Chapter 32
NICK
After Andy’s death, as the days had turned to weeks and the weeks into months, we all slowly started to heal.
At least, the girls did, and Amanda, eventually.
But the guilt felt as though it was eating me up from the inside, and apart from my work, I stopped engaging with the world.
I stopped seeing friends, I saw the girls and Amanda less and less often, the pain of knowing what I’d done to them too much to bear.
Eventually, I moved away, to Suffolk, and found a job in another school, far away from everything I’d known before.
Ten years after his death I finally felt strong enough to set up a charity in Andy’s name, to help people who had unexpectedly lost a loved one to access grief counselling, and that kept me busy, but apart from that I led a quiet life, alone. It felt like all I deserved.
And then, Emma’s email had appeared, and it was as though the last twenty years had never happened.
Emma Vickers.
The woman who had made me fall in love with her, then broken my heart.
The woman I had never truly got over. Or forgiven.
I’d shied away from checking up on her, from looking her up online. My grief was too raw and my heart too fragile. It was easier to let the memory of her face fade in my mind with the passing of time.
In a few weak moments more recently I had contemplated knocking on the door of my old house on one of my infrequent visits to see Amanda and the girls.
I’d tried to picture Emma’s reaction, to imagine how it would feel to see her face again; whether she would be pleased to see me, or whether she would simply slam the door in my face.
Would I be pleased to see her, or would I only be able to see the face of the person I blamed for my brother’s death?
In the end, I hadn’t dared to do it. I’d made peace with the fact that she’d never be part of my life again and there was no point in stirring up the hornets’ nest.
But now, here she was, splitting my life apart like an axe through a log, and I couldn’t ignore it any longer.
She wanted to see me, and I had to decide whether to pull that loose thread one last time and risk my whole, safe life unravelling – or leave it alone and live with the knowledge that being here, in my life, was enough.