Guildford, Four Months Earlier #2
Oliver had these moments, too. They talked about them sometimes, on his better days.
It was this that kept her coming back—the fact that he understood.
And perhaps the guilt, too. The knowledge that some deep, awful part of herself had wished for a moment that he’d died on that hillside.
That when it came to the fork in the road, the sliding doors moment, she’d wanted the universe to choose Fearne.
“Do you know,” Oliver said one day, as they lay facing each other in his bed, “we haven’t kissed? Since Fearne died?”
The room was filthy. Charlie cleaned the house often, but Oliver filled it with mess again: uneaten food, unwashed clothes, unopened post from races he’d entered before Fearne’s death.
Charlie hated being in his house now—hated being with him, sometimes, if she was truly honest with herself.
It was so hard to remember the sexy, understated, self-confident man he had been.
“Oh,” Charlie said. “I…I guess we haven’t.”
“Do you still love me, do you think?” Oliver asked.
His tone was curious rather than pained. After a moment, he took her hand from where it lay on the bed between them.
“It’s OK,” he said.
“I must love you,” Charlie said, and she was shocked to find her eyes filling with tears as she said it.
“I’m so sorry,” Oliver whispered. “Looking after me like this has been hard for you. Of course you’ve fallen out of love with me.”
“Oliver, God, don’t,” she said, beginning to cry. “I do love you.”
“In a way,” he finished for her. “You love me in a way. But not in the way that you loved Berty.”
She shut her eyes tightly, squeezing two tears onto the pillow beneath her.
“You’ve done so much for me,” Oliver said, wiping her tears away. “Especially these last few weeks. But you don’t have to stay with me just because I’m…like this. You can leave, Charlie.”
“I don’t want to leave you,” Charlie said, and she meant it.
True, she didn’t love him with the fiery endlessness with which she had loved Berty. But she did care for him, and she owed him, too. Or was it Fearne she owed? Whoever it was, she felt a deep, cosmic obligation to keep returning to this squalid place.
“Can we stay together like…friends?” she asked, and then cringed at herself. “I just mean that I still want to help you get back on your feet, and talk to you about Fearne, and still see you…”
It occurred to her only as she said this that it might actually be true.
“I want you in my life,” she whispered.
Oliver smiled. A tiny, Oliver smile, the first she’d seen in several weeks.
“Well, I like being in your life, Charlie. So that works.”
—
It did work, sort of. They fell into a routine as Oliver began to recover, a kind of mutually supportive grief.
They would stay up late on his tiny balcony over the A road, drinking toasts and sharing stories of Fearne.
Charlie would go to work the next day and try to turn the shop she’d built with Fearne into something that could exist without her.
But Charlie couldn’t shake Brianna’s words from the night at Fearne’s flat. I wonder if you need a fresh start, Charlie.
When Fearne was alive, they’d sometimes joked that it was Fearne’s world, and everyone else was just living in it.
And in a sense, it had been, for Charlie.
It hadn’t particularly bothered her: she loved Fearne, and was happy to let her best friend lead.
She didn’t mind her days being filled with bikes, and when Fearne’s handsome friend wanted to take her out on a date, she didn’t mind that, either.
But now Fearne was gone, Charlie had been left in a sort of…
ghost life. Even her job was a dream she had shared with Fearne.
She was estranged from her adoptive parents and had no other family, yet; she had nothing to anchor her but an ex-boyfriend who moved through the same ghost town she did.
She woke up one morning with a pounding head, stared across at her bedroom wall and realized she had no idea what she and Oliver had done the previous night.
Had they cooked pasta for dinner? One day was sliding miserably into the next; they were not in the first pit of grief, but wherever they were now was viscous and gloomy, an emotional quagmire.
Charlie reached blindly for her phone and began to doomscroll, as she did every morning, but part of her recoiled as she did it.
She was looking for escapism, presumably, but where was the pleasure in this?
Where was the pleasure in anything, lately?
It was fate, Charlie told herself later. She turned to her usual bookmarked pages—Isle of Ormer property, the Isle of Ormer official site, the community Facebook page—and there it was, advertised in gold letters above an image of the island in its emerald-green splendor.
Are you seeking a different kind of life?
Would you like to join a warm, friendly community on a beautiful, secluded island?
Farm shop manager required at Bramblebay Farm. Apply to Rosie Nicole, Bramblebay Farm, Isle of Ormer.
Charlie could hardly believe how perfect it was.
She handwrote her application. She stretched the truth a little on her CV—Vintage, Please was not quite the resounding success she made it sound—but her cover letter was all truth.
She wrote about how she had been fascinated by the Isle of Ormer for many years.
She wrote about how it was time, at last, to live the dream she had made so many mood boards about.
And she finished her letter by saying that more than anything, she hoped Bramblebay Farm might be her home, the home she’d always longed to find.