Page 116 of The Life We Almost Had

It hasn’t.

Outside, I blink in the brightness. It still isn’t raining and I hate that the sky isn’t crying for Adam the way that I am crying for him.

‘You’re doing amazingly well.’ Nell hooks her arm through mine, as Josh does the same to my left.

I stem my tears as we stand at the graveside while Adam is lowered into his final resting place. I just need to hold it together for a little longer but the world is spinning. I feel my knees buckle and, if it weren’t for Nell and Josh, I would fall.

‘I’ll always catch you, Anna,’ Adam had said. But he isn’t catching me now and suddenly I hate him for leaving me, and then I hate myself for feeling that way.

‘Anna,’ Nell whispers. I am offered a red rose from a bucket; I’d chosen not to have soil. Heat spreads through me as I fight the urge to tip the flowers on the grass – if we don’t pay our last respects to Adam, surely they can’t fill in his grave?

‘You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,’ Josh says, but today I am doing everything I don’t want to.

I am letting go of the man I love.

My face is fire. Tears burning behind my eyes, pressure building in my nose. My forehead throbbing with the emotion I’m trying to contain.

Slowly, reluctantly, I unhook my arm from Josh’s and I pluck a rose from the bucket and step forward, holding it between my fingers.

‘Be free.’ I let the flower fall as I say goodbye to my husband, to Harry, to the life we almost had.

To all of it.

I stuff my hands into my pockets, rooted to the spot, unwilling to leave him. In my pocket I find a coin. I pull it out. It’sthecoin. My grandad’s. I hadn’t remembered putting it in my coat and, after running my finger over it one last time, I kiss it and let it fall into the grave.

I’ll be thinking of you, Adam. Always.

It is when I turn away that the circling thought that there is something I need to remember stills and becomes as clear as the bright blue sky.

The day Adam died, before he took the fateful yacht trip for the second time, he had scrawled an address on a notepad. An address I can’t clearly remember.

It was a message for me. It must have been.

But what?

Chapter Seventy-Eight

Anna

The wake is held in The Star. I haven’t been here for years. Adam would be pleased to know they still have the same pool tables. I step inside onto the forever-sticky floor and it feels like stepping back in time. Dark wooden beams striping the ceiling. Round mahogany tables wobble on spindly legs.

I hover uncertainly by the bar, unsure of what my place is here. What I am supposed to do. Both unwilling and unable to mingle and join one of the conversations that are too loud. Too jolly. Voices dripping with relief that the ceremony is over, and laughter. People are laughing.

‘Anna?’ An elderly lady I don’t recognize stands before me, a much younger man at her side. ‘I… I just wanted to say…’ Her opaque eyes fill with tears, and then I know.

‘You were on the yacht.’ She was the one who Adam had tried to save.

‘I’m so sorry.’ She waits for me to speak. I don’t. I can’t.

‘I know it’s no consolation,’ the man speaks now, ‘but Grandma is the heart of our family. We’d all be lost without her. I’m so sorry about your husband. Adam. But we’re all very grateful to him.If he hadn’t noticed Grandma had been left behind and gone back to rescue her, no one might have noticed she was stuck. He was a brave man. A good man.’

What can I do but agree with him? Adam was a good man. The best. Hating the old woman who shakes in front of me won’t bring him back.

‘He would be happy to know you are okay.’ I touch her briefly on the arm before I walk away.

Nell thrusts a gin and tonic into my hand. I take a long drink, wanting the warm bloom of alcohol to numb me. On the bar a TV displays a slideshow of pictures of Adam. Most of the photos are Adam as an adult. I had asked his mum to email some baby ones but she said it was too painful for her to look through them.

‘You don’t know how awful it is to lose a child,’ she had said. Memories of Harry rendered me mute and I cut the call.

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