Page 107 of The Art of Loving You

Seeing or hearing things that aren’t there.

Jack had come to me.

It had been real. It hadfeltso real.

Jack.

I tried to pull myself together. I tried to listen as Charlotte ran through what would happen during the surgery, Mum rubbing my back rhythmically as I leaned forward, elbows on knees, head in my hands, but I couldn’t focus. All I could think of was Jack.

The ward was quiet. Lights dimmed.

Jack.

I whispered his name but he didn’t come. Surely if he was a figment of my imagination I could summon him at will. I stared into the not-quite-dark until the shapes around the ward sharpened and shifted, bedside cabinets swaying from side to side, an IV drip sliding across the floor.

Jack.

If my seeing him, hearing him, being with him was caused by the tumour then removing it would almost certainly remove Jack from my life and I couldn’t bear that, not again. A life without him wasn’t the life I wanted or needed.

If I didn’t have the surgery he would still be with me. Always be with me, until …

We’d be together.

It was the early hours when I slipped out of bed.

Noiselessly I padded down the ward.

I turned the corner, the gloom swallowing me.

One step.

Two steps.

Three.

I carried on walking towards the glowing green of the fire escape exit sign.

As quietly as I could I pressed down on the bar and opened the door. Stepped out into the night.

Carried on walking.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

The sun was rising by the time I’d arrived home, shivering in my hospital gown, my feet bloodied and sore.

Irrational behaviour.

I had jogged much of the way, ducking behind parked cars, taking cover in ditches whenever traffic crawled by, sure that someone must have realised I was missing, be looking for me.

But they didn’t seem to be.

Several times I had stopped to vomit in a hedge. This time I couldn’t put my sickness down to a suspected pregnancy. Whether it was the exercise, the mass in my brain or just the knowing it was there that was making me sick I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything any more.

Still, my heart hammered as I stumbled up the lane, convinced there’d be a nurse, a police car, Mum or Alice at the very least waiting for me at the top, but there was no one.

The sight of the house caused a painful tightening in my chest. I remembered the day we had moved in. How I had drunk it all in. The pops of yellow as daffodils had poked their cheerful heads through the tangle of stinging nettles. The front garden was just as unkempt as it had been then, although the back was much improved. The paint still peeled on the front door I had vowed to restore to a glossy British racing green.The brass lion’s head door knocker remained ginger with rust.

It had all gone so horribly wrong.

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