Chapter 18
HELENA DIDN’T LEAVE the house for the rest of the week.
She couldn’t. The only person she could have imagined reaching out to was Margery, but she couldn’t even face seeing her.
The shame of it all – the humiliation of being left, the mockery Noah had made of her life, their relationship, it was too awful to bear.
No one came knocking, but that wasn’t unusual, no one normally did.
They had integrated so badly into village life she wouldn’t be surprised if no one noticed Noah and Raffy had even gone.
Besides, it was quiet in the village, lots of people were already away on their summer holidays.
Maybe people assumed the same of them. The only person who came to the house was the postman and there was barely any mail.
The fridge was virtually empty, but she had no appetite.
She hadn’t showered. Her hair was filthy.
She found herself wandering aimlessly from room to room.
She cried more tears than she had ever known possible, trying to figure out where it had all gone so wrong.
Noah hadn’t switched his phone on. She knew this for a fact having checked his WhatsApp religiously – the last seen time remained the same.
She called and called but it went straight to voicemail.
She fired off emails into the ether, no longer even sure if he would ever bother to read them.
There weren’t many people in this world who could cut off such a large part of their life with the callous detachment Noah appeared to be capable of.
It seemed inhumane to be able to act like this.
But even through her disbelief she could see how it might appeal to him.
A clean break, that would be how he’d see it.
Perhaps his twisted heart was incapable of coping any other way.
He could be so far past ‘normal’ when it came to basic human emotion that he hadn’t been able to face telling her the simple truth: that he didn’t want to be with her any longer.
She couldn’t forgive him for it. She knew she never would.
Losing Raffy felt like losing a limb. Her heart spilled over with love for him and the agonising hurt she felt at his loss was devastating.
She felt as though her own child had died.
The knowledge that she may never see him again certainly felt as brutal and insurmountable as his death.
As she sat in a depressed trance on the sofa, drinking wine straight from the bottle, she tried to imagine what a future without them would look like.
She was brought to tears by the possibility that Raffy might forget all about her and the years they had spent together.
He was still so young. And she was as sure as she could be that Noah would not keep her memory alive, in the way he did with Kate’s.
Perhaps she would be forced to wait until he was eighteen to contact him.
Maybe it would take that long before she would see that little face again, the face she knew better than her own.
What if he didn’t even remember her? And how could she possibly wait twelve years?
At the thought a new wave of desolation swept through her, so powerful it sucked the breath from her lungs.
How could she? All she longed for was to wrap his small body in her arms and hold him tight, to smell that delicious smell, uniquely his, to lie next to him on his bed and read him his favourite stories, to talk and talk about school, the world, anything, everything.
Instead, she lay on his bed. She hugged the teddy that Noah had left behind, anything to try and stop that desperate gap from aching so much in her heart.
Despite hating Noah for what he had done, she missed him.
She was so cripplingly lonely in their house, with all his and Raffy’s things mocking her, laughing at her as they watched her fall apart.
Like a piece of knitting that was slowly unravelling, she could feel herself disintegrating at the seams. She thought she might go mad, demented from a grief she had no control over, with no rational explanation for its cause, for a situation that was not only the last thing she wanted but also one she was powerless to stop.