I seem to spend every day worrying about when the divorce asteroid will hurtle into our marriage’s atmosphere and explode on impact. Surely he’s as unhappy as I am? We come to life only at social events where other people are present, and that’s only because it’s easier to pretend things are okay than to explain ourselves.
My phone pops up with a reminder:Drew’s mum’s anniversary.
I set the annual alert the day after she died, so I’d rememberto message Drew each year, tell him I’m thinking of him and apologize, again, for missing the funeral. He’s ignored me every single time. Obviously, he took my instruction never to contact me again and ran with it. Probably blocked me or hid my messages, so it’s futile reaching out.
A memory of that train wreck of an afternoon barges in. Me standing firm on not taking Oliver back, trying to get to the church to support Drew. Oliver utterly losing it, falling at my feet, and practically begging me to take him back. The classic playbook of short-lived promises:I’ve changed, Evie, I’m working on myself, doing everything I can to deserve you.
I’d stood firm. I left the house and got in my car and started heading for the church, determined to stand beside my friend the way I’d promised. But before I could get there, my phone rang with an unknown number. I shiver even now.
“Are you Evie?” It was some guy—a random jogger. “I’ve got Oliver here.”
“Where?”
“The cliffs at The Gap …”
I made it there in record time and found Oliver prowling the clifftop, eyes wild, searching for me in the gathering crowd. He lurched at me when I got to him, gripped me by the shoulders, forehead pressed against mine, fusing us together in his desperation.
“Give me one last chance, Evie. Promise you will.”
“Let me go, Oliver.” I was terrified he would take me with him, over the edge.
“One chance. Just one.” His voice was strangled as he shook me. And I knew there was no way out. The answer he forced out of me became the promise that locked me to this future.
But even that was not enough.
“Give me your phone,” he said. That’s when he typed that message to Drew about pretending we’d never met. He handed it back. “Send it.”
“It’s his mother’s funeral …”
He held my hand and stepped back, closer to the edge, not even looking behind him. His foot shifted some rocks that tumbled over the edge and smashed at the ground. He was going to kill us both at this rate. “Send it, Evie.”
“I’m begging you, let me send it later?” I felt sick about the timing, after I’d promised to be there for Drew. But I was caught in a hopeless, life-and-death situation with a man I felt responsible for. Wasn’t it me, and my rejection of him, that had caused this? How could I walk away and have his inevitable choice on my conscience?
So I chose Oliver. Again.
And again, and again, and again. At every instance surrendering another piece of myself I could never get back.
The doorbell rings now, and I’m relieved to be dragged out of the memory. I set the coffee mug down. I don’t know what kind of person visits a household unannounced before eight in the morning on a Saturday, and I’m surprised to open the door and find a woman about my age standing there, with a little girl asleep in a stroller.
“Evie?” she begins tentatively. How odd that she knows my name. She looks haggard—way worse than I feel, in jeans and a white T-shirt, gray cardigan and sneakers, simple ponytail sweeping mousy blond hair out of worried brown eyes.
“Yes?”
“I’m so sorry to barge in.” She seems genuinely apologetic and genuinely distressed. “I’m Chloe? An old friend of Oliver’s.” She looks like she’s hoping I’ll know exactly who she is, but Idon’t. “I found you through a mutual friend of his on Facebook and they let me know your address.”
I’ve never heard him mention her before, and we’ve been together since we were sixteen, so you’d think I’d be aware of all the old friends. I shepherd her across the doorstep and into the kitchen, where I can offer her some of the coffee.
“He had a late night,” I explain. “He’s still in bed.”
She nods and checks on the sleeping child in the stroller, whose blond ringlets fall across her face as she sucks her thumb. When Chloe looks back at me, there’s anguish in her eyes. My heart sinks, the way a heart can before a brain catches on. I don’t know what’s going on here, but it involves this little girl, and it’s bad.
“I need to talk to Oliver,” she says, blinking back tears. “I’m so sorry.”
Sorry for what?All this apologizing.
I look back at the little girl, and several things strike me all at once. How pale she is. How blond. How she has dimples in both cheeks—like Oliver—and the same perfectly symmetrical features. All of that, and the fact that there seems to be some sort of catheter sticking out of her chest, covered in surgical tape.
No. No, no.Pieces of a puzzle I wasn’t aware of until this moment seem to descend at once and my mind attempts to assemble it. I think I’m meant to feel enraged. Shouldn’t I bewildwith fury?
