Even after Max’s assault, when he had no longer cared when Eve’s birthday was, Annie had never allowed it to pass without fanfare. She’d always insisted on a special family dinner, and there’d be beautifully wrapped gifts from her and Nigel, as well as from Max himself; no one acknowledging that Annie had bought and wrapped those as well. Max had been in an induced coma on the first of the family birthdays that came around after he was assaulted, but the ones after that had been marked by Annie as if nothing had changed, just as Eve knew Max’s birthday would be this year. He was thirty-three and should have been just a year off qualifying as a surgeon, except now he often needed help with the most basic of tasks, becoming incredibly angry when he couldn’t do something as simple as fastening a button by himself and wrenching it off in fury. Did Annie really believe it was just a matter of time before Max returned to his old self? She was an intelligent woman, but she was also a loving mother, so Eve understood why it might be preferable not to face reality. It was why they were all dressing up to go out for his birthday lunch, at Bocca Felice, a restaurant overlooking the bay in Port Kara.
‘You look so beautiful, Eve.’ It was down to Annie to utter the words that Max would once have said to her without fail when she entered the restaurant, and to envelope her into an embrace that left her smelling of the older woman’s Chanel No.5 perfume.
‘So do you, Annie.’ Eve turned towards Max’s father, who was already seated next to his son, smiling. ‘And you don’t scrub up too badly either, Nigel.’
‘I know, I quite fancied myself when I caught sight of my reflection.’ Nigel winked, but that didn’t stop Max from rolling his eyes.
‘Must be something wrong with your mirror, no one is going to fancy you with that many wrinkles.’
‘Max, don’t be so rude.’ Annie’s face had taken on a pinched look, and she was clearly worried that the shape of the day had already been determined, because it was Max’s mood that would dictate whether or not they were able to have a nice time. He wasn’t the only resident at Oakwood Park who had undergone a change in personality as a result of his head injury. One day, when Eve had gone to visit him, and he’d lashed out at her because her breathing sounded ‘weird’ and he’d shouted at her that she never thought about him or brought him anything nice, she hadn’t been able to hold back the tears. She’d visited after a night shift from hell, without any sleep, because Annie had been at home in bed with the flu and for once wouldn’t be coming in. Eve had been exhausted, but she’d driven ten miles out of her way before even arriving at Oakwood Park. Her first stop had been to the Asian foods supermarket, waiting outside until it opened, to get Max some of the matcha KitKats that had become his favourite on an holiday they’d taken to Japan two years before the assault. There were two types, one coated completely in matcha, and the other a combination of matcha and chocolate. She’d selected the wrong one and it had been enough to set Max off. As she’d stood in the corridor outside his room, one of the other residents, a man called Sammy, who was about the same age as Max, came up and stood next to her. She was furiously wiping away the tears, trying to stem more fromcoming, when Sammy had asked her a question in the gentlest of tones.
‘Do you need a hug?’ All she’d been able to do was nod, because she really did.
‘Everything okay?’ Jeanine, one of the carers had followed Sammy down the corridor, and he’d stepped back, releasing Eve.
‘She just needed a hug, but she feels better now.’ Sammy had smiled then and given them both a salute, as if to indicate his duty was done, before heading further down the corridor and disappearing into his own room.
‘Are you really feeling better, because you don’t look like you are?’ Jeanine had reached out and squeezed her shoulder and the tears that Eve had desperately been trying to stem had begun to flow again.
‘Max just seems to hate me most of the time, he’s so angry and I don’t know what to do to change that.’
‘You can’t do anything because it’s Max who’s changed.’ It had been the first time anyone had been quite so honest about the situation, perhaps because Annie wasn’t there to insist it was dressed up another way. ‘It’s common with head injuries like his to become more irritable and to no longer be able to comply with social norms.’
‘But Sammy’s really sweet, and when I spoke to his mum she said he’d sustained a very similar head injury to Max.’ She hadn’t meant to make the comparison, but she couldn’t help it. If she couldn’t have the old Max back, then why couldn’t he at least be like Sammy?
‘Even if they’d had identical injuries, it wouldn’t mean it affected them in the same way. Sammy’s mother told me he used to be really competitive in his job, even bordering on aggressive, when he was going after something he wanted before his accident. Now, he’s a total sweetheart, but he’s still not the same Sammy he was. The residents here almost alwaysexperience a change in behaviour because of the seriousness of their injuries and, as you know only too well, that can be one of the hardest things for loved ones to deal with. I know it’s a struggle, but Max is so lucky to have so many people who love him unconditionally, especially you and his mum. Not all our residents get regular visitors and Max gets more than anyone else. Don’t be hard on yourself if you find it tough some days, anyone would.’
Jeanine had hugged her then and it should have made Eve feel better, but all it did was bring forth a fresh crop of tears. It wasn’t just the sympathy and understanding, it was the fact that Jeanine’s words had made her feel more trapped than ever, because they seemed to come with the expectation that her visits would never stop, or even reduce. The thought of doing this for the rest of her life, made it feel like there was a hand pressed against her windpipe, with the weight of the world behind it, and suddenly it had seemed almost impossible to breathe. She’d known if she didn’t get out she’d have a full-blown panic attack. So Eve had broken away from Jeanine and run out of Oakwood Park, not stopping until she’d got to her car.
It had taken her forty-five minutes to go back in and try again with Max; to take the photos of the two of them she would need to send to Annie to satisfy his mother that they were coping without her and that her son wasn’t going without visits while she was unwell. If Eve hadn’t done that, her phone would have rung constantly. It was easier just to do her duty and to try and power through, despite the love she’d once had for Max having died, not in one fell swoop, but by a thousand tiny cuts. She hated herself for not being able to love him like she used to, but she couldn’t pretend any more, not even to herself. She did still love him, but it looked nothing like the love they’d once shared. The only pretence she maintained was with Annie, and she hated herself even more for lying to the woman who had done nothingbut show her love, and had been the closest thing she’d had to a mum since she was fourteen years old.
As Eve looked across at Annie now, she could see in the older woman’s face that the changes in Max hurt her every bit as much. She might be desperate to cling to the belief that this was all just temporary, but deep down she must have known that hope was futile. All Annie wanted was a nice family meal to celebrate Max’s birthday and Eve would do whatever it took to make that happen.
‘They’ve got fillet steak on the menu, Max.’ When she spoke, Eve’s voice had a sing-song tone she barely recognised as belonging to her, and she kept her smile in place despite the half-hearted shrug he gave in response. She resisted the urge to reminisce about the night they’d come to this same restaurant – his favourite anywhere in the world he’d told her – to celebrate their engagement, after his proposal at Halfmoon Cove, when they’d been down visiting his parents. He’d had steak that night and they’d drunk champagne and planned a whole life together, one they’d had so much certainty they were going to have that Eve had almost been able to reach out and touch it. Neither of them had known that a nightmare was just around the corner and that was something she was incredibly grateful for, because it remained the most perfect day of her entire life.
‘Well, I’m going to have the fish.’ Nigel was smiling now, too, both of them fighting hard to keep things upbeat. ‘If I can’t stop my face from wrinkling, I can at least feed my brain and stop that from shrivelling up as well!’
He laughed and the idea also seemed to amuse Max, making him join in. For a moment, as she listened to the sound, Eve allowed herself to believe that the old Max was back. It might have been his birthday, but that short-lived moment of make believe was her gift to herself.
After lunch, Annie had suggested that they drive to Port Agnes to take a walk around the harbour there, and Eve had hesitated. It was less than two miles from the restaurant and only three from the hospital, which was on the outskirts of Port Kara, which meant there was a very good chance of her bumping into someone she knew. As she’d admitted to Felix, she kept the part of her life that centred around Max a secret for her own sanity. It was hard enough having to play the role of his fiancée for Annie’s sake, she didn’t want people at work to start asking how he was, or probing deeper into how his head injury had changed things, and maybe even questioning what that meant for their long-term plans. She couldn’t have answered that kind of question, because the one thing she wanted – for life to go back to the way it had been before the assault – was impossible.
But her second choice of walking away, was never going to be an option either. So for now all she could do was keep going and hope that fate, or the universe, or whatever it was that had let off the hand grenade in her life in the first place, would take charge again and map out the course of the rest of her life for her. In the meantime, her job allowed her to play make believe, and pretend that there were as many options for the next phase of her life as people with a valued profession like hers usually had at their fingertips. That’s why her first thought when Annie had suggested going for a walk was to say it was too cold, but then she’d realised they could just as easily have been spotted in the restaurant and that no one seeing them together would assume she was in a relationship with Max anyway. The last time she’d tried to hold his hand he’d shoved it roughly away, andanother tiny piece of her heart had broken off and floated into the distance forever.
Sometimes it felt as though she was the only person in the world experiencing this kind of pain and she’d spent countless hours, in the first year or so after Max’s assault, searching for information about head injuries like his, to try and find grains of hope. That’s when she’d found a Louis Theroux documentary, about a woman who’d sustained a head injury after a horse-riding accident and whose husband had described her as having lost all her ‘squishy bits’; the soft and gentle side of her that had given and received physical and emotional affection. It had felt as though someone was telling hers and Max’s story. It didn’t make his rejection of her hurt any less, but she’d suddenly felt a tiny bit less alone.
‘I’m seriously thinking about getting a boat this summer, you know.’ Nigel made the comment as they approached the harbour. ‘You’d love that wouldn’t you, Max? The feel of the sun on your face and the wind in your hair. We could go fishing again, like we used to.’
‘Fish stink.’ Max wrinkled his nose and Eve could sense his twitchiness beside her. She knew that despite it being a beautiful crisp spring day, with a bright blue sky stretching endlessly above one of the most beautiful villages in the country, that Max wanted to be in his room, on his PlayStation or Xbox, lost in a world where he didn’t have to interact in ways that required him to meet anyone else’s expectations. He’d never been a gamer before the assault, at least not since his early teens according to Annie, but it had become his happy place since he’d moved to Oakwood Park.
‘I think you should get a boat, Nigel. Imagine all the wonderful trips you could take Annie on around this stretch of coastline. I still remember the first boat trip I took when Max brought me down here and I couldn’t believe that turquoise bluewaters like that existed outside of an Instagram filter, let alone in the UK. That first glimpse of Dagger’s Head, rising up out of the water like some kind of mythical sea creature, took my breath away.’
‘Why can’t you just say you thought it was nice, instead of all that flowery crap?’ Max rolled his eyes.
‘Don’t be unkind, Eve is just trying to—’ Before Annie could finish, Nigel cut her off.
‘What Evie should do is write for the Cornish tourist board, or become a sales rep for the one of the boat building firms.’ Nigel blew her a kiss. ‘Either way you’ve sold me on buying one, Evie, I’m going to get a boat for the summer. It’s time to seize the day,carpe diemand all that. It’ll force Annie to take a bit more time to herself, too, if we’re out on the boat together.’
Eve didn’t miss the look of hope in Nigel’s eyes and she knew he must miss the version of Annie his wife had been, before Max’s assault, not to mention the relationship he’d had with his son. They’d all lost so much, but Annie was already shaking her head.
