Chapter 2 Rosie
Rosie
I sent her a message and all I got back in response was emojis.
” Rosie stared at her phone, trying hard to keep all her emotions locked inside her.
It was Christmas, her favourite time of the year.
She was wearing her sparkly sweater with her festive skirt and boots and the delicate robin earrings that had been a gift from Becky.
She was going home and it was snowing. Actually snowing.
They were going to have a white Christmas, which was the pinnacle of perfection in her mind.
She should be filled with a feeling of warmth and well-being.
Instead she was sitting in the front of a freezing car struggling with a strange mixture of sadness and numbness.
She felt as if someone had smashed her heart with something heavy.
“Declan?” She turned her head. “Are you listening?”
The back door of the car was open but there was no answer, and she wasn’t sure if that was because he was busy loading the car with their luggage and hadn’t heard her or because he was still too upset with her to indulge in conversation.
All she’d had from him in the last week was monosyllabic answers, and it was torture because she was the sort of person who wanted an instant resolution to any problems. But was there even a resolution to this one?
Divorce?
No, no, no! She was not going to think that way.
There was another blast of cold air and Rosie shivered and pulled her coat around herself.
This was their first Christmas together. They should be loading the car with all their luggage and gifts and feeling festive and generally joyful.
Instead they were barely speaking.
They had to start speaking. They had to talk about it. They couldn’t go home for Christmas with this atmosphere simmering between them.
She’d hurt him. But he’d hurt her too.
They both needed to move on from it, but to do that one of them had to make the first move.
She took a breath and stepped out of the car. “Do you need help?”
His head was down and he was currently trying to jam a large box next to her suitcase.
“Declan?”
His head jerked up. Snow clung to his hair and the shoulders of his jacket. “What?”
She hated this side of him, or maybe it was more accurate to say she struggled with it.
When he was hurt, he vanished inside himself in the same way Becky did.
It was impossible to reach him. It was something she’d only discovered about him fairly recently.
He dealt with his problems silently whereas she dealt with hers out loud.
“Do you need help?”
“Not unless you can do without one of these suitcases. I thought you said you were going to travel light.”
“This is light. I’ve left a lot of stuff behind.”
“Really? Because it feels like you’ve packed everything you own.”
She bristled. “It’s not all mine. Some of it is yours.”
“One bag.” He rested the box on the rest of the packing and winced as he rolled his shoulders. “One small bag is mine.”
“It’s Christmas. It’s hard to pack light at Christmas. What was I supposed to leave behind? The gifts?”
“Normally I go away with just hand luggage and I manage fine.” He picked up the box again. “Unless we can make maximum use of the space, it’s not going to fit. It’s a mathematical challenge.”
“Can I help?”
“No. It’s basically a giant puzzle, and you hate puzzles.
” He stared at the box, then turned it onto its side and slotted it into the single space left.
“The rest is going to have to go on the back seat and we just have to hope it doesn’t block the mirrors.
Get back in the car, Rosie. The weather is arctic.
There’s no sense in both of us freezing. ”
He was telling her she had too much stuff and couldn’t pack a car. Normally she would have laughed and admitted it, but right now it felt like another blow to their increasingly bruised relationship.
She slunk back into the passenger seat feeling useless.
Was there really a right and wrong way to pack a car?
Why did it have to be a puzzle? What was wrong with just loading everything in haphazardly?
That method worked for most people and it had worked perfectly well for her in the past. She was confident that if she’d been doing it, she would have crammed it all in somehow.
And who on earth could go away for Christmas with just hand luggage?
She couldn’t even fit her makeup in a bag the size of the one he’d packed.
But that exchange was further confirmation that Declan’s methodical, ordered approach was completely at odds with her more free and easy style.
They were so different. He changed his passwords regularly and had been horrified to discover that her password was almost always Rosie1.
He’d installed a password manager for her and set up two-factor authentication wherever he could, which all sounded very secure and meant strangers were less likely to access her accounts, but most of the time Rosie couldn’t access them either.
She just wanted her laptop to work—she wasn’t interested in the engineering behind it.
And they were different in the way they handled emotions. She’d never been able to sit with a problem. If something was wrong then she needed to talk it through. It was the way she solved things. And if people didn’t tell her how they were feeling, then her mind filled in the blanks.
Declan was more like Becky. He kept his thoughts inside, tucked away.
It had never bothered either of them before.
If anything, their differences had been part of the attraction.
Being with him calmed her overactive imagination and she liked to think he benefited from her more spontaneous nature.
But today her spontaneous nature seemed to be a source of irritation, along with so many other things.
At what point had those differences become a problem?
No one had told her that marriage would be this hard.
She’d imagined them sailing through the years on the same river of dizzy happiness that had characterized those first blissful months of their relationship.
Everything about him had fascinated her.
Everything about her had fascinated him.
She’d never imagined them reaching a point where they were barely speaking.
Was he regretting marrying her?
Her mind raced forward, spinning worst-case scenarios.
She tried to remember when he’d last said I love you . He didn’t say it that often, but that was because he wasn’t as emotionally open and demonstrative as her. The first time he’d ever said it she felt as if she’d won the lottery.
She tried to put the brakes on her unhelpful thinking.
He hadn’t said he was regretting their marriage, so she was not going to make that assumption.
Like her sister, he didn’t talk about his feelings, whereas Rosie shared every one of her feelings, and although her family teased her about it she couldn’t help thinking that it was easier for everyone in the end.
No one ever had to ask her how she was feeling because she usually told them within minutes of entering a room.
She slumped in her seat as he opened the back door of the car, letting in another blast of freezing air.
How were they going to get through the next week? She was hopeless at hiding things. Her family was going to know something was wrong the moment she walked through the door. She could hardly tell them that her marriage was crumbling after less than a year.
They should have taken more time to get to know each other before getting married, which was another reason she was keen to get home for Christmas.
It seemed as if her brother was about to announce his engagement and she needed to talk to him.
Urgently. She needed to warn him to take his time before fixing a date for the wedding.
She needed to tell him that marriage changed everything and that it was best to go slow and take the time to get to know each other properly.
She was a cautionary tale, although of course she wasn’t going to admit that.
She couldn’t talk to anyone about this, which was an uncomfortable situation to be in.
It would have been nice to have a friendly message from her sister.
She’d called her a few days before, but Becky had been at work and the call had gone to voicemail.
And that was happening more and more frequently.
Becky seemed to feel that now Rosie and Declan were married she should be giving them space and not intruding on these precious early days of their relationship.
She seemed to be imagining Rosie swimming in a sea of pure happiness, and right now nothing could be further from the truth.
One good thing about going home was that she’d finally get to spend quality time with her sister.
She hadn’t heard from Becky since Jamie had sent that message to them all telling them he wanted to have a special celebration party before Christmas because he had something to tell them.
Rosie had immediately messaged her sister.
Do you think he’s engaged?
It had taken a few hours for Becky to respond, and when she did it was brief.
Don’t know.
There had been a time when that sort of message from her brother would have triggered an hour of video chat (admittedly with Rosie doing most of the chatting), but not anymore, and it confirmed what Rosie already knew—that her marriage to Declan had changed everything, not least her relationship with her twin.
There had never been a time when she hadn’t known exactly what was going on in Becky’s life, but she no longer had a clue.
Would she have married Declan if she’d been able to predict the impact on her relationship with her sister?
She was not going to ask herself that question. She had to stop thinking like this.
“Is there room for this in the front?” Declan leaned in through the door and passed her a large tote bag.