Chapter Twenty-Seven
They were sitting around the kitchen table in the cottage. It was late, and the night felt extra dark to Luna.
For once, her mum hadn’t fretted when they’d turned up at the cottage.
She’d taken one look at them all and wordlessly let them come inside; another person not surprised by the news that Earl had been dying.
Her dad must have told her, Luna supposed.
He’d been asleep on the couch but now he nodded and squeezed Luna’s shoulder as he went towards the bedroom.
Everything was falling apart.
‘He didn’t look like himself. I thought people looked like themselves when they died,’ Mae said. Mae and Zadie had gone to check on Earl, and had found him on the floor of the caravan.
A seizure probably, the on-call doctor had told them after the ambulance left, a result of brain metastases from primary lung cancer.
Emmett, who had barely said a word until now began to mutter, ‘How didn’t I know? I didn’t say goodbye,’ over and over for a while after that, before lapsing into silence again.
Now he sat, staring at the wall. Not drinking the cup of tea that Luna had made him.
She wondered whether it would be better to come clean now. Rip it off like a plaster. Get it over with and admit that she had known, and if she’d just been honest, Emmett would have been able to say goodbye.
‘Luna, are you okay?’ Zadie asked her. Luna wasn’t crying; she thought there’d be more crying. ‘Sorry. Stupid question.’ Zadie had an arm around Mae.
She couldn’t even reply.
‘I wonder why he didn’t tell us,’ Mae said. ‘It’s not like him, to keep a secret. We could have helped him.’
‘It’ll have been because of me.’ Emmett wouldn’t stop walking.
Up and down the little kitchen he went. Never stopping, his fists balled tight at the side of him like he was about to punch something, anything.
‘It’ll be me,’ he said again. ‘He won’t have wanted to upset me and now I’m the reason no one got to say goodbye to him.
I’m the reason he didn’t tell anyone and just dealt with this all on his own for a whole year. I’m so fucking selfish, so selfish.’
‘Mate, it wasn’t you,’ Mae said. ‘You can’t think that.’
‘It was though.’ More walking. ‘It’s obvious. He probably didn’t have treatment so I wouldn’t know how sick he was. He’d be here now, if it wasn’t for me.’ He punched the stone wall and Emmett was swearing and grabbing onto his hand. It was everything that Earl hadn’t wanted to happen.
And Luna knew that she couldn’t let Emmett believe all of these horrible things that he was telling himself. For the first time since Earl died, she found her voice.
‘He was planning to tell you.’
Her words were quiet but their effect in the kitchen was immediate. Everyone stopped talking and waited for her to say more.
‘What do you mean, Luna?’ Emmett asked. A question that sounded like a warning.
Big fat tears rolled down her cheeks now. They dripped off the end of her chin and she didn’t care.
‘He wanted to wait until you’d done your exams and left. He was going to tell you when you’d gone. There was no treatment; there was never anything that they could do. It was because he loved you so much. That’s why he didn’t tell you. He wanted you to be free to go.’
‘Shit,’ Zadie said. ‘You knew?’
Luna nodded.
‘Then fuck, why didn’t you tell me, Luna?’ Emmett asked at the same time that Mae said, ‘How long have you known?’
‘A year,’ she admitted, thinking that it wasn’t quite the same as ripping a plaster off. More like letting all the blood drain out of you, slowly. ‘Earl made me promise that I wouldn’t tell you. You’d have done the same; we’d all have done anything he asked.’
She felt all of them pull back from her. Maybe she’d lose them as well as Earl. Maybe it was what she deserved.
‘I would never have kept something like that from you,’ Emmett said. He was quiet, but somehow that was worse. It’d be easier somehow, Luna thought, if he shouted.
The door to the cottage slammed and in the silence she knew that he was gone.
Zadie and Ahmed too.
It was just her and Mae now, in the kitchen.
‘You stayed,’ Luna said.
‘Earl wouldn’t want this,’ Mae answered, crying too. ‘And anyway, I fucking love you, you idiot. It’d take more than that to get rid of me.’
Luna knew then that Emmett didn’t love her.
He’d never told her that he loved her, and she’d never asked that of him.
She’d promised herself, after their first kiss, never to ask for too much from him and maybe that was as good an indicator as any that her love was fleeting and fragile, like a butterfly with a broken wing. Beautiful but doomed at the same time.
Because Luna wasn’t certain about much, but one thing she had always known to be absolutely true was that Emmett would leave. He’d go, leave her and Northumberland. This, he had told her and now it was come true. Emmett would go and chances were, he’d never, ever come back.