A tear slides down my cheek. ‘I want to be a mum, Josh. You know that about me. You always have. And I want to be good at it. It already feels wrong, and I can’t risk fucking it up. Iwon’trisk it.’
His brown eyes parch mine. ‘So, what – you’re going to go off and have kids with someone else?’
I think of what my dad said.Sometimes, the healthier thing is to walk away. Sometimes, you leave with love.
‘I want to be happy... and I don’t think I will be, with you. Not now. Not long-term. Maybe we could be, for a while. I’m sure we could pretend that none of this has happened. But everything has changed. And we’re going to have to face up to that, one day. And if there’s a hard decision to be made... it will be so much less painful to make it now. Don’t you think?’
‘No,’ he whispers, his voice and whole face crumpling. ‘I will never say I think it’s the right thing not to be with you.’
24.
Josh
June 2001
Not long after Rachel tells me she thinks we should separate, Polly arrives in her SUV to pick her up. Thankfully, tactfully, she decides to wait outside in the car.
I think I knew straight away that this wasn’t an impromptu thing. Rachel doesn’t do knee-jerk. It’s not who she is. But Polly’s turning up feels less as if life as I know it is about to end, and more as if it already has.
From the very first day Rachel and I met, I was afraid of doing something to hurt her. It’s why I agonised for two weeks after that party before calling her, or trying to find her on campus. Why I deliberated for a full week further before finally writing her that note.
I know my actions have led us here. But I can’t let her go. I can’t letusgo.
‘Please stay,’ I say again, from where I’m standing in the doorway to the bedroom.
She opens her side of the wardrobe, pulls out a canvas bag I don’t recognise. She must have borrowed it from someone. It’s the kind of oversized holdall you’d take if you were planning on spending a few months on the other side of the world. ‘I can’t. I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t apologise,’ I whisper, burning from the sight of the bag. ‘Just stay.’
‘I love you so much.’ She is talking through her tears, voice hopping, almost gasping for breath. ‘Which is why I have to go.’
‘That doesn’t make sense.’ I am grasping now. I’m desperate.
She looks at me for a searing moment, eyes hot and brimming. ‘It does to me.’
After she goes, I sit on the edge of the bed and stare for a while at her empty side of the wardrobe, the newly bare shelves, the unfamiliar tessellation of my things without hers. Of the two of us, Rachel always accumulated far fewer belongings than me, an inclination left over from her childhood perhaps. She kept actively on top of her stuff, enjoyed some periodic paring-down. But still, our flat is small enough for the slivers of space she has left to seem more like craters.
Outside, light begins to slide from the sky. The flat gets colder. The silence ticks.
I still can’t quite believe I am facing my first night without her. That she’s not coming back. That this is what she wants.
I know I should call Giles or Wilf, or go to see my mum. Or do anything, really, except what I end up doing, which is to crack open a bottle of whisky and start desperately swigging from it, the way people do when they need to be numb. Trying and failing to soothe my screaming nerve-endings, quell the question that won’t stop hurtling around my head.
Why did I do it? Why? Why? Why?
25.
Rachel
July 2001
One Saturday about a month after I leave, I am in Polly’s living room, readingJust Williamto her son, Blake, when I hear a hammering on the front door. The rhythmic, insistent fist-thump of someone who won’t be leaving till they’re heard.
This continues for thirty seconds or so before the shouting starts.
‘Rachel? Rach!Rachel!’
Fuck. It’s Josh.
