‘Yes, but it isn’t about him, not really. It’s about me, about how losing him affected me.’
‘Okay. That’s fine?’ It comes out as a question. ‘I don’t see what the issue is here, I mean I don’t know why you didn’t tell me about it but it’s no big deal, Mama.’
‘You have always been a little too naïve for my liking, my darling. Go on, Ava, you tell him what else has been going on, why you’re really here.’
I look from her to him, the venom in her eyes and the expectant disappointment in his. But there’s no use avoiding it; in a few minutes every secret I ever kept from him will be common knowledge.
‘There’s a book.’
‘A book?’
‘Yes, that’s what my loose end is. The blog got bought by a publisher a year ago and I’ve been working on it ever since. She told me I needed to come here because I needed to find some ending to it. She thought that me coming out here would give me some closure and then I was meant to go home and get the thing published and that would be it.’
‘That’s why you came?’ His face falls into a stony stare. ‘Not because you missed this place?’
‘I didn’t want to come.’ The truth slips out now even when it isn’t needed, like I can’t stop it. ‘I had no intention of ever coming back here. I only came because she told me that if I didn’t then there wouldn’t be a book.’
‘But why not tell me?’
‘I was going to, but you made this big speech about how making art about Ettie would be sort of profiting from his death and… I wanted to wait, wait until it was finished and I could show you properly and… then you would see… see that, that isn’t what this is.’
I watch as the memory of the conversation we had in his studio plays through his mind. ‘I—’
‘And I didn’t think it mattered anyway!’ I don’t let him finish, I won’t let anyone say anything until it’s all out there. ‘Because you didn’t matter, not at first… until youdid.’My voice cracks, all of the bravado and confidence evaporating. ‘Until I started to realise that I cared about you, that I do care about you, Florian, but it all got too big.’
Florian softens a little, for a moment it is all salvageable. He’ll ask her to leave, we can talk this through. It’s a harmless lie. No one gets hurt, no one dies, we can put it down to a complication. I have a second chance.
‘How dare he. How fucking dare he.’ Madame Grenaud’s voice cuts across the table. We are both put off guard by the words coming out of her mouth, until I see the open page of the diary and realise that they aren’t her words at all, they’re mine. ‘“How does he get to be alive, him with all his fuck ups and bad decisions, how does he get to live and Ettie doesn’t? He’s selfish, just some selfish drug addict who’s entirely occupied with protecting his own back. Ettie would hate that he’s back here, in our place, living out the life that Ettie should have had.”’
‘Florian…’ I look at him, the pain of those words carving into his skin and through any chance of redemption.
‘I didn’t know that’s how you felt.’
‘I don’t! I wrote that after the first time I ran into you… it’s a diary, it’s just a stream of consciousness.’
Madame Grenaud clears her throat, an almost gleeful look of anticipation on her lips. ‘“I want to wipe the taste of him off my lips, to undo it all. I hate the person I am with him.”’
‘Stop it! You’re twisting it!’ I scream at her, snatching the diary out of her hands and standing there gasping, looking from the woman next to me to the man a few feet away whose softness and adoration have now entirely vanished.
‘You need to go,’ he says flatly.
‘Please, Florian, don’t,’ I sob, all dignity lost.
He steels himself; I watch the hardness wash over him. ‘Get the fuck out of my house.’
Chapter 30
‘Ava?’ A voice breaksthrough the stagnant air of the apartment. Apart from the radio and occasional Instagram reel, I have not heard another voice since I started my self-imposed confinement, two days ago.
‘Ava,’ the voice calls again. For a moment I imagine it’s Florian. I had spent all of Wednesday night and most of yesterday thinking, hoping, praying that he would just launch himself into my apartment and shout at me some more just to tell me that it didn’t matter. That we were worth more than this. I gave up on that dream when midnight hit and my eleventh call and twelfth text remained unanswered. Deciding instead to smoke the last of my cigarettes and drink the rest of the whisky from the other night as a kind of pathetic tribute to what we could have been.
‘Ava?’ the voice calls again and then the bedroom door opens, The American peers around the corner cautiously as if she isn’t quite sure what she might find. ‘Oh, thank God, you’re not dead.’ She sighs, surveys the state of the room and then the state of me. Her face immediately switches from relief to sheer pity.
‘How did you get in?’ I groan, the sleep still sitting heavily on my bones.
‘I have the keys, remember.’ She waves something silver and shiny in front of my face.
‘Doesn’t that break some sort of rental law?’
