‘Hey.’ He opened the door the second I knocked on it. ‘I was looking out for you,’ he admitted, seeing me flinch in surprise.
‘I can’t pretend I wouldn’t be doing the same if it was the other way around.’
‘Is it okay if I say how lovely you look?’ he said as we walked down a short hallway to a spotless, functional kitchen.
‘As nice as Georgie’s mum, apparently.’
He whistled. ‘Whew. A compliment indeed.’
I shook my head, grinning. ‘Georgie’s mum had a botched facelift a couple of months ago. She tries to deflect attention from it with tiny, too-tight dresses and no underwear.’
Jonah kept his gaze firmly on my non-botched face as he offered me a drink. He looked pretty lovely himself, in a navy shirt and faded jeans, hair slightly mussed. I made a mental note to ask when he started wearing colour.
We swapped updates on Mum turning up and how Ellis was doing – in summary: not great – while Jonah added prawns to a wok of fragrant vegetables and noodles and dished up what I realised with a tingle of pleasure was a sticky chilli prawn dish, my teenage favourite.
‘I can’t believe you remembered.’
Jonah put the plates on the square table, and we sat down opposite each other. ‘I can’t believe you’d think I’d forget.’
I grimaced. ‘Well, you seemed to instantly forget aboutme…’
‘I already told you, I never stopped thinking about you. Not once. The paltry number of crappy relationships I’ve had since all fizzled out after a few months – weeks, usually – because dating other women only made me miss you harder.’
‘You disappearing the day you left kind of makes that hard to believe.’ I took a slow sip of my drink. I was driving home but had permitted myself one low-alcohol beer.
Jonah took a moment while we both started eating, then he began to speak. ‘That day, I was driven hours to a residential unit in Shropshire. I wasn’t allowed anywhere on my own for the rest of the summer because I was considered a flight risk. I might have dabbled in teenage delinquency, but I didn’t have the skills to sneak out of there and back to Sherwood Forest without getting caught.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Were you expecting me to show up?’
‘Well, maybe. I was sixteen and madly in love. I liked to think I’d have found a way to get to you if I’d known where you were. Said goodbye properly, at least.’
He stabbed at a chunk of pepper. ‘If I had, what then? They’d have only dragged me back and made things even worse.’
‘Okay. I get that you couldn’t come back. But why didn’t you reply to my messages or call me? Were you mad at me?’ It was ridiculous, but I had to force the words past the ache clogging upmy throat. I’d been married since then. How could I possibly still be so upset?
There was a horrible silence.
‘You messaged?’
I sucked in a painful breath. ‘Of course I messaged! I was frantic with worry. Drowning in guilt at being yet another person who’d ruined your life. I was desperate to know if you hated me or not.’
‘I tried to call you in the car, but my phone was dead. By the time we got to the new place it was late, and they wouldn’t allow phones in the bedrooms past curfew. When I asked for it back the next morning they said there’d been no calls or messages, you didn’t want to speak to me and I wasn’t allowed to contact you. When I kicked off about them deleting your number, they confiscated it. After I complained to my social worker, she got me a new one, but it was a crappy pay-as-you-go with no Internet.’
‘Oh, Jonah. I’m so sorry.’
Phones weren’t such a lifeline back then as they were now, but for a teenager in a strange part of the country, with no family, friends or anything familiar, having a few numbers in your phone, access to the Internet and social media was one of the ways to survive.
‘Things were savage at that place. I don’t want to go into it, but some of the other kids… getting through each day was bad enough. They wouldn’t let me have contact with Ellis and Billy unless I kept the rules.’ He rubbed his hand over his face. ‘I’d like to tell you that if I’d known you were waiting, I’d have done anything to get to you. But surviving took everything I’d got.’
‘I had to wonder if Mum was right.’ Jonah had set the table with paper napkins, and I grabbed one, pressing it against each eye before I could keep going. ‘I was simply a momentary distraction from everything else that was going on.’
‘I hate that you thought that about me.’ He winced. ‘That you might still think that.’
‘I didn’t. I couldn’t. When I remembered what it was really like, I knew it was real. But you ghosted me, Jonah. The only logical conclusion was that either you’d played me or you blamed me for getting sent miles away from your brother and sister. Maybe both?’
He leant forwards across the small table, his meal forgotten. ‘Now you know it was neither. But you don’t seem very relieved.’
‘I might be. If I didn’t know that for five years you were living at the Green House.’ My voice disintegrated. ‘You were an adult by then. No having to listen to social workers any more. If you really loved me, why didn’t you contact me?’
That hung between us for a long moment. ‘I was going to.’ He slid his beer bottle closer and started picking at the label. ‘I moved there a year after being in the other place. A space came up in one of the annexes for eighteen-year-olds, and because Ellis and Billy were still local, they offered it to me. It was like getting dropped off in paradise. Only after so long living in hell, I’d grown to resemble a demon.’ He rolled his shoulders. ‘I couldn’t bear for you to see me like that. But you know the Green House. It’s impossible to be there long and not start to hope. I was going to give it a bit of time, get enrolled in college, wait until I could get through the day without smashing something. Then they had this Christmas party.’
