Nostalgia is a powerful thing…
Alex shifts slightly beside me.
“If you walk away, I’ll just follow you,” I say warningly. “And I’m in the room next door to you, so I’m going to be hard to avoid.”
I have no idea who this new, assertive Summer is, or where she came from, but I think I like her. Let’s just hope Alex does, too.
“You’re really not going to give up on this, are you?” he says.
“Nope. ‘Fraid not.” I try to sound cheerful, but it sounds forced even to me, so I drop the act and go for a more direct approach instead.
“What happened to your fiancée, Alex?” I ask softly. “Did she… she didn’t…?”
The words dry up as a horrible thought occurs to me.
“Oh my God, she’s not… she’s notdead,is she?”
My hand flies up and clamps itself over my mouth in horror, a series of terrible images flooding my brain: Alex’s fiancée, dying just before theirwedding day; him, broken-hearted and inconsolable, honeymooning alone, in a bid to preserve her memory; or maybe to scatter her ashes? Because that would be—
“Of course she’s not bloody dead,” he says, rolling his eyes almost out of his head. “Good grief, Summer, what do you take me for? D’you seriously think I’d have gone on a quad bike safari with you this afternoon if I was mourning my beloved dead wife?”
He snorts, sounding almost amused.
“Um, no. No, of course not,” I tell him quickly. “Of course you wouldn’t. And that’s great! That she’s alive, I mean. It’s really, really great that you have a living wife. Or fiancée. Or… whatever she is.”
Whatisshe, though? Because that’s what Ireallywant to know, now we’ve established she’s still with us.
“Is it?” His expression darkens again.
Uh-oh.
“Look, don’t get me wrong,” he says, still staring out at the ocean. “I don’t wish herdead. I’m notthatmad at her. I do wish I’d never been engaged to her, though. And I suspect she does, too, actually; it would’ve made the revelation that she was sleeping with my best friend feel like much less of a betrayal.”
There’s a long silence, during which our seagull friend gets tired of pecking around in the shallows and flies off. I watch him go enviously, wondering what on earth I’m supposed to say next. Whatdoyou say to something like that, after all?
“I’m sorry,” I manage eventually. “That’s … well, pretty intense. And right before your birthday, too — that must’ve made it even worse.”
Alex looks at me blankly.
“My birthday?”
“Yeah, the other day? I saw the flowers in your … oh.”
My face starts to burn with embarrassment as everything falls into place. The flowers in his room. The champagne on the plane, and on our first night at the hotel. All perfectly appropriate gifts for the newlyweds. Except we weren’t them.
No wonder he was so grouchy about it all.
“Sorry,” I tell him, cringing at the memory of how I made everyone sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to him on the mountain top. “I just assumed. I really shouldn’t have. I really,reallyshouldn’t have.”
Alex shrugs, as if it doesn’t really matter to him, but the sag of his shoulders tells a different, much sadder story, and I have to resist the urge to put my arms around him and hug him until the sadness goes away.
“I know you said you don’t want to talk about it,” I tell him instead, “but … it might help? Even just a little?”
“You’re desperate to know what happened, you mean?” he says, glancing over at me. He smiles, which takes the sting out of his words, but not the sadness from his eyes.
“No. No, it’s not that,” I reply. “Well, I am just atinybit curious, yes. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t. But that’s not why I’m trying to get you to talk to me about it.”
I want to tell him that I’m doing it because I want to help him; because I feel super shitty about how self-absorbed I’ve been to have kept rambling on about myself and my stupid diary while he was dealing with a broken engagement. But his shoulders tense as if he’s trying to make his mind up about something, and then he starts to speak.
