Chapter 12
‘…She is very ill indeed, and suffers a vast deal…’
My beautiful, gorgeous Jamie was dead. A car crash in Marbella. By the time the ambulance had arrived, it was already too late.
My whole world collapsed in on itself. Our golden, sun-drenched future had been obliterated in an instant. Gone.
He’d been driving alone. Something about speeding. No drugs or alcohol. Just anger, a sharp bend in the road, and a concrete wall that didn’t move.
I didn’t understand. Not really. Not until Lily called me the night before the funeral.
We hadn’t spoken properly in weeks. Everything had been swallowed up by grief and logistics, too many people hovering and passing along vague, sanitised versions of events.
Everyone seemed determined to protect me from something, though I couldn’t work out what, and in doing so they left me stranded in a fog of half-knowledge and unanswered questions.
But that night, her voice cracked down the line. ‘I need to tell you what happened, Florrie. Before tomorrow. Before you’re standing next to her.’
Lily’s meaning was clear. Her meant her mother, Juliet Stonehill.
‘Go on,’ I said, heart thudding.
‘We were at the villa,’ Lily said, her voice shaking. ‘Dinner had finished. I’d gone to bed but I could still hear them downstairs. Your name came up. Jamie told her he was going to marry you.’
My throat tightened.
‘And she lost it,’ Lily continued. ‘Properly lost it. Said you were a phase, that he was ruining his future. That it was all too soon. And he would be cut off.’
I closed my eyes. I could picture it too easily. Juliet, in one of her silk kaftans, sipping some red wine, cutting Jamie down.
‘I came downstairs,’ Lily said, ‘just as he stormed out. She tried to stop him, but he was livid. Said he didn’t want the money, didn’t care about her approval, he just wanted you. Then he got in the car.’
I was silent.
Lily was crying now. ‘I should’ve stopped him. But he was already reversing. Headlights swinging out onto the drive, music on full blast. I didn’t think… I didn’t know.’
I was perched on the edge of the kitchen worktop, knuckles white around the phone. Waves of rage and grief came rolling through me. I realised I was shaking.
‘So now you know,’ Lily whispered. ‘He died because she couldn’t keep her bloody mouth shut. I’m so sorry.’
The line went dead.
I stared at the ceiling, my whole body now pulsing with rage. Not only had Juliet tried to poison his love for me, she’d made his last moments on this earth full of pain and anger. I barely slept.
The funeral was a blur of shattered pieces.
Dom helping carry the polished oak coffin.
Sebastian’s eulogy collapsing midway as he wept at the pulpit.
The endless line of black-clad mourners snaking through the frost-covered graveyard.
The hollow thud of earth on the casket. Faces from the party crowd stood scattered among the mourners – Toby, Luke, others I barely recognised in daylight – all suddenly quiet, stripped of their carefree confidence.
Jamie, six feet deep in the family plot, silenced forever.
I stood stiff beside my parents, numb with grief and disbelief.
At the country house hotel afterwards, people approached with their sympathetic smiles and platitudes. I couldn’t look at Juliet. I couldn’t trust myself not to scream in her face. She moved through the crowd, dabbing her eyes with a linen handkerchief, leaving a trail of cloying perfume.
Lily found me in a corner and pressed Jamie’s signet ring into my hand. ‘What will we do without him?’ she whispered.
Before I could answer, she turned abruptly and walked out onto the terrace, into the cold air, as though the walls inside could no longer contain her grief.
I clutched the ring so hard it left an imprint in my palm.
And then it was over, and Jamie was still gone.
The return home was silent. Alice sat beside me, her arm wrapped tightly around my shoulders as though she thought I might break if she let go.
When we reached the house, all the lights were on, softly glowing in the twilight. No one said a word as we passed through the kitchen. Alice opened the fridge, took out a bottle of white wine, and nodded towards the stairs.
We were back in my attic room, with its sloping ceiling and rain-tapped window that had borne witness to us making our Darcy List only a few years before, when our greatest worry had been whether a man could both gallop and brood convincingly.
Now the room felt smaller. I kicked off my shoes and climbed into bed.
Alice shut the door with her foot, sat beside me, and filled our glasses to the brim. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Tell me everything you haven’t told anyone.’
I stared at the glass in my hand. The cold from the wine seemed to travel straight into the gold band of Jamie’s signet ring on my finger.
The metal felt shockingly chill. I turned the ring with my thumb so the tiny crest caught the light from my bedside lamp.
It had always looked so certain on his hand – inherited, belonging.
On mine – the Stonehill interloper – it sat loose.
Too big, too certain of a history that wasn’t mine.
The cold deepened, settling there between glass and gold.
I held both tighter.
‘He asked me,’ I said.
Alice didn’t move. ‘Asked you what?’
‘To marry him.’
The words felt fragile, like thin glass.
There was a pause. Then, very quietly: ‘When?’
‘In London. In the taxi. On the way to Lily’s party.’
Alice’s head snapped round. ‘And you didn’t tell me?’
I swallowed. ‘He wanted to tell Juliet first. He said it mattered. I promised I’d keep it quiet until he had.’
Her eyes flashed. ‘Florence.’
I could feel the tears rising again, hot and relentless. ‘I couldn’t tell anyone. Not before. And afterwards…’ My voice faltered. ‘Afterwards I couldn’t say it out loud. If I’d said it out loud, it would have made it real. And if it was real, then he was really gone.’
Alice stared at me as if I’d just confessed to a crime. ‘And Juliet?’
I hesitated. The room seemed to contract. ‘Lily called me,’ I said. ‘Last night.’
Alice stiffened.
‘She said she’d gone upstairs to bed. Then she heard Jamie and their mum arguing down below. He told Juliet he was going to marry me. And she lost it. Said I was a phase, that he was ruining his future. That it was all too soon and he would be cut off.’
Alice’s face drained of colour. ‘She said that?’
I nodded. ‘Lily said he was furious. He stormed out. Said he didn’t care about money, that he just wanted to be with me. Then he got in the car.’ The words felt like stones in my mouth.
Alice sat up straight. ‘So he drove off like that. Because of her?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said quickly, even though I did. ‘There was a bend. He was angry.’
Alice’s jaw tightened. ‘She said no? She said no to him marrying you? What a stuck-up bitch. What a cow. She literally drove him to his death.’
The words lingered in the air, heavy, and I wanted to believe her.
‘I wouldn’t have got through the funeral if I’d shared what had really happened. I had to keep it inside. If I’d opened it up, it would have swallowed me.’
There was a long silence between us, thick with everything unsaid.
Finally Alice exhaled sharply. ‘I cannot believe she actually told him you weren’t suitable.’ The word landed between us.
Alice reached out and took my hand, her thumb brushing over the signet ring.
‘And you,’ she said, ‘were never a phase.’
I stared into my glass. A tear drop fell into the wine and vanished instantly. If only I could disappear like that. ‘I keep thinking. If she’d said one kind thing. Just one.’
Alice’s voice softened. ‘You can’t go down that way of thinking.’
‘But I can’t stop replaying it.’
She shifted and lay down beside me, head at the foot of the bed, the way we used to when we were girls, when secrets felt thrilling instead of catastrophic.
‘I’m furious with her. Bloody furious.’
‘I don’t want to hate her,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to carry that as well.’
‘Then don’t,’ Alice replied. ‘Jamie being gone is more than enough to bear.’
I didn’t answer.
Jamie, with his charm and magnetism, could make a room tilt towards him without trying.
He had a way of looking at me that made the rest of the world recede.
And he was brave in the small ways that counted – standing up for Lily when she spiralled, challenging his father when it mattered, telling his mother he would marry me whether she approved or not.
That was the thing. He had chosen.
And now he was gone. A sharp bend in the road. A wall that would not move.
The finality of it was what undid me. He would never see thirty. Or forty. He would never grow old.
We finished the bottle. At some point I lay fully back against the pillows. Alice reached over and switched off the lamp. The room sank into darkness.
In the dark, the ring felt heavier.
‘I’m so sorry, Flo,’ she whispered.
And finally, I let myself cry properly, for the simple, unbearable fact that the boy who had asked me to marry him would never ask me anything again.