“You asked…”
“I did.”
“I can’t imagine what it’s like to lose your life partner, after you’ve made that commitment,” she said, widening her eyes to stop them welling up, and hoping she didn’t look like a madwoman. “Like, someone you loved wholeheartedly and planned a future with. And the way Nika told it, Holt didn’t feel free to move on because he didn’t believe, deep down, that his wife had died. Is that the truth?”
His raised eyebrows said everything.
“God, I’m sorry, I’ve overstepped. That’s another family quirk, I’m afraid—we go straight for the big questions. Life is short, no time to mess around, etcetera.”
“All good, I prefer it when people are straight up.” She thought he would use her backdown as an excuse to return to the tape—and understandably so—but instead he stared at her for a good long half a minute in that way she didn’t have ahope of interpreting, then continued. “Vanessa’s been legally declared dead, but it’s like you with not being able to go there again. I don’t think I could feel it for someone else the way I did with her—and I did feel it with her, that physical thing. Not just attraction but … that connection. It’s like that part of me is joined to her and always will be, so how could it be joined with someone else? So yeah, I get it,” he said, shrugging, like a couple of sentences encapsulated his whole story, and there was nothing left to say. But for the first time, he seemed to have let down his guard for longer than a split second.
“You never want kids? A family?” she prompted.
He sipped the coffee and worked it down like it was an effort. “Not anymore, the way things have worked out.”
“Me neither.”
He eyed her with curiosity. “You know you could have a kid without the relationship.”
“I really can’t.”
“You can’t? Oh shit, you mean…?” He raised a palm. “Sorry—I shouldn’t have asked. Man, how did we end up here—and without any alcohol?”
“Oh no, I can have kids,physically—as far as I know—but…”
“Ah. But youcan’tcan’t. Like the boyfriend thing.”
“Look, I don’t want to dwell on this, but just so we can drop the subject and move on… The cancer that my mom and sister had, and Kimberly has? All the women on that side of the family are dead or dying from it, except me, so far. So even if I survive that long, if I have a baby, if I have a girl… Or even if it’s a boy, ifhehas a girl… Who knows?”
“Got it. You have multilayered shit going on there, if you don’t mind me saying.”
“I know, right? But the whole having-kids thing keeps me away from relationships too. Because most guys in their thirties or thereabouts want kids, right? And before you start talkingabout adoption and surrogacy and all of that—I wouldn’t want to risk having children and then leaving them motherless, which is a strong possibility with my genetic heritage. I know what it is to lose someone you love and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, let alone bring it on someone—child or partner.”
“Maybe he’d think it would be worth the risk.”
The way Carter looked straight at her as he said it, the way he held her gaze in almost a challenge, it was almost like he was talking about himself. She mentally slapped herself. Of course he wasn’t. He’d just finished saying that he couldn’t feel anything for anyone else.
“Yeah, the last guy I dated, and I use that word loosely,” she continued, a nervous breathlessness creeping into her voice, “he was all, ‘Oh, but better to have loved and lost…’ But that’s bullshit. Losing someone close to you breaks a part of you, and you never recover. God, I’m sorry. I just get all… It’s all those people with their ‘life goes on, time heals all’ bullshit. Actually, for some of us it doesn’t go on, not in the same way. They say that losing someone is supposed to remind you to make the most of life, but it just reminds me how fragile life is, and to be super careful. Sorry. Shut me up now, please.”
“You’re the preacher, I’m the converted.” He looked up at the spot in the corner of the ceiling that had held his attention earlier. “It’s almost reassuring to meet someone who’s as messed up as me. You know, when I first bought the book, I flicked through it to see what Nika had said that was so damning that I was suddenly being fingered as the fall guy in all this. But once I’d gotten myself safe from the immediate threat, I had a closer read. And even though I was still ninety-nine percent focused on trying to figure out how the hell to extract myself, there were times I reread a passage several times because, holy shit, the writer was in my head—and not just that but seeing things in a way I hadn’t seen them before.” He finished his coffee and rinsedthe cup in the sink, putting his back to her. Was that why he’d been looking at her strangely ever since they were standing in her classroom—because he thought she was in his head?
“Like what?” she said quietly. Any second now he would surely pick up the earbuds.
He looked out the window—atthe window, since it was dark outside. She could see his face reflected in it: somber, warped by the glass. Sad. She wanted to step up and close her arms around him. It was almost a magnetic pull. “Like with the bit about how grief is a journey, but it’s a journey without end, which is a thing most people don’t get. About how my wife was gone but the relationship still felt real, and current. The yo-yoing between hope and despair, and how fucking exhausting it can be.”
“Yeah, right? Like it’s not just mentally exhausting, but physically.”
“And the complete mindfuck when you feel both hope and despair at the same time. About how your brain can’t deal with the uncertainty of someone being presentandabsent. All that stuff, that was…”
Alice murmured in sympathy. Most of that had come from Kimberly.Without a body, the process of grief is frozen, she’d said.
“I was amazed that Nika evidently knew me way better than I’d given her credit for.” He looked down, and wiped something off the sink. “But talking to you… Now I get it. It was you who wrote that—all the stuff about trying to escape my grief by drowning myself in a different life, a dangerous one, but actually it’s all still there, waiting for me to return to.” He turned suddenly, with a smile that looked forced. “So there you go, I see your psychobabble and raise you to … whatever is one step up from that.”
“I was totally projecting, imagining myself in that situation and what the attraction would be to that life. I really had no idea.”
His forced smile morphed into that wry, asymmetrical grin that imprinted on one side of his mouth. “I’m thinking now that you had some idea. But you also projected freakishly well.”
“With Kimberly’s help, to be fair. She gave me a lot of background about grief, and did some digging into how it differs when the person you love is missing. She can’t fix me, to her frustration, but she helps me see what might be going on in my head, which can be useful—and sometimes not. She has this theory on me—she only mentioned this recently, otherwise I might have put it in the book—she says I don’t fear new love, I fear old pain. I’m still trying to interpret it. Like a line in a poem that you have to dig into, grow into, before you can begin to understand its layers.”
