I checked my phone again. Three minutes to five.
I took a deep breath, walked up the path and stepped up onto the bandstand.
He wasn’t here.
I sat, my leg jiggling beneath me. I hated waiting, and it was even worse that I had no way of checking to see if he was on his way. My leg continued to bounce and I hung my head between my knees.
That’s how I was sitting when Nick arrived. ‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ he said, bursting onto the bandstand full of nervous energy. He was soaked through, his hair plastered to his head, his shirt sticking to his body. ‘It started pissing it down just as I left work but I didn’t have time to go home and change.’ When he finally looked at me, he frowned. ‘Is everything okay? I really am sorry for being late.’
‘I’m fine,’ I said, forcing a smile. ‘I just didn’t sleep very well last night.’
‘Oh no.’ He sat down beside me, water dripping from his hair into his eyes. He looked so handsome I wanted to lean over and kiss him, but held myself back. ‘Do you want to go home and get some sleep? We could do this tomorrow instead?’
I shook my head. ‘No, I’ll be okay. I’ve been looking forward to seeing you after…’ I trailed off shyly.
A flush crept up Nick’s face too. ‘Yeah, me too. It was pretty… spectacular, wasn’t it?’
I nodded, all the words I was trying not to say to him stuck in my throat. I looked down at the floor because looking at him just reminded me of the image of his happy face peering out from the newspaper article, blissfully unaware of his fate.
Nick Flynn died at the scene.
The words kept ticker-taping through my mind, and I shook them away, trying to dislodge them. I had to try and forget what I’d read.
It wasn’t going to be easy.
‘It was amazing,’ I said.
‘I wish we could go somewhere else to be together.’
Oh, how I wished the same. Not being able to meet Nick wherever and whenever I wanted; to enjoy days out together, snuggle up together, to be normal – it was hell. I wished with all my heart that we’d met under any other circumstances.
And yet, if things had been different between us, we would probably never have met at all.
I turned to look at him and noticed he was studying me closely.
‘What?’ I said.
‘You seem… different,’ he said. He was still staring at me and I turned away, afraid my face might give me away.
‘It’s just tiredness. Honestly.’
‘Are you sure? You seem very down. You haven’t… I don’t know. Met someone else, have you?’
‘Since two days ago?’ I gave a sad smile. ‘No, I haven’t met anyone else. I haven’t exactly been looking.’
‘Right.’ He looked down at his trousers and plucked at an imaginary thread. My stomach squeezed with anxiety. I needed to pull myself together. Perhaps I should ask him what he’d been up to. Yes, that would be a normal conversation opener. I opened my mouth to speak but before I could say a word, he spoke again.
‘Something has happened, hasn’t it?’
I don’t know what my face did, but it clearly wasn’t good, because he took a sharp intake of breath and moved away from me so the gap between us widened. ‘You’ve tried to find me, haven’t you?’
‘No, I wouldn’t?—’
‘And it’s bad news, isn’t it?’
‘No!’ I said, too quickly. But the look on his face told me he didn’t believe me. I wanted to rewind time, to go back to five minutes ago when he first arrived and start all over again. I wanted to smile and be happy, not morose and untalkative. Of course he could tell there was something wrong, I had never been like this with him.
And of course there was only really one thing it could be, one thing that I couldn’t admit to.
