“But that’s you. You are a good person. Don’t change that. Ever.”
She turned her head to me. “That sounded like goodbye.”
“Wasn’t meant to. I’m nowhere near goodbye.” And I wasn’t, not even close.
But she was.
Two weeks after her drink was spiked, Callum came to pick up a list of belongings that she wanted to have with her at Claire’s. Ava had come home to me after leaving the hospital, but she’d been quiet and reserved, saying very little. She’d woken in the night with bad dreams and stiffened when I’d held her.
The Wednesday after, I came home to find some of her belongings gone and a note to say that she needed space.
I got it.
I understood.
All of us did: me, her brothers, her sisters. We’d avoided the sympathy, even avoided the anger we felt at the shit who’d put her through it. She’d been given a huge dose of diazepam, which was why she’d not been able to move her limbs. Jon McKend-Berry had been charged and there was a possibility that he’d be looking at time inside, but that meant Ava would have to testify in court.
She’d been adamant at first that she didn’t want to be supervised anywhere, that she was fine and ‘wouldn’t be so stupid’ again. We muted her protests, doing everything as usual but she didn’t go out. She wouldn’t meet us after work and on the one occasion we’d gone for dinner she didn’t drink anything but the bottled water she’d ordered and insisted the top stayed on.
I sat down on the sofa as Callum packed books into a bag, and tried to look interested in a magazine on cars.
“I’m sorry, man,” he said, sitting opposite me. “This is fucking you up.”
I shook my head. “I get she needs to be with her family. I don’t know if we’re over or not.” She was returning my texts but her answers were distant, perfunctory.
“Give her time,” Callum said. “I know I’m not exactly agony aunt material when it comes to relationships because I’m officially shit at them, but she’s being odd with all of us. Which we kind of get.”
“I know. And I can give her time. I’m hardly out on dates every night,” I said, holding onto a cold cup of coffee.
“Not because you don’t get offers,” he said. “I saw you prise that woman off you on Friday.”
I’d gone out for a quick drink after work, mainly because going home to an apartment that was empty of Ava wasn’t high on my to-do list. There had been a group of women out from an accountants’ we sometimes worked with and two of them had propositioned me. Callum clearly didn’t know about the second. I’d gone home shortly after and set up my Xbox, settling for a night of shooting up bad guys instead.
“Look, Cal, I’m happy to give Ava as much space as she needs. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to see her, but clearly she has shit she needs to sort through at the moment. She knows I’m here.”
“Yeah, I know you text her a dozen times a day. It’s the only time she smiles,” he said.
I felt something heavy hit my chest.
We’d psycho analysed her from afar, me, Max and Jackson. We’d talked about how she’d always felt over-protected and cosseted, not allowed to make her own decisions and her brothers had agreed to not go completely bat shit crazy. Because she hadn’t done anything wrong.
And the worst hadn’t happened. We’d gotten there quickly enough that he’d not laid a finger on her. In the time between Ava making the phone call and us getting there, he’d been talking to her, telling her what he was going to do and how she was going to like it, then his phone had rung and he’d been distracted.
And then Max and I had arrived.
“We agreed we’d be temporary,” I said. “While she was changing spaces around and finishing off the priory.”
“Is that what you wanted?” Callum said. “I’m not going to beat you up if you say yes.”
I laughed, but the sound was hollow. “You couldn’t beat me up,” I said. “But no. I was happy with how things were. I got she was going to find her own place and that was fine, but I didn’t – don’t – want things between us to end.”
Callum nodded, picking up Ava’s bag. “This feels shitty,” he said. “Just – hold on in there. Everything will get better. She’ll be fine, you know and so will you.”
I nodded, watching him see himself out. I wasn’t sure I would be.
For the next couple of weeks, I heard about Ava solely from Payton, Max, Jackson and Seph, and less and less each day. It was if they were afraid to bring her up for fear it would incite some reaction in me that they wouldn’t know how to respond to. I heard from her and she sometimes instigated the messages rather than it just being me. I knew she was going out more, that she was back on site and working full time again. And I knew that she was prepared to testify against Jon McKend-Berry.
The heat from early summer had burnt itself out by the time August started and rain hit London like there was about to be a second flood. I’d spent the morning in court, trying to ensure my client got the compensation he deserved after his ex-business partner had fucked him over.
