Page 36 of The Truth About You and Me
‘To hope.’
We sit quietly, his eyes focused on the inside of the shop, mine focused on him.
‘Maybe I can help?’ He draws his eyes back to me. ‘If we talk about it some more, we might be able to get your memories back and then maybe you won’t feel that pain, maybe it won’t be so hard to try to read?’
He shakes his head. ‘I’ve tried. That’s all I remember.’
I lean in a touch. ‘Humour me?’ I encourage. ‘What was he wearing?’
Jack takes a bite and chews thoughtfully.
‘Black. All black.’
‘Like a leather jacket?’
‘Yeah. Maybe.’
I try to keep my composure. I try not to let my body react.
‘There is one thing… I think he might have had a scar on his eyebrow.’ He shakes his head as though trying to discount his own memories.
‘Here?’ I point to where the ‘scar’ was while knowing he shaved it in on purpose.
‘Yeah? How did you know that?’
My thoughts go back to that night. We’d gone for a walk after Luke had cooked me dinner. I had been thinking how kind he was being. He’d bought me flowers and had been so attentive that night and I’d figured it was the right time to tell him.
When we began to take the next step in our relationship, and things were more physical, I had tried to block out his thoughts in lots of different ways: reciting the alphabet backwards, singing in my head, anything to avoid hearing him. Over the years, Tess and I had suggested many weird and wonderful methods to control it, but little snippets always managed to leak through. And then I’d kissed him, and the first thing I’d heard – as I tried to focus on naming as many fruits as I could – was the name Becca, and the way she was more ‘into’ him. I’d pulled away fiercely.
‘You’re sleeping with someone else?!’
‘No!’
‘Don’t lie to me, Luke! I know you are!’
‘Well what did you expect? You hardly let me touch you and when we do, it’s like your mind is on a million different things. You make me feel like a waste of space.’
He’d shouted then, thrown in my face all the things that were wrong with me, how being with me was so hard, so weird and that I should learn a few things about how to make a man feel wanted.
Then I said the words that would wreck Jack’s life: ‘Don’t take the fact that you’ve been caught out on me.Take it out on someone else.I’m done.’
I was right. I didn’t get the image mixed up. It was my fault.
18
JACK
‘Jack…’ Maggie exhales long and hard. ‘I think… I think I might know who it was.’
Do I want to know more? Do I want to know who he is, the man who took so much from me? Yes. Yes I do.
‘How? How do you know who it was?’ Maggie looks up at me. There’s hesitation there, more words to be said.
‘I… you see, I think that I was there, Jack – the night you had your stroke. And I’ – she rubs the space between her eyebrows – ‘I think it was my fault. Well not my fault exactly but?—’
The room is too hot, the air too close, too full.
‘How can it be your fault?’ My words come out scratchy.
