‘Apart from you. We’ve been so intimate and yet .?.?. God, I’m embarrassed to hear myself saying this, but I feel like I know very little about you.’
‘Funny, that’s exactly what my ex used to say.’
‘So, she thought you were unreadable as well.’ She smiled. ‘And were you?’
He gave a rueful laugh. ‘Maybe. Seems like it.’ His shoulders slumped a little. He’s really not used to this, she thought.
‘So, what happened?’
‘No blame,’ he began, which was a good sign. ‘Nobody else involved or anything like that.’
‘You just .?.?. fell out of love?’
He gave a snort of laughter.
‘Is that funny?’
‘No, it’s just I have asked myself that too: were we ever “in love” at all?’
‘Don’t make it sound like a disease.’
He seemed to be struggling to find the words and it struck Cassie that perhaps this was the first time he’d talked about it.
‘Maybe we were, for the first summer we were together. She’d just finished teacher training, I was working in my first graduate job, making decent money, and for those few months it seemed as though everything came together. It was like someone had turned down the force of gravity. OK, you have permission to laugh.’
‘No, that’s lovely. I’ve never heard it described quite like that before, but it sounds special. I mean, if that’s not being in love .?.?.’
‘Thank you, for some reason that makes me feel better. Like I didn’t just make it all up.’
There was a sadness in his voice. ‘It was that stage in our lives where you have all the independence and none of the responsibility.’
Cassie thought back over her long freelance career.
‘That can wear pretty thin after a while. Trust me.’
Finn made that sound where people exhale through their nose and finish with a harrumph to express a feeling of regret. There’s no word for that, Cassie thought. And there should be. People do it all the time.
‘I wonder how many couples run for years on the memory of a feeling.’
‘Lots, probably. They live on the feeling they got on their first date. Forever trying to recreate it. Though not my parents, now I think of it. They always seemed to laugh so much. Da would grab Mam and they’d jive around the kitchen whenever Abba or the Bee Gees came on the radio, and then she’d pretend to do the dance of the seven veils with a couple of tea towels. What were your parents like?’
‘Not like yours, by the sound of it. They were very separate.’ He seemed to be searching for the right words. ‘They were always very busy. It was all a bit chaotic, now I think of it.’
Instinct told Cassie to leave it, he’d tell her in his own good time.
‘My ex-wife is very organised.’
‘Good for her.’
‘Looking back, I think that’s what we ran on. A sixteen-year marriage and three kids based on one summer of love and a whole lot of lists.’
‘You stuck with it, though. Maybe there was more to it. It’s my theory that we don’t always know why we do something. Sometimes we start things for one reason and end up doing them for another.’
‘I changed.’
‘Was that a bad thing?’
‘I turned into an adult. I got stuck there. I sort of didn’t recognise myself anymore.’
