Ari nodded, her face falling a little.
At her look of hurt, Tom quickly carried on. “Well, I was just thinking that I... Well, let’s just say that I still prefer the queen of spades. Always have, always will.”
Ari blushed, a pretty pink colour dusting her cheeks.
Between them, Reine looked up. “Are you going to marry my mummy now?”
Tom glanced at her in surprise.
“Reine!” Ari said.
“Well, you know—” Tom began, but he couldn’t finish his words.
“He can’t marry your mother, dear,” a curt voice interrupted. “You see, he’s already planning on marrying me.”
Tom looked up, right into the blazing eyes of Sasha.
Chapter 19: Fish in a Pond
Getting over Ari isn’t easy.
Tom sits around his parents’ house — no, his mother’s house now, he painfully corrects himself — and doesn’t do much of anything. His father’s plane sits abandoned in the old hangar, and Tom takes her into the skies on occasion, keeping his flying hours up. His father would have liked that, Tom reminds himself. If there was one thing Doug Somerset ever took seriously it was his flying. He might have been a race-car driver by design, but he was a pilot at heart, and Tom can’t bear the thought of his father’s plane going to rust and ruin in Doug’s eternal absence.
“You can keep her, you know,” Marnie tells him one evening, and Tom looks up at her, blank-faced and confused. He couldn’t keep her, he thinks. He lost her. She’s moved on, married to someone else, with a baby. His mother doesn’t know what she’s talking about.
“The plane,” Marnie clarifies, looking at him with concern.
“Oh,” Tom replies. “Right.” For a moment he sits quietly, mulling over her words.
“And anything else you want to keep of your father’s,” Marnie offers, her voice rippling with pain and loss anew. “Anything at all. All his stuff... all his junk...” There’s a bittersweet smile on her face as memory strikes. “Maybe it’s time to move on. Find it all a new home.”
Tom shrugs. “Thanks, but there’s nothing I want. Not really.”
His mother frowns. “Not even the plane?”
“I don’t have anywhere to keep her in Brooklyn.”
“Brooklyn? Who said anything about Brooklyn? It can stay here. Besides, since when do you live in Brooklyn? You’vepractically moved back here since your father died. That was two years ago.”
“If I’m in your way—”
“No, that’s not what I meant,” Marnie cuts him off. “All I’m thinking is that your place in the city is costing you a small fortune every month in rent, and you’ve hardly been back to the place. Why don’t you give it up? Stay here with me?”
At the almost pleading tone to her voice, Tom shrinks back. His mother retired during the worst of Doug’s illness to care for him, and her lack of purpose is starting to show. Suddenly, Tom realises that she’s thinking of making a project out of him. If he continues to stay here, continues to mope and grieve and dwell on what could have been, he might as well give up now. He takes a deep breath and sits taller.
“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” he says, as gently as he can. “In fact, I’ve been thinking recently about going... Well, maybe going back to the apartment. Getting a job. Doing some travelling.”
“You only just got back from London,” Marnie complains. “And you want to travel again?”
Tom swallows hard, trying in vain not to think about Ari, the image of her baby in another man’s arms.
“Yeah,” he says softly. “I want to travel again.”
“Another European jaunt?”
Tom tries not to flinch. “No. Somewhere new.”
Somewhere, he tells himself,that doesn’t remind him of Ari.
