London Tides

by Carla Laureano

  “No. But I’m done with that. They’re from part of my life I need to leave behind if I’m going to move forward.”

  He studied her face as if he was trying to discern the truth in her words, then stood and held out his hand. “Come on.”

  She took his hand automatically, and the warm strength in his fingers as they closed around hers did something strange to her chest. They backtracked through the cathedral into the cool afternoon air, where a breeze ruffled their clothing. Clouds had begun to slide over the clear blue sky. Grace itched to take out the camera and snap a few shots.

  “Go ahead. I know you want to.”

  “How do you—?” She broke off when she realized her free hand was already curled around the camera grip.

  He made a gesture to proceed and stepped back, his arms crossed over his chest. With an abashed smile, she knelt so she could vary the angle of the clouds and the trees in the viewfinder. When she glanced up again, he was watching her with a thoughtful look that made her stomach turn flips.

  But he only asked, “What do you think? Lunch now?”

  “Sure.”

  He led her across the cathedral lawn and back into Market Square, where he guided her into a two-story restaurant. The hostess led them through the clubby bar area and up a narrow staircase into the half-filled dining room above, where they took their seats at a table that overlooked the market below.

  “I have to hand it to you, Ian. You’re really good at this.”

  “At what?” he asked innocently.

  “This.” She waved a hand. “Twice now, you’ve managed to put together the perfect date. It’s not really fair. How is a girl supposed to resist you?”

  “I wasn’t under the impression you wanted to.” Ian gave her a mischievous expression that was more dangerous than the outing itself. “Seriously, Grace, you deserve a little fun. A reminder of why you loved England in the first place.”

  “So it’s a public service again?”

  “No. This is all quite personal.”

  She suppressed a smile and opened the menu, scanning the offerings before she closed it again. “Old standby. Fish-and-chips.”

  “Ale?”

  “Pass. I think I proved with the sangria last week that my tolerance has gotten shockingly low.”

  “So that’s why you were flirting with me.”

  “I was not flirting!” She chuckled at his raised eyebrows. “Okay, I might have been flirting a little. But I can assure you, it had nothing to do with the wine.”

  A server came to take their order, then disappeared again. Grace watched the people milling about below, buying fresh fruit and vegetables from the farmers’ stands, looking over handcrafted art pieces and garden ornaments. “This is why I love photography.”

  “Because you love squash?”

  Grace made a face. “Look at it. This moment will never happen again. All these people, together in one place. Change a single thing and it wouldn’t be this moment. Wait five minutes and everything is different. But a photo—it’s the only way you can stop time. It’s proof of a moment you can never get back.”

  “You have a unique way of looking at the world, you know that?”

  She shook her head, embarrassed. “Too much time alone, thinking. Too much time looking through a viewfinder.”

  They moved on to other topics, nothing too serious, nothing significant. All the while, Grace’s thoughts were spinning. This was lovely. Normal. Utterly unremarkable. She felt more relaxed and happy than she could remember being in years. Even in Paris, she’d always felt on edge, like she was waiting for the next excuse to leave. It might have been headquarters, but it had never felt like home.

  When their meal was at last finished, Ian paid, and they made their way down the stairs to the pub below. As they wound between the polished oak tables, a scatter of newsprint caught her eye.

  She paused and lifted a section, the blood draining from her face. On the front page, above the fold, a photo and headline proclaimed an outbreak of violence in Syria. She automatically checked the photo credit. Sergio Medina.

  Ian peered over her shoulder. “What is it?”

  She swallowed. “I would have been here. This was supposed to be my assignment. Sergio took my place.”

  Ian’s brow furrowed. “Why didn’t you go then?”

  Because I froze. I had a panic attack in the airport and couldn’t even get past the ticket counter. It was the first time she’d admitted it to herself, even in her head.

  “Grace?”

  She realized he was still waiting for an answer. She dropped the paper on the table and sidled away from it. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Clearly it does. Why won’t you tell me?” Ian caught up with her in a few long strides as she broke out onto the pavement. “What am I missing?”

  Grace swallowed down the lump in her throat and rounded on him. “I’m not quitting because I want to. I’m quitting because I have to.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m not capable of doing it anymore.” Until now, she’d almost believed if she avoided saying it aloud, it wouldn’t be true. “I thought I was dealing with it. Thought I could go back. But I couldn’t get on the plane.”

  Ian’s expression softened to one of sympathy. “How long has this been going on?”

  “Three months.” Ever since Brian died in front of her. She started walking again to avoid seeing the look on Ian’s face, whether sympathy or disappointment. She didn’t want either.

  His hand found hers, and she didn’t pull away, even though she didn’t grip it back. “Have you seen someone about it?”

  “You mean a shrink? Or a priest? Because I’ve seen both. Neither were any help. The first put me on a bunch of medication that made me feel worse. The other told me I would get over it when I had enough faith for God to heal me. So I did the only thing I could do. I ran away.”

  “Surely you don’t blame yourself. Grace, after all you’ve experienced—”

  “You don’t understand. I’m a war photographer who can’t photograph wars. What does that make me?”

  “It makes you exactly what you’ve always been. Your talent is in your way of looking at the world. It doesn’t matter if you’re shooting conflicts or market scenes. Just because you’ve always photographed war doesn’t mean you can’t do something else.”

  “What if I don’t want to do something else? It’s not like I’m giving up some boring office job to go to another boring office job. What I did was important. It had meaning. And now . . .” She shook her head. “You couldn’t possibly understand.”

  “So what? Everything you said to me was a lie? All the talk about doubting your path, questioning the cost? That was what you thought I wanted to hear? Tell me, Grace, because I feel like I’m seeing two different people here.”

  She realized their raised voices were drawing attention and tugged him down the street. “No. That’s all true. I’ve questioned it for years. I’ve wondered if the sacrifices were worth it.”

  “Then I don’t understand why it hurts you so much to think about leaving it behind.”

  Grace pressed her fingers to her eyes, trying to find the words to explain. “If I quit, it’s like they’ve won. They killed Aidan and they killed Brian and they made me leave. And no matter what I do from now on, I’ll feel like a failure.”

  Too late, she saw the hurt in his eyes, realized how it must sound to him. She’d built him up, made it seem like she was back for him, and now she was telling him once more he was not enough. “Ian, I didn’t mean—”

  “No. You meant it. You meant it now, just like you meant it when you left.” He released her hand, a muscle pulsing in his jaw. “I may not know what it’s like to live in a war zone. But I know what it’s like to let go of something I loved. For someone I loved more. And that’s apparently what you can’t understand.”

  A flush of shame heated her cheeks. “Ian—”

  “Come on. I’ll take you home.” H
e didn’t reach for her hand this time, and the foot of space separating them might as well have been a mile. By the time they reached the car park, Grace felt as cold as the wind that whipped around them. Ian unlocked the Healey for her and opened the door, but he left the top up. Grace clasped her hands in her lap, staring blindly through the windscreen.

  They spent the drive back to London with only the drone of the radio and the snap of the wind against the roadster’s soft top for company. When he pulled up outside her building, they both sat silently.

  “Ian, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

  He silenced her with a slight shake of his head. “I’m not mad at you, Grace. Not really. I just thought—” He cut himself off with another annoyed shake. “You need to decide what you want. I’m not going to try to convince you. I’m not going to chase you.”

  It was so much kinder than she deserved. She swallowed and chewed her lip to keep the tears from coming. “Thanks for the trip. The car’s a beauty.”

  “Yes, she is.”

  Grace gave him one more nod, then climbed the steps to the door without looking back. She heard Ian put the roadster into gear and pull away from the curb into traffic.

  He may have said it was her decision, but somehow it felt like he had made it for her.

  Ian returned the Healey to the car park, the tension in his clenched jaw making his face and neck ache. He drew the cover over the roadster, careful to let only the chamois lining touch the mirrorlike paint job.

  Looking at the car had given him hope that not all damage was permanent, that broken things could be restored with time and love and attention. Maybe that only went for cars, not people. The attraction between him and Grace was still there, but maybe that was all it was, the gleam of varnish over a rusted shell of a relationship.

  He should have expected as much. Maybe Chris and his mum were right. Maybe his refusal to date normal, ordinary women was just a refusal to commit. If he really wanted a relationship, wouldn’t someone like Rachel or the lawyer be a better choice? No drama, no traumatic past, no need to prove her worth. With that sort of woman, he could have a perfectly happy life. Pleasant. Undemanding. Safe.

  And yet in the two weeks since Grace had returned to London, he’d felt more alive than he had in the past ten years.

  He walked back to his Gloucester Road flat, where he changed into a pair of shorts and headed straight for his spare room, which housed his weights and rowing machine. Despite his furious energy, he forced himself through stretches before he climbed onto the ergometer.

  With every pull, his mind felt a little clearer. Maybe Grace had it right. He had lost something of himself, too, but maybe that something wasn’t her. He’d abandoned all his own goals, first for Grace, then for Jamie and his mum. And for what? To end up almost forty years old and alone, in a job that more than paid the bills but bored him to tears?

  Grace’s words came back to him, diffusing some of his anger. She had been searching for meaning too, the reason she existed on this earth. Rather than stay in London and let herself stagnate, she’d gone out and found her sense of purpose. He could have used her departure as a challenge to do the same, but instead he’d let himself be smothered in a meaningless, rote existence. Wake up, row, go to work, lift weights, go to bed. Repeat, maybe with an occasional trip to the pub or a family visit. It was as if the uniformity of his rowing had permeated every part of his life. Precise. Measured. Do everything the same way each time. Get the results you expect by the technique you put in. No room for uncertainty or creativity or thought, no room for anything but perfection.

  Grace wasn’t perfect. She was messy, passionate, unpredictable. That’s what he’d always loved about her. That’s why his life had never felt complete without her.

  Ian stopped abruptly after the monitor registered one kilometer, then collapsed onto his back on the floor. The sound of his own panting and the whir of the erg’s fan as it slowed closed in around him. He stared at the ceiling as if some divine answer were written there.

  Maybe Grace had been right to leave. Had she stayed, she would have been smothered by his boring, bleak existence, doing nothing of importance. The niggling feeling grew to a crushing weight, squeezing out a bitter laugh.

  Ironic. Stay or go, Grace was once more in the center of the wreckage of his life.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ASHA’S FLAT WAS FAR TOO QUIET. Grace flicked on the television for company, then turned it right back off. She paced a few times between the door and the kitchen, a sick feeling in her stomach.

  She’d screwed it up. No doubt about it. Yes, she was still ambivalent about giving up conflict photography—okay, heartbroken. But the dream this morning had said it all. Her issues weren’t going to resolve themselves anytime soon. Her therapist had been useless, and as she told Ian, antidepressants and antipsychotics only made her alternately anxious and suicidal, the two things she’d been trying to avoid.

  Likewise, church hadn’t helped. It had only made her feel more broken and alone. Not because of God—there was comfort in the familiarity of Scripture, the childhood faith she’d retained even through her wild youth and begun to return to in the past few years—but because of the parishioners and the priests. They’d looked at her tattoos and her career choices and concluded she was to blame for her own trauma. There was no way they could possibly understand what she’d been through or how it had affected her.

  Like it or not, that part of her life was over. The sooner she accepted it, the sooner she could begin building a new one. A life she had hoped might include Ian.

  And it could have, had she not so artlessly conveyed that he wasn’t reason enough to leave her former life behind.

  In the past she would have sought to relieve this terrible feeling in a self-destructive way. But it wasn’t an option. That life was dead, even further in her past than the death of her career. It was one thing she didn’t want back.

  Her eyes fell on her duffel bag, which lay open from her preparations this morning. Near the top was an ugly green-and-yellow tote bag, from which peeked an even uglier ball of red, blue, and white yarn.

  Therapy. Or at least that was the idea. She’d picked up the yarn and needles on a whim and never looked at them again, even though her Irish grandmother had taught her to knit as a girl. God only knew why she had brought them.

  Well, maybe that was exactly right. She climbed under a fuzzy blanket on the sofa and dragged the tote onto her lap.

  That was how Asha found her hours later, holding the beginnings of a sock from which pointy sticks jutted in all directions. Asha tossed her keys on the table and hung up her coat. “What on earth are you doing?”

  Grace looked up and forced a smile. “What does it look like I’m doing? I’m wrestling an octopus by one leg.”

  Asha chuckled and flopped down on the sofa beside her. “I never took you for a knitter.”

  “Makeshift therapy,” Grace said with a grimace. “It’s supposed to help control the impulse toward stupidity.”

  “I can see that. What I can’t understand is why you’d choose wool that looks like clown vomit.”

  “It’s patriotic! The color is called Union Jack.”

  “You’re not British.”

  “Would you rather I have gone for my own patriotic colors of orange, white, and green?”

  Asha pretended to shudder. “No, thank you. Color choices aside, why the sudden need for wool therapy?”

  Grace lowered the porcupine in her hands to her lap. “Ian took me to Salisbury this morning.”

  “How’d it go?”

  “Complete disaster. They could write self-help books about this relationship. Not that there is a relationship.”

  “Oh, there’s a relationship, whether you want to acknowledge it or not. That tends to happen when two people are still in love with each other but refuse to admit it.”

  Grace picked up her needles again and focused on the tiny stitches. “I don’t think admitting it is the proble
m.”

  “Then why are you sitting here and torturing yourself with your knitting, pining for a man you could have if only you weren’t so stubborn?”

  “It has nothing to do with being stubborn. I screwed things up. It was a beautiful day, everything was going great, and then I basically told him he had nothing to do with my return to London—that I was only back because I was forced to retire.”

  “Oh, sweetie. Why didn’t you tell me that’s why you came back?”

  Grace held up her knitting in response. Asha sighed. “So, what now?”

  “With Ian? I don’t know. He wants a guarantee, some sort of commitment, and I don’t know if I can give that. I’m still figuring out where to go next, what to do with my life.”

  “Did he tell you that?” Asha asked, eyes narrowing. “Or are you assuming?”

  “It’s pretty clear he wants me to commit to staying in London.”

  “Well, of course he does. Why wouldn’t he?” Asha abruptly pushed off the sofa and wandered to the kitchen. She returned with an open bag of crisps and tilted them in Grace’s direction.

  Grace shook her head.

  “Listen, I don’t know if all this ridiculous back-and-forth is your twisted courtship ritual or what. But two weeks ago, you were desperate for him to give you a second chance, and now that he gives you one, you sabotage it?”

  Grace didn’t look at her. “I thought you’d be on my side.”

  “I’m on the side that’s going to make you happy, Grace. I love you.”

  “You’re acting like I’m not trying. I am. But how can I reassure him I’m going to stay when I don’t even know myself?”

  Asha perched on the edge of the seat and took one of Grace’s hands. “Sweetie, tell me what you’re really afraid of here.”

  A lump rose in her throat. What was she afraid of? Why was she so reluctant to give her life here a second chance? “I already ruined things with us once. What if I try again and it’s not enough? I can’t do that to him again. I can’t do that to me again.”