“She stood me up at the altar,” he says, turning back to stare at the ocean. “Decided she couldn’t go through with it, because she wanted to be with him. I think that was the worst part; how public the humiliation was. You know?”
“I canimagine,” I say, speaking carefully because although I’m no stranger to public humiliation, for once this is a level of humiliation Idon’tknow much about. “And I guess this explains why you hate weddings so much. But you shouldn’t feel humiliated. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I’m not so sure about that, actually,” he says ruefully. “I didn’t do anything half as bad as they did, obviously—” He pauses to roll his eyes — “But I’m not exactly blameless. I should never have been marrying her in the first place. That’s on me.”
“You… you shouldn’t have?”
I have no idea why my heart leaps at this statement, but it does. Which, I remind myself, is totally inappropriate under the circumstances.
“No, I really shouldn’t have.”
He turns abruptly and starts walking back along the beach, and, after a moment, I follow him.
“We’d been together since we were kids,” he says, thrusting his hands into his pockets as he walks. “Well, teenagers.”
“Childhood sweethearts, you mean?” I stop in my tracks. “Wow. That’s so—”
“If you’re going to say ‘romantic’, save it,” Alex says, striding ahead and forcing me to break into a clumsy jog to catch up with him again. “It wasn’t the least bit romantic.”
“I guess not,” I concede, splashing through the shallow water next to him. “Theideaof it is, for sure; but I’m starting to think maybe people aren’t actuallymeantto spend their entire lives with the very first person they meet.”
“That’s the thing, though,” says Alex, stopping so suddenly I almost walk into him. “It’s theideaof it people fall for. It’s notreal. We just convinced ourselves it was because it was what everyone expectedof us. It was like this perfect love story: we were just too scared to admit it wasn’t actually true.”
His shoulders droop again, and then he’s back to his ‘staring at the horizon’ trick, as if the sinking sun holds all the answers.
“What’s her name? Your fiancée?”
It isn’t important, obviously, but suddenly I want to know. I want to know who she is; this woman who got engaged to Alexander Fox, and cheated on him with his best friend. I want to know who made him like this.
“Rebecca,” he says reluctantly, speaking as if the word tastes bad. “She’s not my fiancée any more, though. She’s not anything to me anymore.”
Rebecca.
I roll the name around in my head. It’s a pretty name: all soft curves and musical vowels: Re-be-ca.
Alex’s fiancée, Rebecca.
Who I have a sudden, and completely irrational, hatred of.
“We didn’t love each other,” he says, so quietly that I have to lean in to hear him. “Not like you’re supposed to. We weren’t in love. Not ever, really. We were just a habit neither of us tried hard enough to break. And I just wish we’d had the courage to admit that before we started sending out invitations and paying a small fortune for flowers. I wish I could go back in time and do the right thing rather than the easy one. Because the ‘easy’ thing has turned out to be the hardest one after all.”
The sun glides serenely towards the horizon, casting a golden glow over the world. We stand there watching it until it hits the tip of the mountains that make up the center of La Gomera, and is swallowed up by the land.
“If you’re not careful, you’re going to start sounding like me,” I say, breaking the silence that descends as the gold in the sky turns to silver. “Talking about wanting to go back in time and act on the opportunities that were right there in front of you.”
“I think everyone wants that, though, don’t they?” says Alex, shrugging again. “We all wonder what we’d have done differently, if we’d had the chance. We all sometimes dream of going back and ‘fixing’ things; making them how they were meant to be. That’s what I admire about you, Summer.”
“Me?”
I glance over my shoulder, just in case there’s some other ‘Summer’ approaching who he could be addressing. But nope: it’s just the two of us, on this almost deserted beach.
“Yeah. Because we all wish we could go back and change things, but you actually tried to do it, didn’t you? Whereas I just let things continue the way they were until it was too late.”
I consider this thoughtfully.
“It might be too late for me to change things too,” I admit, thinking of my talk with Jamie earlier today, and how I’ve yet to start feeling like anything I’ve done this week has even come close to changing my life, like it was supposed to. “So I wouldn’t go trying to model yourself on me just yet, if I were you.”
“That doesn’t sound like the Summer I’ve come to know,” says Alex, nudging me. “Come on; you’re the one who’s supposed to believe in this stuff. Help a guy out here, would you? I’m kind of counting on you.”
