‘She didn’t drop it.’ It feels important to point this out. He is defensive of her. ‘It was just delayed. And then, admittedly, I walked out, so it didn’t happen. But that wasn’t her fault.’
‘But if she had cancelled it, would you have been angry?’
He looks down at his fists. He hadn’t realised he was clenching them. ‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘I suppose because I’m realising how often people put me second. And I know that if we commit to each other and have kids, I’ll be second a lot. But it’s the beginning of our relationship, and I’m just working through all this, so it feels, I don’t know, raw?’
‘Good,’ says the therapist, pushing his glasses up his nose. ‘Good. That’s good.’
‘It doesn’t feel good, though.’
‘It’s good that you’re recognising all of this. Also, let me ask you something else: is there a part of you that worries that Jess is puttingherselfsecond?’
‘Bingo,’ he says. Not a word he has ever used in his life, at least not like this. His fists unclench; a weight lifts from his shoulders. Even just understanding this about himself helps. ‘I love her,’ he says – and probably the first time he says this should not be to someone whom he is paying to hear it, but oh well. ‘And so I feel defensive of her, I suppose. And worried that she’ll be taken advantage of and have to give more than she’s prepared to.’
‘Good,’ the therapist says again, and Alex does his best to suppress his irritation in the midst of this small cathartic victory. ‘So what do you think you need to do next?’
The answer is so obvious that it makes Alex want to roll his eyes. ‘Talk to her, I’m guessing?’
His therapist takes a breath.
‘Please don’t saybingotoo,’ Alex says, and the therapist chuckles.
‘Okay,’ he says, and does a thumbs-up sign instead. Which might be worse.
It’s all very well saying that he needs to speak to Jess, but that requires her being willing to talk to him. Alex has already done the showing-up-with-flowers trick, and while he doesn’t put it past himself to need to do that again sometime, it seems a little too soon since the last time. A little unoriginal, which in turn smacks of insincerity.
Besides, it feels like this moment needs something bigger than just flowers. Honestly, he is starting to feel ashamed of his inability to deal with the hard stuff of life, to stay and work through things. He knows from his childhood, from his parents’ failed and then successful marriages, that relationships are hard and they require work. He’s been exploring the nuances of that in his books for a decade at this point, and successfully so, if his critics are to be believed; and he has certainly always been inclined to believe them.
He takes out his phone and scrolls to Jess’s name, but a text seems so pathetic, and it didn’t impress her last time. An email, maybe? But that’s so … formal. So unromantic. They don’t have the greatest of histories with email, either. And yet, if he could express himself in writing, it would definitely help his cause – help him to say exactly what he needs to, without stammering or stuttering or getting the nuance wrong and unwittingly digging himself into a hole or making everything worse than it already is. Maybe he’ll put something in the book? Dedicating a book to someone is always a nice touch, something that tends to move people. But you can’t dedicate a novel to your co-author; that’s just weird. In the acknowledgements, maybe? That doesn’t feel quite right, either.
Maybe there’s a simpler answer than any of this. Maybe he should express himself in the pages of the novel itself, write an ending that communicates to Jess how much he cares for her, how much he’s learned from her. They haven’t finished the book entirely; there are pages outlined but not yet written. There are more characters and relationships not fully fleshed-out that he could get some mileage out of. He’d have to be careful not to be too obvious, not to be too cheesy – not to harm the book itself in pursuit of reconciliation. But it feels doable.
Okay. Time to get to work.
Chapter Forty-One
Jess
Jess is starting to wonder if coming to this taster class was a mistake. She’s distracted by thoughts of the book’s ending (and, if she’s honest, also by the attractive French teacher). It feels like exactly the wrong time to be starting something new, even if she’s glad to be focussing on something other than her complicated feelings about Alex. She needs to concentrate, and to fight her natural tendency to flit from one task or one hobby to another. Part of her wonders if she is only doing this to escape from having to untangle the knot of The Alex Situation, as she has taken to referring to it in conversations with Lily and in her own internal monologue.
Jess already knows how her learning French is likely to end: she’ll be excited for a few weeks, thrilled to put her first few sentences together, then the real work of learning will start, and she’ll lose interest, and think about taking up cross-stitch or pickleball or the cello. Still, though, escapism aside, it feels important to face what she’s been running from her whole life: that her dad did in fact exist, and part ofher is inextricably linked with him. It feels, maybe, like growth. Like taking her head out of the sand at least a little bit.
She’s been thinking about her conversation with Lily, about her claim that anything worth having requires work, and sometimes that work is inconvenient and painful. Maybe this connection to her dad – to Jess’s own DNA, her own heritage – falls into that category. And besides, thisisjust a taster class. By the time it properly starts later in the year, the bulk of the editing work on the novel will surely –surely? – be done. She’ll have space in her brain and in her timetable for something new. Another reason to stay put, to not go rushing off on adventures – a reason to add to Ivy, and her grandparents, and maybe, if they can figure things out, to Alex.
She forces herself to tune back in. They are going round the class, each person sharing their connection to French, why they’ve chosen to learn it or refresh it at this point in their adult lives. Jess’s heart begins to thump. She has a choice, she knows. She can brush it off with a laugh, as she usually does with difficult things. She thinks about saying,I want to be able to flirt with the hot men when I’m next on holiday, waiting for the others to chuckle, watching the teacher for signs of blushing. She could say,I’m hoping to win the lottery and get a second home on the Riviera. But when it gets to her turn, she surprises herself.
‘My dad was French,’ she says. ‘I never knew him, and I thought it would be nice to have more of a connection to him.’
Jess’s heart is so loud now that she is sure everyone can hear its unsteady rhythm. But nobody else in the room seems unduly concerned: the only response is some sympatheticmmms, and the concerned, furrowed brow of the tutor, which once upon a time (last year, perhaps) might have annoyed her and put her off sharing anything that wasn’t light-hearted ever again. Her ears are ringing, and she can barely hear what others have to say.
Alex, she knows, would be proud of her. He’s on his own journey processing his past, and he knows these small victories shouldn’t be taken for granted. She knows, too, that thinking of him in these seminal life moments, wanting to share even the hard stuff with him, can only mean one thing: that she’s more deeply in love than she realised, and that what they have is worth fighting for.
Lily’s advice was well and good, but Jess is still smarting from Alex’s walking away. And anyway, what is she supposed to do? Really, it’s up to him to contact her. He’s the one who walked away. She doesn’t want to nag, and a text saying,Are you okay?could feel to him like nagging, like she’s saying,Where are you? Have you got over your sulk? Are you ready to discuss this like an adult?Especially because, deep down – or maybe not even that deep down – that is how she actually feels. She could overcompensate with emoji, and hope that covers any buried passive aggression, but she doesn’t trust himto read the right thing between the lines. Especially as she’s not sure what the right thingis, what it is that she actually wants to tell him. Sometimes,Grow up, is what she beams at him telepathically across London. Other times, it’sI love you! Come back to me. But mostly, she just misses him. She misses their creativity bouncing off each other, misses working with him on their book, talking about its characters, which have become so real to her.
She opens the text on her computer, scrolls up and down to her favourite parts: the witty dialogue Alex finally let her include, the new characters she introduced and developed. It’s glaringly obvious, to her, which parts are her writing and which parts are his, but it’s the job of a good editor to smooth that out, and she trusts Nathan to do it well. She’s proud of the work they’ve done together, even in its unfinished, unpolished form.
