Chapter 78
TEN DAYS AGO
78
Evie
I gently push the covers off and swivel my legs over the side of our bed. Oliver’s still asleep beside me, facing the other way. We’ve slept like this for years—if we’re actually in the same room—each on the far side of the king-size mattress, clutching the edge of the sheet. I’ve perfected the knack of wrapping it around my leg, almost like a little hammock over the side, keeping me as far from him as possible, while preventing me from falling out.
That’s if Oliver is at home at all. He spends a lot of nights somewhere else. “Work,” apparently. I don’t ask. It’s reached a point where I don’t care. Honestly, if he came home and told me he’d fallen madly in love with a partner at the firm and she was pregnant with triplets, I’d be relieved. This marriage is dead.
I’m dead, with it.
The death knell was when I read that the bioluminescence was back at Jervis Bay.
“Come with me?” I’d begged him. I remembered that enchanted night with Drew and believed that glittery water capable of anything—as if it held some supernatural power to draw people close. Perhaps it could save even us.
He did agree to go, reluctantly, and, as we pulled up the car, I turned to him. “Coming?”
“I can see it from here,” he said. And technically we could see it shimmering and glowing in the distance. He doesn’t like sand. Doesn’t look at the stars. Doesn’t live . “I’ll make a few work calls from the car. Don’t be long, Evie.”
I walked to the water’s edge and dipped my toes in. Thought how different this was. How wrong everything felt. How trapped I’d become. There was so little of me left by that night, I was barely able to mourn for myself. Couldn’t rouse the pity I deeply deserved. Couldn’t even cry.
I grab my silk dressing gown now, then tread down the hall and downstairs into the kitchen. Sunlight is streaming through the bay window I dreamed up with an architect when we built this place years ago. The house is perfect. A dream house. It’s hard to believe something so beautiful can contain an existence this dismal.
Every morning, I psych myself up to ask for a divorce. Every night, as I close my eyes, I kick myself for chickening out. Fictional triplet babies or not, Oliver still seems fixated on me. Or maybe it’s that a divorce would reflect badly on him. My own life has evaporated. I’m a plus-one in his. Constantly charming his clients, smoothing his path, calming his nerves, boosting his spirits, while my own direction is lost—the path so overgrown underfoot I can’t find it.
I flick on the kettle, and it starts rumbling to life while I check my phone. As I scroll through the same mind-numbing wasteland as always, something catches my eye.
It’s a post from the official school account from St. Ag’s. Notification of the death of an ex-student, after a short illness. I remember her. She was in our year.
She was thirty . A vet. Always clever. She volunteered at the animal shelter, as I recall. I can picture her so clearly.
“Too young,” I whisper. “So much life ahead. Several decades.”
So much life ahead. DECADES.
My own future crowds in, swamping me with its awfulness until I gulp for breath and feel like I might die too.
I can’t do this anymore. Not for one single day.
I have a sudden, unbelievable need to talk to Bree. Piece by piece of our friendship broke off every time Oliver couldn’t cope with me going out, or thought I was on the phone too long or was sending too many messages. She got sick of me hanging up and canceling plans and not responding to texts. Even then she agreed to be my bridesmaid, but we fought at the wedding when I wouldn’t let her help me call it off. The obvious choice, in retrospect. But Oliver convinced me afterward that she was the bad, unsupportive friend, and I was better off without her.
I open a message to her. Pippa Marsh died , I type. No “Hello.” No “Long time no hear.” No “Sorry I let my husband ruin everything we ever were to each other.”
As I wait for her to respond, I scroll up and read our last few messages. Before the post-wedding silence, it’s nothing but a string of broken promises and apologies from me. I keep scrolling. The further back I go, the longer my messages get. The less apologetic. Warmer. I’m more focused on life . Talking rubbish about inconsequential but, in retrospect, beautiful things. And I’m grief-stricken for having lost that. Lost Bree.
Not just her. My parents too.
And Drew.
I flick to my messages with him. I have to go a lot further back, but it’s the same pattern. The air that was sucked out of our friendship in the later messages gradually coming to life the further back in time I travel.
Not just the friendship coming to life. Me.
And when the kettle clicks off, steam rising out of the spout, I decide I cannot spend another morning standing here at this bench, watching this kettle boil. Watching my precious life slip through my fingers.
I can’t give another single day to this man.