An hour later, I closed Rachel’s laptop with trembling hands. A heavy weight pressed on my heart, and I took a deep, shaky breath in.
‘Drink this.’ Rachel put a glass of something amber in front of me and without even asking what it was I tipped it down my throat. It burned, like a fire inside me.
‘I should have listened to him.’
She wrapped her arms around me from behind and pressed her cheek against my back. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered.
A tear tracked down my cheek and I swiped it away. I had no right to cry about this. It was all my own doing.
I’d been so sure I was doing the right thing, looking for Nick in 2019. I’d been so confident that he would be fine, that he’d be living his best life and that I’d find out all kinds of details of what he’d been up to over the last twenty years. Despite what I’d said, the worst I’d imagined was that he’d be happily married and I’d have to live knowing he was unattainable. But I could handle that. It was the not-knowing I couldn’t handle.
But that’s not what our search had found.
Just like last time, his name didn’t bring anything up at all, so we’d narrowed it down, typing in ‘teacher’ and ‘London’.
And then I’d seen it. A few pages down, but there it was.
An article in the local paper, dated 13 March 2006.
Local teacher named as victim of fatal Euston train crash
I’d known even before I clicked on it what I was going to see, but by then there was no choice but to find out more. And when the page loaded, my breath had left my body. Because there was a photo of Nick, smiling into the camera, his hair shorter than now, his face slightly more lined, but undeniably Nick.
It was the caption underneath that took my breath from me: ‘Popular maths teacher Nick Flynn died at the scene in the Euston train crash on Sunday.’
I couldn’t speak.
Rachel pulled away from me and dragged a bar stool over to sit beside me. She pushed my hair back from my face and tucked it behind my ear.
‘What have I done?’ I whispered.
‘You couldn’t have known.’
‘But he specifically asked me not to. He said he didn’t want to know. And this is why.’
‘You don’t have to tell him.’
I shook my head. ‘I won’t tell him. But I don’t know…’ I sniffed. ‘I don’t know whether I can keep this from him. I don’t think I’m that good an actor.’
I tried to picture how I would act when I saw Nick again as arranged the following day. Would I be able to pretend nothing had changed, that I hadn’t found out anything? I mean, I hadn’t mentioned that I was going to look him up again. And if I’d found him and gone to look for him in real life then I hadn’t even planned to tell him that either, but just wait for him to discover it when he got to 2019.
But this was different. This was huge.
How could I keep it from him, that he was going to die?
And yet at the same time, I also knew that I could never tell him. Because knowing it would destroy his life.
I realised I was crying, huge, uncontrollable sobs wracking my body, and Rachel pulled me to her and held me and let me cry. I didn’t think I was ever going to stop.
Why hadn’t I listened to Nick? I’d ruined everything.
For the first time since I’d met Nick, I was nervous about seeing him. We’d arranged to meet on Monday at 5p.m. as usual, but I was early, pacing up and down in front of the bandstand trying to work out how to arrange my face.
‘You can do this,’ Rachel had assured me when she rang before I left.
‘I’m not sure I can,’ I said.
But if I wanted to keep seeing Nick, which I desperately did, then I had to get this right.
