by Silver, Amy
I sit at the kitchen table, feeling tearful and unhappy, drinking fennel tea. I loathe herbal tea, but at times like this you need a hot drink, and there is nothing else available. After what seems like for ever, but is actually just half an hour, the car pulls up. Dom gets out, he goes around the back of the car, opens the boot and lets the dogs out.
I run to the back door and fling it open, welcoming an overexcited Mick and Marianne into my arms.
‘I thought you’d want to see them when you woke up,’ Dom says as I start to cry again, ‘so I drove down to Matt’s to fetch them.’ He’s also bought tea and milk and bread, as well as the most delicious cheese in the world from the farm shop down the road from Matt’s place. We sit down at the kitchen table and eat cheese and pickle sandwiches accompanied by enormous mugs of builder’s tea. Having run around the house and garden several times to make sure everything is as it should be, the dogs have settled, Marianne is in her favourite spot, dozing in a shaft of sunshine up against the radiator in the hallway, Mick is sleeping on my feet. The thought of leaving this makes me fearful.
Dom reads my mind.
‘Once everything’s sorted out,’ he says, taking a swig of his tea, ‘once the funeral’s over and you’ve got everything straight with your dad’s affairs, you should go. Go to Libya, go to New York, do what you need to do.’
‘I don’t want to leave you,’ I say, my voice small and strangled.
‘You do. You just think you don’t right now at this moment, because you’ve just lost your dad and you need to be somewhere safe. It’ll be like it was before. But after a while, in three months or six months or twelve, you’ll start pulling away, when all this safety becomes too boring for you, and we’ll have to go through this all over again. I don’t want to go through this again.’ His voice is small, too, small and sad. The ache in me, the ache I felt earlier when I was standing in the shower, it grows larger, it swallows up my heart. He gets up, walks around the kitchen table and pulls a chair up next to mine. We put our arms around each other.
‘We’ll get the dogs a passport,’ he murmurs into my neck, ‘if you decide that you’re going to live in New York. We’ll share custody. You can have them for six months and I’ll have them for six months. Or something. We’ll work something out. We’ll be in each other’s lives. We’ll always be in each other’s lives.’
‘Promise?’ I ask.
‘I promise.’
At dusk, I take the dogs out to the common. The pair of them race ahead of me, bouncing up and down with the sheer joy of being back out on their favourite walk. I try to picture myself walking along a New York sidewalk with the pair of them attached to leads. I can’t quite imagine it. I try to picture myself working at Zeitgeist Productions, in the building at the corner of Lexington and East 71st, sitting at a desk just metres away from Aidan’s, or camping out on the sofa in Alex’s tiny flat. I try to picture myself single again, unmarried.
It’s exciting to me but it’s frightening too, not just because it’s a leap into the unknown, not just because I’m thinking of abandoning one life for another. It’s frightening because I wonder if Dominic is right. He told me, back in New York, that I had to choose between him and my ghosts. Am I choosing ghosts? Maybe I am, and maybe that way sadness lies, but I have to give that life another try. I have to see if I can do it again, if I can do it better this time. I have to see if I can be me again without Julian.
I turn back as darkness falls, clenching and unclenching my hands, which are freezing even in gloves and shoved into pockets. The wind is getting up, it’s time to go home, to get back to the warmth, but I don’t. Instead I sit down on a bench at the side of the pathway. The dogs wander around for a bit, confused, then they settle at my feet. There is a slip of a moon in the sky, just a sliver of ivory in the black. I can’t see any stars.
He seems to come out of nowhere, out of the dark like a phantom.
‘You can’t be here,’ I say.
‘I spoke to Alex,’ he says, ‘I got the first flight I could.’
‘But, you can’t be here,’ I say again. ‘Dominic …’
‘He’s the one who told me where to find you.’
Aidan sits down next to me on the bench and puts his arms around me. ‘I’m sorry about your dad,’ he says, pulling me into his chest.
‘How long are you here for?’ I ask him.
‘Just until tomorrow. I have to get back to work.’
‘Does the job offer still stand?’
‘It does.’
‘I want to come to New York,’ I tell him, ‘I want to try again. Work, Alex, everything.’
‘Me?’
‘Well, I don’t know about you …’ I say, laughing, and then he kisses me, and I don’t feel the cold any more.
I want to stay there, on the bench, in the darkness, holding him, but I know that I can’t, that it’s cruel, to stay here with him when Dom’s waiting for me inside, knowing I’m out here with Aidan. So I kiss him one last time and get to my feet, the dogs taking their cue and scrambling up, and I say goodbye.
‘I’ll see you again soon,’ I tell him. ‘I’ll see you in New York.’
‘I’ll be waiting for you.’
And this time, I know he will.
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Published by Arrow Books 2011
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Copyright © Amy Silver 2011
Amy Silver has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance between these fictional characters and actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Arrow Books
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ISBN 9780099564638
Table of Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Amy Silver
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Copyright
ne Minute to Midnight