Alice nodded, not wanting to interrupt him, but her heart was speared by an image of a young, lanky boy, full of creativity and passion but paralysed by fear and judgement.
‘He told me that if I wanted to waste my life taking “snaps” instead of joining him in his insurance company, then I could get out the day I turned eighteen. For once in my life, I was pleased to do as I was told. I packed my bag and left. Got the first bus out of Invergarrig, not caring which way it was going. And I never went back. Not to his house anyway … Norina had always doted on us, and she didn’t have any children of her own, so when her sister died, she said her door would always be open to me and Cat. She became something of a stand-in mum for me,but Cat … She loved Norina, but by that point, she’d lash out at anyone she perceived as an authority figure.’
She reached out, gently laid her hand on his arm. ‘No one would blame you for not doing what your dad wanted as a career. It would have been such a waste if you had.’
Ben looked away. ‘But it wasn’t just me, was it? While I was off having fun, travelling the world, building a career … I’d left Cat there on her own. She started letting off steam the only way she knew how – at first it was drink, but later she got on to harder stuff.’
‘Ben?’ She waited until he met her gaze. ‘You are not responsible for your sister’s addiction.’
He stared at her bleakly. ‘If I hadn’t left, things would have been different …’
‘Yes, and if your father had been a different man, things would have turned out differently, or if your mother hadn’t died, maybe Cat wouldn’t have rebelled, or if she’d had different friends … There are so many variables. You can’t lay it all at your own door.’
He gave her a look that said,Can’t I?
‘The last time Cat went into rehab, about a year before she died, Norina and I did a programme too. Cat had been turning up at Norina’s, talking about taking Willow, and the staff helped us work through setting boundaries, outlining dealbreaker behaviour with her. I’d always felt so guilty where Cat was concerned that she sometimes could talk me into giving her money. I knew deep down it wasn’t helping her, that I was just enabling her, but it was so hard to say no.’
‘I can’t even imagine …’
‘So I set boundaries and I stuck to them. No more money.
No more bailing her out of her own mess.’
‘That sounds healthy. Especially if that’s what the experts told you to do.’
Ben looked away. ‘A month before she died, I was back in Glasgow, staying at my friend’s flat, and she found me. She was clearly off her face, and she begged me for more money. I said no.’ He shook his head. ‘I turned her away …’
Alice’s heart lodged in her mouth. She so badly wanted to reach out and touch him, to smooth that torment from his brow with her fingertips.
‘I wasn’t there for her when she needed me. And not for the first time. It had always been a disaster waiting to happen, and I could have stopped it, but I didn’t. I chose not to.’
Alice stepped closer, almost between the long legs anchored against the floor to keep his backside resting on the ledge.
When he met her gaze, the rawness in his eyes tore at her soul. ‘What if I do it all over again? What if I let Willow down too? I couldn’t bear it.’
Even though it was gloomy in their little shelter, she saw his eyes become shiny, heard the catch in his voice. A single tear leaked from the corner of his eye, and she reached up and brushed it away with the pad of her index finger.
He grabbed her hand and held it between both palms, pressed it to his cheek. Alice’s heart began to pound. ‘Don’t,’ she whispered, and tears welled in her own eyes at the thought of how this wonderful man’s heart was ripping in two. ‘Don’t do this to yourself.’
Their faces were close now. She could feel his warmth, the juddering of his ribcage as he drew in a breath.His pupils were large and black, only a thin sliver of brown remaining.
Alice didn’t know how many kisses she’d had in her life, but she knew she was on the verge of one at that moment. For her, it would be like afirstkiss, the kind that marks you forever purely because it’s just that. Her eyelids drifted closed, and she held her breath.
‘This is a bad idea,’ Ben murmured, his voice low and rumbly in the confined space.
‘I know …’ For all the reasons she’d already told herself. But that had been when she’d thought this was a one-sided thing, when she was just crushing on someone who’d been kind to her.
There was a moment when everything felt suspended, as if they were at the top of a giant roller coaster ride, about to plunge into something deep and scary and thrilling, and then Ben shifted, and she knew he was about to move away.
‘Can we just … you know, stay like this for a moment?’ she whispered.
Ben’s breath came out shakily as he nodded, and he rested his forehead against hers. They stayed there in silence, sensing the rise and fall of each other’s chests, only the tiniest patch of skin touching, but it felt … like an admission. Like the start of something.
Alice was just wondering if they could climb back to the top of that roller coaster, ready to start the wild and heady ride, when Ben jolted and pulled away from her and reached for his phone. Now she thought about it, her brain had registered a soft electronic pinging a few seconds earlier, but she’d been so absorbed in being close to him that she hadn’t paid any attention to it.
It was the alarm he’d set to go back to Penrith station. He tapped his phone to silence it. ‘Time to go and find out what our immediate future holds.’
Chapter Thirty-Nine
