How could I tell him that we weren’t going back to being just Kit and Andy after all, that it was all going to get so much harder from here on out?
He’d leave me. He’d leave me, and he’d be right to, because he hadn’t ever agreed to this. No one in their right mind would have.
My chest hurt at the thought of losing Andy so soon after I’d finally been brave enough to tell him how I felt, stomach knotting up so badly it ached.
“I’ll call for tea,” Father said.
“But Andy—”
“Can wait until you’re fit to face him,” Father interrupted, voice gentler than I’d heard it in twenty years. “You won’t do yourself any favors if you run off upset.”
He was right. Of course he was right. I couldn’t explain myself when I could barely bring myself to acknowledge what I’d just learned.
I knew I’d lose Andy over this, but I wanted it to be as amicable a loss as it could be. That meant I had to be as calm as possible when I told him.
Not on the verge of the first panic attack I’d had since college.
A miserable sound scratched at the back of my throat as I stared into the fire, wriggling my toes in my scruffy red trainers to give myself something to focus on instead of the sense of dread looming over me.
Breathe, Kit.
But I didn’t want to breathe. I wanted to weep, I wanted to scream, I wanted to climb out the window and run as far away as I could from all of this.
I wanted to go to Andy and curl up beside him and sob while he petted my hair and promised me that it’d be all right and we’d figure it out. That he didn’t mind moving to London and staying with me, that he was even excited about the idea. That he wouldn’t miss his friends and his life and our cozy little flat full of happy memories of a time before I’d been stupid enough to think I could ever possibly keep him long enough for it to be worth the pain of inevitably losing him.
I’d thought I had moretime.
I was sobbing into my knees by the time Father came back with tea, which I desperately wanted to soothe my throat, but which my stomach warned me might force it to turn itself inside out.
“Oh Kit,” Father said, sitting down beside me on the floor and pulling me into his arms.
I went easily, like I had when I was little and no one but him could make the world right again after some small disaster had befallen me.
This was rather a larger disaster than usual.
“It’s going to be all right,” he said, and I wished I could believe him. “We’re going to make it all right.”
But I wasn’t convinced it’d be all right ever again.
