Page 61 of East (The Moral Compass 3)

This is going to fucking kill me. I take East’s hand in mine.

“On a serious note, I might not be back for a while. It might be a long while. I need you to promise me to live. I want you to go out and have fun. I want you to go and experience life. When you get any paperwork that needs signing, just email it over, and I’ll sign it and send it back. I think the world of you, and I want you to know you are the most important woman in my life, but I can’t hold you back. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone, and I don’t have the right to ask you to wait for me.”

She doesn’t reply. She doesn’t even nod. She just keeps her head bowed. I can tell she’s upset, but she’ll be okay. She was the one who insisted on a divorce. It’ll all be fine.

I place a gentle kiss on the top of her head and exit the plane.

I’ve never felt anything like it. I’m torn. I want to run back on the plane and tell her I’m wrong, but I can’t. She needs to move on and find a nice guy who will be there with her day in, day out, take her on that picnic she dreams of, and marry her properly in a real church wedding.

Nah, I’m not that guy.

Chapter 25

East

Theplanesettlesatthirty-five thousand feet. I’ve not spoken a word since Zed left. I can’t. If I raise my head, the tears will flow. I know exactly what he meant when he left. I understand every word, but it doesn’t stop me from hurting.

I don’t want to go out and have fun. I don’t want to do anything without him. We became so close so fast, and it felt different. Maybe it was because he was my first, but I’m not sure. We had something. Something I can’t quite put my finger on. He frustrates the hell out of me with his moodiness, but he has a really caring heart. I remember how he stayed with me at the hospital and how every time he went to hold my hand, I pulled away.

I don’t blame him for going. It’s his job, but I didn’t give him any encouragement to stay either.

I’ve curled up in the foetal position, and my eyelids are heavy. After a few deep breaths, I’m dreaming away.

It’s the same dream again.

I’m dreaming that I’m in an open-top sports car being driven through the open roads of the English countryside. A man is driving the car, and I’m the passenger.

We stop for lunch. There is a picnic blanket, and all the food is laid out in a wide-open field full of wildflowers. The man in my dream holds my hand and then produces the most exquisite diamond ring. My dream shifts, and I am in a church. Looking down the aisle, butterflies race around my tummy, and as I get to the altar, I look up to my groom—

“East, honey. You need to wake up. You need some more pain killers. It’s been four hours now.”

“No! No! No! Leave me alone. Why do people keep waking me up?”

“Hey, what’s wrong? I only want to give you some tablets,” Kara says softly. “You don’t want to let them run out. It’s harder to manage the pain if you’re starting from scratch.”

“Yeah, I know.” I look at her. “I’m sorry, it’s just I keep having this dream, and every time I get to see who I’m going to marry, someone wakes me up. It’s happened like four times now. I just want to know.”

“Oh, darling, I think you already know who it is. Don’t worry, he’ll come back. I just know it. He’ll bounce back into your life just like Zebedee,” Margarite says.

“Who the fuck is Zebedee?”

Margarite laughs. “Oh, you young’uns. Zebedee was a character from a kid’s programme in the seventies,The Magic Roundabout.He was a spring, and he bounced around all day. Just like Zed. I promise you, he will be back.”

I give her a small smile.I’m not too sure. He might not want to.

The three of us sit and talk, and Margarite fills me in on who she really is. It’s like watching a bad episode ofFamily Fortunes. She surprises both me and Kara when she says that she really likes Alicia and that she thinks that she is good for Drake. She obviously sees something we don’t.

It turns out that Margaret, as she is really called, was in an abusive relationship herself. Her husband was a bully and a big drinker, and those two don’t mix well. When Zed’s teenage mum came home pregnant with twins, her husband insisted on the babies being adopted. It broke Margaret’s heart, but she daren’t go against him. She found out where they were and kept a close eye on them their entire lives.

Margaret only escaped when he got hit by a bus on his way home from the pub one day, but by this time it was too late. Her daughter has never spoken to her since. She knows about the other two grandchildren and deposits money into their banks every so often under an alias of a tax rebate.

When Drake started to go completely off the rails, that’s when she intervened and introduced him to Alicia. She’s known Alicia from when she, too, was a young girl. Although they don’t know she set up the chance meeting.

When I ask her why she did what she did to me and Zed, she smiles. “Things have a way of working themselves out, darling. Just wait and see. It’ll all come out in the wash.”

This woman talks in flaming riddles half the time, and the other half, I’m sure she’s on some form of happy pills.

She’s not a bad person, really, and I know she never meant to kill me. It was a mixture of mishaps, and we would be none the wiser about Matt the Twat if all this hadn’t happened. He would be still planning our deaths without us knowing.

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