Page 120 of The Art of Loving You

‘Don’t.’ I can’t bear another black-and-white movie farewell.

‘Good luck,’ Alice says simply, instinctively knowing I don’t want a fuss.

‘We’ll be here when you come round,’ Mum says and like a child I want her to promise me that I will come round,but even if she says the words it won’t make them true. One thing I’ve learned over the past few months is you can’t take anything for granted. Our little family of four is still a family of four but instead of Jack, there’s Chloe. We don’t know how long we have left with the people we love. Whether each time we see them will be the last.

See you soon, Jack had said that fateful day when he went out to the shops. Norma had told Sid goodnight and never woken up again. It’s impossible to predict when people will leave our life, enter our life. All we can do is make the most of the here and now. The people we have.

I hug Mum tightly. ‘I love you so much. Sorry about everything I’ve put you through.’ She strokes my hair as she had when I was small when I’d woken from a nightmare.

‘None of that self-pity, young lady,’ she gently chides.

‘It’s shellfish.’ Alice stands and wraps herself around us both and when the nurse calls me again and they let me go, for the longest time I can still feel their arms around me. Jack’s too.

I am staring at the ceiling. The nurse telling me in a second she’ll count me down from ten and then the anaesthetic will take hold and I’ll step over the line that separates the conscious from the unconscious.

‘You’ll be okay, you know.’ She smiles down at my worried face. ‘That young man of yours will look after you. From the way he was gazing at those babies you could tell he is kind.’

I wrestle to sit up as she eases me back down. She hadseenhim.

She had seen Jack.

I attempt to speak but my tongue is too big for my mouth.

Jack, I try to say, but his name is only in my head.

Suddenly he is next to me, taking my hand, only this time I feel it, warm and soft around mine.

‘I love you, Elizabeth Emerson.’ His whispered words cross worlds, coming from his heart to mine.

It’s the last thing I hear.

I don’t know how much time has passed when my awareness begins to kick in. Everything is hazy. Someone is calling my name.

Jack?

He’s come back to me.

Or have I gone to him?

Perhaps we’ve met in the nothingness in between.

I struggle to open my eyes, but I can’t. My lids are too heavy.

Jack?

‘Libby?’ he says softly. ‘It’s time to wake up.’

Chapter Forty-One

It has been a month since my operation. A month in which my house has been filled with visitors bearing cards and flowers, well-wishers carrying casseroles. Everyone and everything.

Except Jack.

He’s gone and as hard as it is, I have to accept that he was never really here. That he was a symptom of my tumour.

But sometimes I still wonder …

I’ve become close to Angela, Jack’s nurse, and I was going to ask her to trace the nurse who was with me when I had my anaesthetic and ask her to describe who she’d seen when she’d said ‘That young man of yours will look after you.’ She couldn’t have meant Sid.

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