Chapter 15
Rachel
I am home from my work trip. Josh has cooked, and we sit at our little kitchen table to eat steaming bowlfuls of linguine and clams. I have changed into joggers and an oversized hoodie – both Josh’s – my hair loose around my shoulders.
I love the feeling of being intentionally unkempt at home, after all the stiff shirts and high heels and hairspray I am obliged to wear for work.
‘Sorelli’s has shut down,’ Josh says, after a while.
Our beloved first date restaurant. ‘I saw. Sad, isn’t it?’
He nods. ‘Feels weirdly emotional every time I walk past it.’
‘Slow-cooked ragù till we die.’ I smile at him, twirling pasta on to my fork.
He smiles back, but it feels oddly off-kilter, the atmosphere between us strange. Like snowfall in the middle of summer.
Shadows have begun to wrap the room. The water pipes are winding down for the night, clunking and knocking beneath the floorboards. I scrunch my toes, feeling their warmth through my feet.
I notice his battered copy of Finnegans Wake upturned on the countertop.
A sure sign that he’s been attempting to take his mind off something.
He’s been trying to get through it for the past two years, his go-to book when he needs to distract his brain, because he says he has to concentrate like fuck just to make a single paragraph of progress.
Usually, odd as it sounds, I quite like to see that book lying around.
Because it almost always results in some creative brilliance, whether literary or culinary. Often both.
‘Is it writer’s block?’
‘Sorry?’
I nod over at the countertop. ‘James Joyce has made a reappearance.’ I reach across the table and take his hand.
‘Please talk to me.’ I sometimes have to remind him to do this, when he gets lost in his own head, the thoughts fast and cold as a hurricane, the kind of mental weather that steals your breath.
‘Rach. There’s something I haven’t told you.’
His voice is so abruptly gruff that I stop eating.
‘God, this is hard.’
Between my ears, my pulse begins to roar.
They are surreal, these suspended seconds before he speaks again.
‘Just tell me,’ I whisper.
He steps off the cliff, and I go with him.
‘I took that pill.’
I stare at him, and my mouth opens, but no words come out.
Freefall.