Page 108 of If I Could Say Goodbye
Hailey mumbles something about grainy peacocks as I lie on my back and look at the ceiling. I feel Ed smiling below.
‘I wasn’t too shy,’ he answers quietly. ‘I was waiting for you to do it . . . which you did.’
‘I did.’
‘You did it very well as I recall.’
‘You weren’t too bad yourself.’
I close my eyes and remember that night, how soft his lips were when I kissed him, how gentle he was . . . as though he didn’t want to break me.
‘You were so gentle,’ I say quietly.
‘I’d waited a long time. I’d fantasised about that girl standing on the train platform, one arm raised in a right angle behind her head, eyes looking off at something or someone further up the platform, not at me . . . you only glanced in my direction as the doors closed.’
I hear Ed shifting himself onto his back and rolling Oscar onto his side towards the wall. ‘I wonder what you were looking at,’ he muses.
‘Another man,’ I reply, deadpan.
‘He was probably more your type too . . . dark hair, brooding eyes—’
‘Intelligent, mysterious . . . Nah, I was probably looking for Kerry. She was always late.
‘What happened when the doors shut? Did you stare out of the windows like a lost puppy? All sad eyes and palms against the window?’
He laughs quietly. ‘No . . . but I do remember hitting that girl with a door.’
‘You made me see stars.’ I hang my head upside down over the edge of the bed, my hair falling down towards Ed’s smirking face.
‘How else was I going to make an impression?’ He raises his eyebrows.
‘Do you ever wonder how different our lives would have been if you hadn’t decided to buy flowers that day?’ I ask, returning my head to my pillow.
‘Truth?’ he asks.
‘Truth.’
‘I think if it hadn’t been that day, it would have been another day. I think it was fate.’
‘I love you.’ I yawn.
‘I know.’
From nowhere, I think back to the day I had gone for a run, when I met Richard – the man from Hayworth Hill – his words from that conversation so long ago replaying in my mind: ‘I don’t think there was anything I could have done to change my life even if I wanted to,’ he had said.
But what if I don’t want to?
What if I don’t want to change my life? What if I want to keep my sister and my family?
Chapter Seventy-Five
Ed
It’s fucking freezing. I mean cold, like I’ve never ever felt before. I’m not sure if my fingers and toes are still attached, but I look over to where Jen and the kids are beaming from the sleigh, and I don’t care about the fact that beneath my clothes my extremities could very well be perishing. Christ, I hope Jen isn’t expecting me to perform later; I doubt she’ll be able to find my boy beneath all these layers, and even if she does, I suspect he may be hunkering away, shying from the cold.
‘Come on, Daddy!’ Hailey shouts, her cheeks red, her eyes bright behind her glasses. Oscar is fidgeting with his scarf and puffing out steam through his nostrils.
‘I’m coming!’ I jog/stomp my way over to them through the snow. I’m not sure my knees will ever recover from this trip.
