Chapter Thirty Seven
Sleep took so long coming I almost gave up on it. I’d battled so restlessly with the duvet that even Fletcher had eventually decided the floor was a better place to spend the night. By the light of the moon, through the bedroom shutters I hadn’t properly closed, I saw practically every hour on the clock face click over to its neighbour.
I wondered if somewhere in his Airbnb Josh was also lying awake, staring at the same moon and replaying our conversation over and over in his head, the way I was doing.
After our third circuit of the lake, our feet had strayed from the path and led us into the thicket of trees beside it. This time. when Josh took my hand, I knew it wasn’t because the terrain was uneven. I looked up at him in the moonlight filtering through the branches like delicate filigree silver. In that moment I felt safer than I’d done in a very long time. I didn’t want to compare it to the way Adam had made me feel, because that was different. It always would be. But it felt like I was stepping on to a boat that was sailing gently away from the shore. I could imagine Adam standing on the pier, watching me go and giving that gentle smile that belonged to no one else but me.
‘Just so you know, I had this whole speech worked out to give you,’ Josh said.
The shadows hid my smile. I’d known it, but only because I knew him, better than even he realised. My life had tangled itself with Josh Metcalf’s in my formative teenage years and, despite the passage of time and all that had happened in our friendship, I’d never managed to unwind my past from his.
‘Was it a good speech?’
‘I was quite proud of it,’ he said with a nod.
‘Go on then. I’m all ears.’
Josh shook his head. ‘Now that you’re here, I realise I don’t need a rehearsed declaration, because . . .’ He gave a small shrug. ‘. . . because it’s you. And it’s me. It’s always been you and me, Lily.’
‘Except when it wasn’t,’ I quietly reminded him, in case the fact that I’d spent five years happily married and deeply in love with another man had somehow slipped his mind.
Josh’s smile was gentle. ‘That’s true.’ The fingers that were linked loosely through mine tightened a little. ‘I know Adam is always going to be here. And that’s okay, because he’s part of you . . . and there isn’t a single part of you that I would ever want to change.’
My steps slowed so I could see his face, searching for the doubts that had always been there, but tonight I couldn’t find any trace of them.
‘I knew I was getting it all wrong as I watched you drive out of the clearing seven months ago. I knew I was making yet another stupid mistake sending you away to find someone else, when even the thought of you in another man’s arms sliced me to shreds. I ran after your car as soon as it disappeared out of sight.’
‘You did?’ I couldn’t hide my surprise.
He nodded. ‘And then I ran back to fetch my car keys. I got as far as the edge of the dirt track before good sense kicked in. I told myself I was doing the right thing in letting you leave. You wanted a life I couldn’t give you, a life I had no experience of. A life you’d already known with a man who’d loved you so much he couldn’t bear the idea of you being left alone after he was gone. It takes a big man to admit he was wrong and then try to put things right the way Adam did.’
He gave a small, almost reluctant laugh. ‘I liked Adam. I really did. I mean, for a great many years I wanted to kill him in the worst way possible . . . but I liked him. He was a good guy. He didn’t deserve what happened to him, but he did deserve you. And as I sat there in my car, on the edge of chasing after you, I realised that I still didn’t. If I loved you, if I’d ever really loved you, I needed to set you free to find someone better. Someone not so damaged.’
He looked down at me and shook his head, almost as though he was disappointed in me.
‘You were meant to have found someone else by now. You were meant to be halfway in love with a new man who could give you the world.’
‘It was never going to happen that way, Josh. I knew that even when I was leaving your forest. Most people – if they’re lucky – get to have one amazing love story in their life. I’ve already had two. More than that would just be greedy.’
‘Do you understand why I’ve not been in touch with you for all these months, Lily?’
‘I do,’ I said. It sounded like the vow I’d made to another man a very long time ago.
‘But I’ve been doing a lot of thinking since February and a hell of a lot of kicking myself for being the biggest fool of all time.’
He looked at me then, as though waiting for me to contradict him.
‘You’ll get no argument from me,’ I said.
‘Anyway, what I realised was that all the things I didn’t know how to do, all the things I was afraid of feeling, weren’t nearly as terrifying as the thought of not trying to make this thing between us work. I know we have a lot to figure out. There’s a lot of baggage – mostly mine – that needs to be unpacked. And I’m still scared there are things you want – that you have every right to expect – that I won’t be able to give you.’
‘You’re talking about a baby?’ I said, my voice trembling with the weight of the secret he still knew nothing about. He nodded, and a spasm of pain passed over his features.
‘Maybe it’s too much to ask of anyone, but I had to let you know how I feel . . .’ He gave the crooked smile that I’d fallen in love with decades earlier. ‘How I’ve always felt.’
He didn’t want me to give him an answer straight away, which was just as well because my head and my heart were both in turmoil.
‘I’ve had months to get to this point, it’s only fair you take as long as you need to decide if we’re worth taking one last risk on.’ He reached out and grasped my hands in his. ‘And if you do, we can take things really slowly, get to know each other all over again and see if maybe teenage Josh and Lily were right all along. That we really are meant to be together.’
I’d fallen asleep as dawn was creeping slowly through the shutters, still counting all the times I should have leapt in and told Josh about the fertility clinic and the plans I’d already set in motion. But like an actor with terminal stage fright, I’d missed every single cue.
I’d woken early, with a pounding headache and a new resolve. I would tell him everything this morning when I met him for breakfast at his rental accommodation.
‘I’ll bring croissants,’ I had told him last night.
We were parked by the pavement, outside the mansion-house flats, in the shadows of the life I’d lived before. I hadn’t invited Josh inside, and I knew he hadn’t expected me to. This was still Adam’s home.
But his Airbnb was neutral territory, and I was honest enough to admit that the thought of seeing him in less than ten hours did strange things to my heart rate. And that was even before he kissed me.
With a thoughtfulness and respect that melted my heart, he looked towards my home as his hand gently cupped the back of my neck. He was drawing me slowly closer, giving me all the time in the world to pull away. ‘Is this okay?’ he asked, his voice low in the dimly lit car. ‘Being here? Doing this?’
I nodded.
‘Thank God,’ he murmured, his thumb lightly brushing against my lower lip, ‘because I’ve been dying to kiss you since the moment you walked into the restaurant this evening.’
I swung my legs out of bed, carefully tiptoeing over a softly snoring Fletcher, and padded barefoot into the kitchen. Working largely on autopilot, I set the coffee to brew, my thoughts still caught between everything we’d said the previous night, and all I still had to tell him. Perhaps I ought to write a speech too, I thought with a wry smile as I made my way into the bathroom to brush my teeth.
I winced as I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror-fronted cabinet. Hiding the twin panda rings beneath my eyes was going to require skill and some industrial-strength concealer.
‘Moisturiser,’ I murmured as I reached into the cabinet for my favourite brand, and then flinched as something from the top shelf tumbled out of the cupboard and fell with a clatter into the sink. I stared down at the oblong box for several moments before plucking it up. With almost comedic incredulity, I glanced up and down at the shelf several times, knowing I hadn’t disturbed anything on it.
And yet, somehow, in my hands was an unopened pregnancy test. I’d kept the others in a drawer beneath the basin and couldn’t remember moving one rogue box into the cabinet, nor fathom how it had ended up falling into the basin.
I turned the kit over in my hands with the curiosity of an archaeologist on an excavation dig. I didn’t need to check the calendar to confirm that, following yesterday’s negative test, my period was now due. Overdue , corrected a pedantic voice in my head.
Day 14 following the IUI had been and gone, and after learning ten times over that I was Not Pregnant , the idea that I might be was too huge for my sleep-deprived brain to cope with.
Take the test.
Stress could make you late. I knew that. It had happened to me frequently during Adam’s illness.
But you’re not stressed now. Take the test.
‘I am most definitely stressed,’ I told my reflection, who was now looking even peakier than it had done just a few minutes earlier.
‘Fine,’ I said to no one except the insistent voice in my head. ‘I’ll take the test. But I can tell you now, it’s going to be negative, just like all the others have been.’
I didn’t need to read the instructions – I could have recited them verbatim if asked. And yet I studied them again as though revising for an exam during those excruciating one hundred and twenty seconds for the result to appear in the window.
Like the tests I’d taken before, I set the stick face-down on the edge of the bath, and when my phone’s two-minute timer pinged that it was time to reveal the answer, my hands were shaking in a way they hadn’t done on any of the previous mornings.
I blinked as I read the single word that had appeared in the window, staring intently as I waited for the expected Not to proceed it. But it never materialised.
I sat down on the edge of the bath, because all at once my legs were incapable of keeping me upright. There was now a second test from the box that was sitting beside the first. They both said exactly the same thing: Pregnant .
The odds had always been so incredibly slight that this first unassisted attempt at IUI would succeed, it had never actually felt real. Until now.
‘We did it, babe,’ I whispered to Adam, hoping that wherever he was he was smiling, because this was what we’d wanted – what I still wanted, I told myself, surprised to find tears were rolling down my cheeks and splashing silently on the two positive tests.
‘This is good news. Wonderful news,’ I said out loud, because it was, it really was.
So why, instead of Adam’s voice in my head, could I hear only the words spoken by another man.
‘Adam realised the only thing that would ever make me walk away was knowing you were having his baby.’