‘How?’ she demanded.
‘I want you to think carefully about whether you want to have this argument.’ Every line of my body was taut. ‘Because once I say this to you, it’s not a thing I can unsay.’
For a moment, the night was perfectly still. We were the only two people in a vast, dark universe, the only sound the ragged intake of her breath, the thudding beat of my heart.
‘How?’ she repeated.
I threaded my fingers through her hair again, combing it out of her face. If I was going to do this – if I was going to say these words that would change reality, that would end the companionate comfort of our little life together, one way or another – I wanted to look her in the eye.
‘I will concede,’ I said, ‘that you said a pretty mean thing to your sister. But you’ve spentfifteen yearssaying mean things to me and I have loved you every second of them anyway.’
I took her hand in mine and pressed my lips to her knuckles, just below the rings I’d put on her finger.
‘I’m not telling you this because I expect anything from you,’ I said. ‘I never have. I never will. I certainly don’t deserve anything from you. If you want to walk away from me, I’ll let you go. But I need you to hear me when I tell you that I’m not going to walk away from you. I love you, Sadie – and there is nothing you can say or do that will ever make me want to leave you.’
Chapter TwentySadie
Once, several years ago, when Jonah and I were still PhD candidates, I gave a paper in the ESU student seminar series about declarations of love. Essentially, I was arguing that declarations of love in a romance novel were a major step towards the ultimate eucatastrophe of the happy ending and, when executed well, they made the world’s most overused phrase – ‘I love you’ – feel like it was being said for the first time.
Professor Fisher hadn’t bothered to turn up to this particular seminar (a pleasant surprise) but one of his students – a smug prick named Peter – had. ‘I just don’t think the language ofcatastropheis useful here,’ he’d said. ‘Isn’t the whole point of romance novels that they’re pink and fluffy and nothing bad ever happens?’
I’d opened my mouth to speak, but Jonah got in before me. ‘You’re misunderstanding what a catastrophe is, Peter.’
He was sitting in the second row, tweed-clad arms stretched across the backs of the empty seats on either side of him. ‘It’s not a disaster, it’s a dramatic term. It’s all through the literature on ancient theatre. Four stages: prologue, protasis, epitasis, catastrophe. The catastrophe is the moment when it all hangs on the precipice. If it goes one way, it’s a tragedy, and everyone willprobably die; if it goes the other, it’s a comedy, and everyone will get their happy ending.’
‘If I could answer the question for myself, thank you,’ I said sharply, ‘Peter, there is in fact plenty of rising and falling action in the romance genre. These books are not set in a static world where everything is pink and fluffy and nothing bad ever happens. Eucatastrophe isjoy poignant as grief. The joy cannot be truly felt in a world where the grief isn’t possible.’
‘And the catastrophe is the narrative fork between the joy and the grief.’
‘Fisher, who exactly is giving this seminar paper?’
‘You are, Shaw, of course. But I’m right, though, aren’t I?’
He was right, but I squared my shoulders for a fight – becauseof coursehe’d take me agreeing with him as some kind of victory, and I was not going to let him have it.
The argument we were in the middle of now, though, he had just emphatically won.
‘I love you, Sadie Shaw,’ Jonah said to me, looking me dead in the eyes, one hand twined tight in my hair, ‘and there is nothing you can say or do that will ever make me want to leave you.’
Those words – somehow both words I had heard before and words I hadnever, everheard before – were catastrophic.
Two paths were before me, snaking away into the moonlit darkness.Everyone leaves in the end,whispered the ghost of Chess, a flash of red hair, walking away from me.
But then there was Jonah, arms spread wide, an invitation, an embrace.You think I’m going to leave you? Try and make me.
‘Say it again?’ I asked, my voice croaky from crying. ‘Please?’
‘Sadie,’ he said. ‘I love you.’
I was on the precipice.
I could believe the evidence of thirty-two years. I could run. He would let me.
Or I could believe him.
I could—
I could—
