WALES 2022
LOVE HAD BEEN MY downfall, as it always was. If I’d just left without saying goodbye to Gracie, if I’d stayed hidden away from this obvious place, I might have made it out of Abergavenny before Arden caught me.
I had the heart of a fool, and I never learned.
How many times would fate teach me the same lesson before I listened?
Arden crossed the empty street towards me. All at once, the urge to flee deserted me, as though the fire fuelling a hot-air balloon had been suddenly extinguished. It took every ounce of energy I had left not to fold to the tarmac.
I was never going to make it to Cardiff.
I should have wanted to kill him. I should have thrown my body at him, kicking and screaming, and snapped his fucking neck.
But I didn’t. I burst into tears all over again.
At the sight of me, Arden’s face softened. ‘Oh, my love.’
Despite the fact it was all his fault, all of it, I fell into his arms.
‘I hate you,’ I whispered, face pressed to his thumping chest, voice thick and desperate.
He kissed my forehead, feather-soft. ‘I know.’
‘Please don’t kill me.’ My quiet sobs turned to full-blown hysteria, my whole body shaking and convulsing with the weight of the sadness. ‘I’ll never see Gracie again.’ His knitted jumper was wet through in seconds. ‘I can’t do it. I can’t do it. I’m not strong enough.’
He cupped my chin with his hand and tugged my face gently up. His eyes burned like sapphires. ‘You’re the strongest person I’ve ever known.’
Sniffing, I shook my head ferociously. ‘I’m not.’
He pressed his forehead to mine. ‘Sometimes I think the force of your love could mend the earth.’
‘I don’t need it to mend the earth. I just need it to mend this .’ I curled a hand into a feeble fist and thumped it against the hollow of his shoulder, but there was no real weight behind it.
‘I would give anything in the world for that to happen.’ His voice was almost too even, as though it cost him dearly to keep his emotions in check, but there was a rough undercurrent, a thickness to the words, that gave him away.
‘It’s overwhelming, loving like this,’ I said weakly, my chest aching and aching. ‘My heart feels like an open wound. I don’t understand how everyone just … walks around with the knowledge that everyone they love will soon be dead. I look at my sister, my mum, and it’s all I can see. Inevitable loss. I look at them and I think, I love you so much, and we will one day lose each other forever, and I might die from the pain of it . So I try to pull myself back, to detach, to keep a healthy distance, like you do, but I can’t. I can’t.’
I sniffed back the tears threatening to surge afresh. ‘And part of me believes I’m tempting fate just saying this – if I show the universe how much I love my family, they’ll be taken from me in spite. Maybe that’s all love is, in the end. An endless tempting of fate.’
I sounded mad, I knew I did, but it was flowing out of me, a millennium of love and loss. The constant games we play with ourselves to try to keep our loved ones safe. The thousand tiny bargains we make with the universe every single day.
And yet, what Arden and I shared … it defied all of it. Time and grief and death and separation and renewal. This fundamental human experience, flouted. I had never truly lost Arden; we ran through each other’s lives like stitches through a seam.
But at my outpouring, Arden looked genuinely bewildered.
‘Am I alone?’ I asked, breathless. ‘Does everyone feel like this, and they just don’t talk about it? Or am I certifiably insane?’
‘I honestly don’t know,’ admitted Arden.
‘I wish I could be like you.’
He shook his head. ‘I’m so glad you’re not like me.’
I scoffed, pulling away and wiping my sodden face on my sleeve. ‘Easy for you to say.’
He looked away, teeth gritted. ‘You think it’s easy for me to watch you go through this?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t fucking know, Arden.’ I planted my palms on his chest and pushed back, and this time it cost him some effort to steady his footing. ‘I’ve loved you for longer than most people can even fathom, but still I have no idea what goes through your head.’
As ever, he was silent. Stoic. An oyster I’d been trying to shuck for a millennium.
Then he asked a question that felt like an arrow through my heart: ‘How do you want me to do it?’
How do you want to die?
It was like a physical blow.
I had begged and begged, and it hadn’t mattered. Siberia had been a one-off.
I turned away from him, up to the silhouette of Sugar Loaf. A full moon hung above the peak; a pearlescent marble. A constant, no matter who or where I was.
‘Just make it look like an accident,’ I muttered. ‘My mum can’t think I was killed, or she’d never forgive herself for letting you into our lives.’
‘There’s a cliff edge overlooking the valley,’ he said, so unfeeling that it made me glad he was about to die too. ‘We could jump together. Everyone will think we fell.’
Or that you pushed me.
I didn’t bother voicing the concern. Given the events of the last few days, there was no way anyone would believe our simultaneous deaths were an accident.
A shudder rollicked through me. Falling was a better death than most, but still my mother would have to live with the image of our mangled bodies and shattered bones for the rest of her life.
How long would it take for Mountain Rescue to find us?
I could still run , I thought fleetingly, desperately. But it wouldn’t be fast enough. He had almost a foot on me, and a robust fitness from years of working outdoors.
And besides, where would I even go? Would it be worth living if I never returned to these people I loved? To Mum? To Gracie?
To Arden?
Then again, I had always found a way to live with the grief of the loves I had lost – to carry them inside me like candles that never blew out, until the slow tide of time eventually extinguished the memories.
‘Let’s go,’ said Arden, reaching out a hand.
I didn’t take it.
Slowly, a plan came to me. Not a plan to survive, but a plan to find peace at last.
Squaring my shoulders, I replied, ‘I can make this easy, or I can make this difficult. I can come willingly. Or I can make you tackle me to the ground and risk attracting attention.’
A bemused beat. ‘There’s no one around.’
I shrugged. ‘Maybe not out here. But I’m pretty sure I can outpace you the hundred yards it takes to get back inside the hospital.’
A bluff, and he knew it. But he also knew that I ran on pure blind hope, and you could never underestimate just how far that took you.
He pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘Why are you like this?’
‘I think it’s fair to say, at this point, that you’ve had a decent hand in forging me.’
He looked at me, through me, down to my very bones. Either the fight had gone out of him, as it had me, or his love for me was entirely overriding his good sense. ‘Fine. What are your terms?’
‘I want to know why,’ I said, chin tilted upwards, meeting his impenetrable gaze. ‘Not here. Not now. But when we get up to that cliff, and we’re looking down over the valley, and we’re contemplating our lives and our deaths, I want to know why.’
He ran a hand over his face. His perfect, infuriating face. ‘It will hurt you.’
‘At this point, it’ll hurt me more not to know.’ A flipped mirror of what he’d said to me in Siberia.
He laughed bitterly. ‘I don’t think that’s possible.’
‘I don’t care, Arden. If we’re going to do this over and over again, if we’re going to defy time and fate and death together – if we’re going to keep falling for each other – then I need equal power. And right now, you hold it all.’
Fear was etched into his very outline now. The kind of fear I so rarely saw on him. ‘This is not power, Evelyn.’
‘It’ll be so much easier for you if we don’t have to fight every time.’ My voice was filled with heat and longing and loathing and, impossibly, love. ‘This is just existentially exhausting. I know you feel it too. And if I understand why you do it … and if it’s as good a reason as you say it is –’
‘It is,’ he replied fiercely. ‘It’s an unstoppable force, and our love is an immovable object.’
And I trusted him more fully than I ever had.
Sheets of white hair, curling black nails. Bone world, falling ash. Pain, pleading.
This has gone on long enough.
The full picture had eluded me for centuries. It was time to lift the veil. I knew it, and Arden did too.
‘Okay.’ I nodded. ‘Then, I’ll work with you. We can jump from cliffs together in every life, when the time comes. And it’ll still hurt, but not like this.’
A long, pulsing quiet. There was an almost-sentience to the silent air between us.
‘I do hate that I’ve forced you into such sequacity.’
‘Go on, enlighten me. What does that mean?’
He sighed exaggeratedly. ‘Honestly, why does language sift through your brain like flour through a sieve? You retain only the words you absolutely need, and everything else –’
‘Arden,’ I snapped.
Then, finally, defeatedly, his shoulders slumped.
‘All right.’
‘All right?’ I asked, disbelieving, my blood thundering in my ears.
I was about to have a thousand years of questions answered.
‘I’ll tell you,’ he whispered, and he looked younger than I’d ever seen him. Innocent and afraid and so unsure, a millennium of conviction crumbling to the earth. ‘I’ll tell you everything.’