Chapter 11
ELEVEN
RORY
I stare at the bottle, and decide I will empty it. I can’t cope with all of the things that are hitting me right now, the kaleidoscope of regrets and anger and, most terrifying of all, hope.
I have lived my adult life hiding from anything that feels as big as all of this, and now it feels like decades’ worth of suppressed emotion are rampaging free inside me.
The dam has broken, and I’m suddenly drowning.
In the space of an hour my whole perspective has been tilted, my world view turned upside down.
I’m sad, mad, and badly in need of anaesthetic. I gulp down more whisky, the tea now long gone. Not even any ice, like a savage. Like the drunken Irishman the villagers wind me up for being.
I keep going over it all, piecing it all together, and can’t come up with any other conclusion than the one I’ve already reached.
Jane was not lying. Those tears were real, that distress was authentic.
It explains the way she reacted when she first saw me – the way she froze.
All these years, we’ve blamed each other.
Hated each other even, because there is indeed a fine line between that and love.
And all these years, we were wrong.
Part of me feels like calling my mother right now, but I hold off.
I’m too upset, and if all goes to plan, will soon be too drunk.
Besides, she’d wipe the floor with me. She’s a tough cookie, my mother.
And my dad… God, he could be a hard man.
Leaving me in the garda cells now seems insignificant.
If they planned everything that happened with me and Jane, then he deliberately let me sit at that train station all night.
He knew where I was, that I was waiting for someone who wouldn’t turn up, and he let me endure that slow torture for all that time.
Knowing him, he’d see it as part of the life lesson.
I drink some more, and slam my mug down on the table.
I hear movement upstairs, the sound of my old plumbing working.
Jane Matthews is in my bathroom. My darling Juliet is under my roof.
The love of my life is here, with me in Bonnie Bay – but she still feels unreal, distant.
We’re both different people now, and it would be madness to think we could pick up where we left off.
Too much damage has been done – we are strangers.
Still, when I hear her footsteps above, I imagine her lying in that bed. Imagine joining her, climbing under the sheets, taking her in my arms… well now. That’s just wrong. I drink more whisky.
If she leaves in the morning, that might be for the best. If she stays, I will have to learn to manage myself.
I told her she could – no idea why, the words just spilled out without me telling them to.
Can I survive a week or so of this torture?
Possibly I will have to spend that entire week black-out drunk, but I can probably manage that.
Anyway, Beth is here too. A chaperone, if we need one. A buffer zone at least. It’ll be fine.
If she stays. Will she stay?
God, I think, pouring more whisky, I hope so.