Chapter 77
77
Daisy couldn’t remember the towpath being so narrow before, but as she made her way towards Theo, she struggled to stay on the thin strip of tarmac and kept stumbling into the hedgerow. It was probably just the nerves making her dizzy, she reasoned. The nerves and perhaps a little bit of the wine, too. But she would be all right once she was aboard the Narrow Escape . She would be fine.
With her hand firmly on the handrail, she crossed over the canal at the lock and promptly hopped onto the Narrow Escape .
‘Theo! Theo!’ She hammered her fist against the door. ‘It’s me, Theo! I need to speak to you, please.’
She paused, straining to hear if there were any footsteps inside, but all her calls were met with silence. She readied her hand and hammered again.
‘Please, Theo, I know I screwed up. I just want to talk to you. Please, please, please listen to me. I’ve messed up. I can let myself in, you know, I’ve got a key.’ She started to rummage in her bag, only to remember she had given Theo his key back, along with all the belongings she’d packed up.
With a slight sigh, Daisy dropped back, rubbing her head momentarily before straightening up and beginning to knock again.
‘I’m not giving up, Theo. I’m not. I won’t stop knocking until you let me in. Can you speak to me, please? I need to speak to you.’
Daisy’s arm was already aching, and her knuckles were red from constantly rapping against the door, yet she couldn’t stop. If she did, he’d think she didn’t care, that she gave up too easily. She wasn’t going to let that happen. ‘I won’t give up, Theo, I won’t. I’ll stay here all night if I have to.’
She paused to catch her breath and was about to start knocking again when a voice spoke to her from behind.
‘If you carry on like that, you’re going to get a noise complaint, and it’s on my boat, so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t.’
Theo was standing a short way away, sunglasses on, Johnny’s lead held limply at his side as the dog wandered freely towards Daisy.
‘Theo, thank God.’ Relief billowed through her. ‘I’m so sorry. I need to talk to you. I have to talk to you.’
Theo didn’t move from where he was standing. ‘So I heard. You look like you’ve had a drink.’
‘Please, Theo, I made a mistake. I made a really horrible mistake. I need you to hear me out. I need you to forgive me. Please, Theo.’
She went to approach him, but something about his posture stopped her. His arms were folded across his chest and his back was so straight, it looked rigid.
‘I think you need to head back home,’ he said. ‘You’ve had far too much to drink.’
‘I haven’t, I haven’t! I mean, I have had a drink, but that doesn’t change what I need to say, Theo. Please, if you’d just listen to me. It wasn’t my fault. I was stupid. I listened to my mother, I?—’
‘Daisy, please. This is getting ridiculous. Go home. I’m not doing this.’
‘But you will, right? You’ll talk to me tomorrow, maybe? Can we talk tomorrow, please? Please?’
‘For crying out loud, Daisy, haven’t you already done enough?’
His raised voice stopped her in her tracks, and she looked up into his eyes as she had thousands of times before, normally just before he kissed her. But there was no hint of romance or love in his gaze. Instead, it was a stony glare that fixed down on her.
‘I can’t keep doing this, Daisy. I can’t do it again. I believed you once. I let myself believe you after all that stuff with Christian?—’
‘Theo, come on. You know there’s never been anybody else but you. That was a mistake, but it’s not like anything happened this time. I just wasn’t sure what I was feeling.’
‘I proposed to you. You said yes. You said yes to spending the rest of your life with me. And then, four days later, you said it was over. I can’t do it, Daisy. I can’t do a lifetime of this – a lifetime of not knowing. Of wondering when you’re going to change your mind again and decide you can’t do it. Like it’s the toss of a coin. I’ll be living on eggshells my entire life.’
‘No, no, you won’t be. I promise it wouldn’t be like that, Theo. It’s you. It’s always been you. You know it has. I just got so overwhelmed and so confused, and I let everybody get into my head. Ending things with you was never what I wanted.’
‘Really? Because you sure as hell made it sound like you did.’
Daisy was trying to respond. There were so many more things she needed to say to him, so many things she needed him to hear, but he just wasn’t listening. Why wasn’t he listening? She opened her mouth to try again, only to realise that wasn’t the problem. Theo was listening. He had heard every word she’d said; he just didn’t care.
‘Go home, Daisy,’ Theo said again. ‘You’ve got what you wanted. This is over for good.’