In all the times she’d dialed his number just to hear his voicemail greeting, she’d never once left that message because, even though Gabi might tell her she was stuck in the past, she really wasn’t. She wasn’t kidding herself. This was just an echo of him, nothing more. She knew she couldn’t bring him back.