“Mum!” I call out after her, glancing at all the other guests milling around waiting for their taxis. They’re watching her with bemused expressions.
“Come on, Freya!” she cries, holding the rail and dancing down the steps, cheering and whooping as she goes. “The sand is calling out to our toes!”
For fuck’s sake.
This is the sort of scenario that happens in romantic movies, except instead of a handsome man telling me to lose myself and beckoning me down for a spontaneous moonlit walk on the beach, it’s my mother.
I have to follow her, because god knows what will happen if I don’t, and I’ve lost sight of her now. Gritting my teeth, I tensely head over to the steps down to the beach and take off my shoes, my cheeks flushing with embarrassment in the knowledge that we’re being watched by others. The steps are lit, but I need to use my phone’s light to see the ground properly. When I hit the sand of the beach, I look up to see Mum with her feet in the water, hitching up her dress so that the waves swilling round her ankles don’t splash her skirt.
“What are you doing, Mum?” I groan, folding my arms grumpily. “We have to go.”
“Do you remember when we went to the beach in Newquay when you were little and you were scared of the jellyfish?”
“I’m not scared of jellyfish.”
She chuckles. “Someone at school had told you some kind of silly horror story about them and you were asking us all sorts of questions. Was it true jellyfish could grow the size of sharks? Could their sting make you die? You were clearly terrified, so I said that you didn’t have to go in the sea if you were scared of jellyfish. But you just looked up at me, shrugged, and went, ‘I’m not scared.’ You grabbed Adrian’s little hand and the two of you pootled along into the sea. It was so sweet.”
“As much as I love going down memory lane, we should—”
“But it’s all right to be afraid sometimes, Freya,” she says, turning to look at me.
“Afraid of what?”
“Everything.” She shrugs. “The future. Change. Life. Jellyfish.”
I raise my eyes to the sky. “Right. Okay, thanks for the pep talk. Can we go back to the hotel now?”
“It just seems like you’re holding your breath, waiting for him to come back and make everything okay.”
It feels like a punch to my stomach. “Mum.”
“It’s true, isn’t it? You’re too frightened to start a new chapter without him, to step into the unknown.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know that you won’t admit when you’re scared—”
“I’m not scared!”
“—and that you won’t let anyone think you’re anything but fine. But you need to face this head-on, let the emotions rage. You need to accept that you’re walking a different path to the one you initially chose.”
“Mum, stop.”
“You have to let him go.”
I throw my arms up in the air. “That’s it. I’m not doing this. I’m going back.”
“Freya,” she calls as I turn on my heel, “you have to talk about how you’re feeling!”
“Not with you!” I yell back over my shoulder.
“Why not?” she cries, having left the water and now following me across the sand. “Why won’t you let yourself need someone?”
That’s it. That’s the stab. I stop and spin round to face her.
“I did need someone, Mum! I needed you when I was growing up! You weren’t there, though, were you?”
Her eyes fall guiltily. “I admit that I should have made more of an effort to show up for things, and, of course, I’ve never forgiven myself for the time I missed picking you up from your school trip in the Peak District. You completely shut me out after that. If only I’d left on time, and there hadn’t been that awful traffic—”
