Chapter 68
68
Holly pulled the crumbled piece of paper out of the envelope. She had taken up the entirety of the front side of the A4, and several lines on the back page too, but it still left almost three-quarters of a side for Giles’s message. Plenty of room for him to scribble down a thorough, heartfelt response. That was what she thought, at least, until she turned the paper over and saw the words he had written.
‘He’s an arse,’ Caroline said. ‘He is. I always said he’d go back to his old ways. People like him can’t change. Not deep down. He’s rotten to the core.’
‘He’s not rotten to the core,’ Holly said. ‘And he’s not gone back to his old ways. He’s just protecting himself, that’s all.’
‘Still, it’s pretty harsh,’ Jamie said.
But it’s true, Holly thought as she stared at the sentence written on the page in front of her.
Sometimes love isn’t enough.
That was it. That was his final say. Love wasn’t enough.
Funny how all the songs and movies said that it was. That love could conquer everything. For so long, Holly had believed that. She’d believed that if or when she found true love again, it would be the final piece she needed to make life perfect. But now she knew the truth. It wasn’t enough.
They shut up the shop and headed upstairs, although Holly wasn’t sure why. She felt perfectly capable of working; she felt strangely okay. Numb, that’s how people would probably describe it. Numb. But that wasn’t a bad thing, was it? It was definitely better than feeling the pain she knew would come if she let it in.
‘Honestly,’ she said, ‘it’s okay. I think it’s for the best.’
‘You’re joking, right?’ Caroline said. ‘This is insane. He’s not going to be happy. We can all see that. The only reason he proposed to her is because he had an accident and some sudden crisis of faith, like he thought if he didn’t get married immediately and have children, his whole life was going to end. That’s the truth of it.’
Holly wasn’t going to defend Giles there. Not when she knew it was the truth.
‘It doesn’t matter why he proposed to her; he did it, and he’s going to see it through. I respect him for that.’
‘You respect him for marrying a woman who’s not the one he loves?’
‘Would you just drop it?’ Holly didn’t mean to snap. She didn’t, but she couldn’t hear this any more. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I just… I need some space, okay? Can you open up the shop again? There are still a couple of hours of trading left.’
She stood up and took her bag from the table.
‘Where are you going?’ Jamie said. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘I’m going to pick up Hope,’ Holly replied. ‘I’m going to remember how amazing my world is, because she’s in it, and then I’m going to move on with my life. It would be great if you guys would let me do that.’