I wanted to discuss it with Rachel, but I knew she’d tell me it was a terrible idea and try to talk me out of it.
And she’d be right of course. There was nothing to be achieved by looking for him. And yet I knew I was going to do it anyway.
Finding him was easy, as it turned out. He had a Facebook page and although he didn’t post on it often, there were a few photos of him and his wife and two girls, both now in their late twenties. We hadn’t had much time to talk about families, but I remembered Nick telling me how much he loved them, and I wondered how they’d coped when their uncle Nick had been killed.
Although Andy looked familiar from the photo I’d seen alongside his interview in the newspaper back in 2007, a year after Nick’s death, he’d aged and his skin was leathery, his hairnow entirely white. I tried to imagine Nick at the same age, but it was impossible.
I scrolled back a few posts, and that was when I saw it. A photo of Nick, just a few years older than he was when I last saw him.
It had been posted on 12 March – the fourteenth anniversary of his death – and my eyes blurred as they wandered over the caption, reading about how much he was loved and missed by his loved ones. But it wasn’t even that which made me stop in my tracks. It was his eyes.
Because they were Flynn’s eyes.
I shut the laptop, shaking. I wanted to keep scrolling through Andy’s page, to find more and more photos and torture myself studying photos of Nick before he died. But I knew I had to step away. These people had been through so much grief and pain. I couldn’t bring any more into their lives. I couldn’t try and find Andy – at least not until after I’d found out for sure whether my letter had saved Nick.
But thinking about Nick’s family had shaken me. Because it reminded me that, somewhere out there, Flynn had a family he may never get the chance to meet.
To take my mind off it during the long, lonely days, I got into the habit of taking Flynn to the park. The weather had been freakishly hot and sunny for weeks, as though the weather gods were trying to make up for the fact that nobody could go anywhere or do anything. Usually this part of the park would be packed with groups of friends and families enjoying the sunshine. But today there were only a few people walking alone on the paths that wound between the patches of parched yellow grass, afraid to break the strict rules by stopping for too long. It was an odd feeling, to be so isolated from the rest of the world.
I rounded the corner and the rose garden and bandstand came into view and as always my heart began racing.Throughout my pregnancy I’d come here a few times, even though Rachel had thought it was a bad idea.
‘You’re just torturing yourself,’ she’d said.
And although I knew she was right, because the note I’d left here all those months ago had gone but the news stories about Nick dying in the train crash had remained the same, I couldn’t help myself. What if he happened to be there and I didn’t go? Seeing him one more time could change everything.
But since Flynn had been born, I hadn’t been able to pluck up the courage to step back inside. A deep-rooted fear kept me away. Fear of seeing Nick and him not wanting anything to do with Flynn and me. Fear of him still being angry. Fear of finding out that nothing I did was going to change the course of time.
It became easier for my shattered heart to simply stay away.
Today, though, on yet another hot day in June, something made me steer the pram away from the main walkway and up the small side path towards the bandstand. It was shady here and a relief after the heat of the sun. I adjusted the parasol that had been protecting Flynn’s face and gazed down at him. He lay flat on his back, his arms splayed out to the sides, his little cheeks red, long eyelashes spread out across the round apples of his cheeks. He looked so like his daddy, and my heart filled with love as I gazed down at him, fast asleep and totally oblivious to the turmoil I was going through.
‘Hey, baby, this is where I met your daddy,’ I whispered. I looked up at the bandstand. It was usually fairly clean, but clearly nobody had been around recently to maintain it, and dust and spiderwebs gathered in all corners, empty bottles and cans littered the ground. I stood rooted to the spot, staring at the bench where Nick and I had met, where we’d got to know each other, told each other stories about our lives, confided in one another. Where we’d fallen in love and discovered the impossible; the place where Flynn had come into being.
I bent down and scooped Flynn into my arms. He grizzled at the disturbance, then settled his cheek against my shoulder and closed his eyes again. I loved the feel of him against me, his warm little body moulding itself to mine, his heart beating against my chest. How had I ever lived without it?
‘Shall we go and see if we can find your daddy?’ I whispered. He shuffled, a little smile forming on his lips, then went still again. I placed my foot onto the platform and paused, nervous. What if Nickwashere? What would I do?
Before I could change my mind, I took a deep breath and stepped up.
Blood roared in my ears and the world turned fuzzy round the edges, as though someone had added a filter to the scene. I stood still, let out a low, slow breath, and allowed everything to settle.
There was no one here.
I walked across to the bench and sat down, leaning back against the wooden slats. I ran my free hand over the smooth wood of the seat and pressed my lips to the soft roundness of Flynn’s head, smelling his sweet, comforting baby smell.
His eyes flicked open and he looked up at me. And then, in slow motion, his little face folded and crumpled, and his mouth opened and a deafening roar filled the air. I leapt up and rocked back and forth trying to calm him. ‘Hey hey hey,’ I soothed, running my hand up and down his back. But he was inconsolable and the screaming only got louder, his face turning more and more red. I paced back and forth, back and forth, but nothing helped. He’d only been fed just before we left the house, but perhaps he was hungry again. It wasn’t as though he could tell the time, and it usually settled him when he grizzled. I sat back down and slipped my top up and unclipped my bra and tried to encourage him to latch on, but he squirmed and turned his face away, his whole body going rigid with the effort.
Tears ran down my face, and I wished I had someone here with me to tell me what to do. I hated making every single decision alone.
I fumbled to do my bra and top back up then settled Flynn against my shoulder and stepped back down to put him in his pram and take him home. But as soon my foot hit the soft earth, there was instant silence. Flynn stopped crying, his sobs became hiccups, and he looked up at me with wide, wet eyes.
‘What was it, baby boy?’ I said, running my finger gently down his cheek. ‘Could you feel something wrong in there?’
I glanced back at the bandstand. Was it really possible that a four and a half-month-old baby could feel something was awry? Could he really detect a shift in the energy, or had the molecules of the universe changed for him when we were inside the only place where I’d ever known his daddy?
Needing to know for sure, I took a step back onto the platform. Sure enough, Flynn’s body instantly went rigid again and his mouth opened ready to scream. But this time, before he became too distressed, I stepped back off. He relaxed immediately.
What did this mean? Did it mean anything, or was it just that he didn’t like it in there? He’d been known to cry a lot simply walking round the supermarket, only stopping the moment we walked outside. And yet this had felt different. This had felt like a sort of desperation, as though his whole body was rejecting something about the very air he breathed.
