Chapter 32
ALICE
The air cools around my shoulders as the sun almost sets.
My skin is tight, my eyes stinging against the lilacs and sherbet orange of the sky.
A few groups of people remain. The summer solstice is a celebration; music is playing, and the opening hours extended.
Picnic blankets are laid out, and eerie Celtic music echoes through speakers from the visitors’ centre.
He’s not coming. I know that now.
I turn to the sea, the reflection like a pathway.
When I was a kid, we had scattered my gran’s ashes on a beach.
Mum told me that the light reflected in the sunset is the path to heaven.
That when you died, you could walk on water, and at the end there would be your loved ones waiting for you.
I take a breath. I’ll wait until the sun sets.
I’ve been here this long, so what’s another thirty minutes?
I wrap my arms around my knees.
What now? Without the end to the story, I have no story. No way back to my old life.
I’m lost in my thoughts when there’s a tug.
The same kind of magnetic pull that I would feel when Ryan was across the room.
I turn slowly, scanning the clutches of people standing and talking, then beneath the shadow of an archway, a figure takes slow steps towards me.
Time slows. My wild heart tripping. It’s him: dark hair, casual walk, shadows falling over his features. I blink, reality folding in on itself.
Spence?
I shake my head. I’ve been in the sun too long.
‘Hey,’ he says as he approaches. I lick the bite of the salty air from my lips. A pop of a cork goes off, but I barely register it.
I frown, words clustering at the back of my throat that won’t come out.
‘Al…’ Spence’s voice is soft, his face pained.
‘What?’ My voice cracks, my throat dry. ‘What’s wrong?’
He takes my hand in his, I look down to the way his thumb is running over mine.
‘He’s not coming.’
I exhale with a small nod. Deep down I knew.
‘Michael died. In eighty-five.’
I try to process the words. I shouldn’t feel like the ground has fallen from beneath my feet.
It’s not like I hadn’t thought this was a possibility but 1985?
All of his hopes, the person he wanted to be, all vanish.
Gone. His family. Oh God, his family. They lost him before…
before he even had chance to really live.
‘How?’ The word comes out like a croak, barely a word at all.
‘Car accident.’
‘When?’
Spence pauses. Gestures to the ground. I fold myself, Spence sitting next to me, his hand in mine again. ‘He was… on his way here.’
My hand covers my mouth. ‘No. No, he came every year, he…’ I look around, the laughter too loud, and yet far away.
I’m hit then, not just with the loss of Michael, or the pain his family must have gone through, Kate, Carl, all of them…
but there is something else. I’m selfishly grieving the world I’ve carefully, ridiculously, constructed around me these past few months.
I can feel it cracking, this wall that I have built brick by brick with every piece of research, with every eighties movie, with every song I’ve danced and cried to.
Spence wipes a tear away from my face, gentle, barely a touch at all. ‘I’m so sorry, Al.’ He looks like he’s trying to carry this news for me.
Something cracks inside my chest. I shake my head, the letters, his words, his hair blowing in the breeze, that small smile beneath black hair.
Spence pulls me against his chest, my head fitting neatly beneath his chin.
My fingers clutching the fabric of his shirt like it can stop me from falling over the cliff edge.
I’ve lost the future I’d been living for.