‘So don’t tell me to move on. Because you don’t get it. You don’t understand! Not until you’ve lived through it!’
And, before Gabi could offer any words in her defence, Anna turned and strode across the deck, heading for the gate at the side of the house. Thankfully, it wasn’t locked. She couldn’t have faced pushing her way back through all those people inside.
You couldn’t face having to turn around and see Gabi standing there, silent tears stinging her eyes,a little voice inside her head goaded, but Anna drowned it out by wrenching the gate open and slamming it shut behind her hard enough to make the latch rattle. And then she marched to the cul de sac where she’d parked her car, climbed in, and drove herself home.
Chapter Three
ANNA DIDN’T BOTHER turning the lights on when she got back home. She headed straight up the stairs and into the master bedroom. The digital alarm clock on the bedside table blinked the time: 11:36. She turned away from it.
If she didn’t look at it, she couldn’t see the numbers getting higher and higher, finally reaching that dreaded row of zeros. And if she couldn’t see them, it wasn’t real. Midnight was a threshold she didn’t want to cross. Not just this particular midnight, which loomed over her like a threatening shadow, but every midnight. Every day without him was one too many.
Anna had developed little rituals to help her get through the days and nights, and she needed one of those now. She walked over to Spencer’s built-in wardrobe. After dropping her handbag on the floor, she curled her fingers around the handles and eased the doors open. All his suits and shirts were still hanging there just where he’d left them. She knew it was a horrible cliché, but she couldn’t bring herself to throw them into a bin bag or take them down to the charity shop.
She sighed and pulled the sleeve of the nearest shirt towards her, held it up to her face and breathed in. His scent was no longer there, even though she refused to wash any of them,but she pretended it was. Every time she did this, she tried to recall it precisely, but it was getting harder and harder to do.
Spencer would have laughed at her for being so sentimental, but then Spencer had laughed at everything, made a joke of everything. It had charmed and infuriated her in equal measures. He’d even done it the first time she’d told him she loved him.
That frosty November evening nine years earlier had been magical. They’d been out to dinner in central London to celebrate their two-month anniversary, but instead of catching the Tube back to Charing Cross, they’d opted to wander beside the Thames, strolling along Victoria Embankment, with its sturdy stone walls, globe-like lamps decorated with ugly, bulbous-headed Victorian fish, and wooden benches with strange mythical creatures woven into the wrought-iron supports. The lights of Festival Hall and the Southbank Centre had twinkled across the water at them, and the London Eye, glowing bluish-white, had kept watch.
Spencer had pulled her into his arms and kissed her, before holding her face between his palms, looking deep into her eyes and saying, so simply, so seriously, ‘I love you.’ Then his face had broken into a huge grin. ‘I’m sorry,’ he’d said, laughing, ‘I just couldn’t hold it in any longer.’
She’d felt dizzy and breathless. Spencer had a way of doing that to her, of making her question if up was down and down was up; he was the magnet to her compass needle.
‘I love you too,’ she’d whispered back, and his smile had grown even wider, but then the edges of his mouth had turned downwards.
‘I beg your pardon?’ he’d said, mischief twinkling in his eyes. ‘I don’t think I quite heard you.’
She’d laughed softly, then had cleared her throat and tried again, louder this time. ‘I love you too.’
Spencer had cupped a hand to his ear. ‘Nope! Still can’t hear you.’ She’d punched him playfully on the arm. He’d kept moving closer and closer until their lips had almost touched, then he’d suddenly let go of her and had leaped onto one of the benches facing the river, feet planted wide, arms outstretched. ‘When you love someone,’ he’d shouted, ‘you don’t say it quietly, you proclaim it from the rooftops! Like this…’ And he’d bellowed to the seagulls sitting on the ropes of lights between the lampposts. ‘I love you, Anna Mason! I’ve loved you since the day I met you and I always will!’
He’d held out his hand to her and she’d taken it, let him help her up onto the bench so she’d been standing beside him, trying not to let the heels of her boots get stuck between the wooden slats. He’d grinned at her, waiting for her to follow suit, and she’d almost yelled her own declaration of love into the night air, but something had stopped her. Instead, she’d turned to face him. Sometimes, Spencer needed to know that his way wasn’t the only way.
‘You heard, you idiot,’ she’d mumbled into his ear, and then she’d kissed him just as softly and just as sweetly as he’d kissed her.
After that, it had become their ‘thing’ – if she said ‘I love you’ first, he always responded with: ‘I beg your pardon?’, and then she’d cap it off by whispering: ‘You heard, idiot’. She’d imagined them saying it to each other well into their eighties…
A sob escaped her lips and she sank to the floor of the wardrobe, taking both shirt and hanger with her, and then she buried her face in the blue-and-white striped cotton and cried until there were no tears left.
How was it possible toachefor someone this way? Not just metaphorically, but literally? Now she understood why people talked about having a broken heart, because she knew it was entirely possible for it to throb in pain along with every single beat.
She lost track of time, curled up on the wardrobe floor with Spencer’s shirt clutched to her chest. Eventually, though, she blinked, regained the sense of where and who she was. The ache didn’t stop, though. It never stopped.
She reached out to retrieve her bag from the bedroom floor and then returned to the wardrobe. Once she was huddled with her back against the wall, she pulled her phone out and pressed a button to wake it up.
Eleven fifty-six. It was almost midnight.
Anna closed her eyes and tried to stop time through the sheer strength of her will. Four minutes. Probably less than that – three and a bit – was all she had left of this year before it slid away, taking another piece of Spencer with it.
It didn’t work. When she opened her eyes again, another minute had evaporated. She stared at the phone as an inner battle began to rage. There was another ritual, you see. One that was even less healthy. In the sane part of her head, she knew that. That was why she’d banned herself from doing it. Shewastrying, even if Gabi didn’t think she was.
Put the phone down, she told herself.You promised yourself you wouldn’t do this again, remember?It had been months since she’d been this weak.
But she didn’t put the phone down. Slowly, deliberately,she pressed the screen and pulled up her contacts, and then, just as slowly, just as deliberately, she located Spencer’s name and hit ‘call’.
Even before it connected, she could hear the message – hear his voice – in her head:Hey! This is Spencer. I’m off having fun without you right now, but if you really have to leave a dull and boring message, you know what to do…
Oh, how she longed to do just that, to pour it all out to him, but she didn’t. It wasn’t enough. She wanted to talk to him, yes, but she didn’t want an empty, one-sided conversation. She wanted to hear his voice, his real voice, not a tinny recording from years ago. She wanted him to talk back to her. And then she could finally say what she should have said to him that last evening before he’d walked out the front door to go to the corner shop, something more meaningful than: ‘Can you grab a pint of milk while you’re there?’
