“Do you know when?”
Yes.
We’re quiet then, eyes picking up where our mouths leave off. Hoots of laughter drift over from a nearby table as, down on the ground, Eversford’s traffic moves. The world has refused to stop turning. Life rumbles heartlessly on.
I know I have to speak. Outline what scant plan I have. “There may be something—”
“Wait.” She covers my hand with hers. It feels curiously cold. “Don’t say any more.”
“But if you—”
“I mean it, Joel. I don’t want you to say any more. You need to listen to me.”
So I stop talking, train my eyes numbly on her flying-swallow necklace instead. It’s the same one that so struck me all those months ago, when I first met her at the café.
“I don’t want to know anything else. Nothing about what you dreamed. I don’t want to know what you saw, or when it will be. Ever. Ineverwant to know. Okay?”
I stare at her. The tears in her eyes have been swapped for steel. “Cal, I don’t think you—”
“I do.” Her voice cuts through the sweet air of the evening. Shewithdraws her hand from mine. “I do understand. All I know, right now, is that I’m going to die. I don’t know how it happens, or when it will be. I’m no different to anyone else here tonight.” She glances at our waiter, then a raucous group of drinkers a couple of tables away.
“ButIknow.”
“Yes. And if you told me, you’d be giving me a terminal illness. Right here, right now.”
“Cal,” I say, “how can you not want to know this? There may be something we can—”
“But there isn’t. You’ve already said you don’t know how it happens. You’re as helpless as me, Joel, and you know it.”
“Callie.” My voice buckles with emotion. “Please let me just—”
“No, Joel. This is my decision. I can’t deal with a death sentence.”
I think of my mum, denied the precious time she wanted to prepare. The fact that all my fears about love since she passed away are playing out now with Callie is almost more than I can bear. “Do you really mean that?”
She nods, just once.
I take her hand again. Grip it hard. Maybe I’m trying to squeeze it full of sense. “I can’t live with me knowing and you not.”
“You want to unburden yourself?”
“No, it’s not that.” But then I wonder if it is.
“You know what this means, don’t you?”
“It means too many things.”
“It means you love me.”
Trust Callie to see the upside. There’s even the softest of smiles on her face. “Callie—”
“You can say it now. The worst has happened. You don’t have to be afraid anymore.” And then she leans across the table, kisses me.
But as I kiss her back, all I can see is her body on the ground.
There’s not a single twinge of movement, and her skin is cold as milk.
57.
