‘Jacob, no one cares about the sodding shortbread,’ Alice tutted.
‘Well, it’s relevant, Alice. You know shortbread’s my weakness. I didn’t just cave for a bloody rich tea.’
‘I’m your mother, I should have known something was wrong. I just never dreamt you were talking to your dead—’
‘Yes!’ It came out louder than intended, the thing winding tighter and tighter inside of me finally snapping. ‘Yes, I’ve been seeing my dead fiancé. Yes, I’ve been talking to him and going to our favourite places with him and blowing you guys off to spend time with him. And yes, I know that’s not healthy, but I don’t know how else to do this. To do life without him.’
I’m not sure what made me look up in that moment. Why I tore my eyes from the polyester bed sheets polka-dotted with my tears. Maybe it was the sound of laughter drifting up the corridor from the nearby nurses’ station. Or the sudden intake of breath echoing in the silence that followed my words. Or perhaps I just felt him. Standing there in the doorway, three cups balanced in a cardboard coffee holder in one hand, a bunch of cellophane-wrapped flowers in the other. They were aggressively bright, sunshine-yellow daffodils and clashing orange gerbera daisies, like they were trying too hard to be cheerful. But I wasn’t looking at the flowers. My eyes were fixed on Luca’s face. It was blank, unreadable, but there was something wrong with his eyes – a pain that he was trying very hard to hide. I felt a spasm of unease twist in my gut.How long had he been standing there?
‘You’ve been seeing Joe this whole time?’ His voice cracked, split open by the sharp sting of betrayal as all my worst fears were confirmed. The beeping next to me was going crazy, my heart threatening to leap out my chest at the pain etched into Luca’s brow as I watched the shadow of the past darken his features.
‘It’s not what you think—’ I began, tripping over the words in my haste to get them all out at once, to stop the wall I could see going up, brick by brick, behind Luca’s eyes. He cleared his throat, not looking at me.
‘The nurse said you’re only allowed three visitors at a time, so I’m going to head out.’ His voice was emotionless as he set the coffees down on the table, looking around as if unsure of what to do with the flowers before thrusting them into Jacob’s lap.
‘Luca, please don’t go!’ I called after him. But it was too late.
He was already gone.
18
No one will ever convince me that time moves to a constant, steady rhythm. Not with the way it drags throughout the week, Monday dripping reluctantly into Tuesday, Wednesday seeming to last an eternity, each day longer than the last, until 5 p.m. on Friday rolls around and then you blink and the weekend’s over. The past two weeks since I’d been discharged from hospital had felt like one never-ending Wednesday, the minute hand moving with a slow sort of reluctance around the grease-spattered clock face in Mum’s kitchen, the hour hand even slower. I’d not seen Luca since the hospital. Not spoken one word to him. Well, technically I’d spoken a lot of words, via texts, emails, and so many left voicemails that a very well-spoken lady now informed me thatthe mailbox you are trying to reach is fullwhenever I dialled his number. And .?.?.
.?.?. nothing.
I’d watched as the double ticks next to my latest overly long apology turned blue, confirming he’d read it, only for him to go offline again a second later without even the briefest appearance of three dots to show that he’d considered responding. He just didn’t want to talk to me. Period. And, it would seem, neither did Joe, who I’d also not seen since that day, the expression on his face before I hit the tarmac still branded on my mind. A constant reminder of that ever-present ache deep in my chest, the hole where something used to be.
‘Any messages?’ I asked Beryl, pausing at her desk on the way to mine after returning from a particularly harrowing trip to Autumn Lodge, the local care home that had been hit with a chlamydia outbreak.You’re never too old to get a cheeky leg overwas the exact quote I’d scribbled down from one resident, who looked about ninety and was wheeling his oxygen tank behind him en route to collect his course of antibiotics. Beryl swivelled slowly in her chair to face me, her lips pinched into a tight pout of annoyance.
‘No, Jennifer. Once again,no onecalled for you,’ she said coolly, no doubt still pissed off from the last time I asked her a few hours ago. Or because she didn’t take kindly to being a glorified PA, even though it was literally her job to field incoming calls.
‘So how are the Viagra-popping residents of Autumn Lodge?’ Jacob asked with a grin as I eased myself gently into my chair. After two weeks off work, my ribs were healing nicely and the bruising was all but gone, but they were still tender and I was under strict instructions from Alice to take it easy.
‘Apparently the gentlemen operate a colour-coded tie system to state their sexual preferences. Not sure why it’s just the men that are allowed to be picky, but I didn’t have the energy today to get into a debate about gender inequality with a bunch of Churchill-loving octogenarians. Blue means can’t go on top – presumably for medical reasons but I wasn’t about to ask for details – while green is code for no foreplay and red means up for anything,’ I read, squinting at my scribbled notes.
‘Let me guess. A man in a red tie told you that?’
I rolled my eyes at Jacob, hitting refresh on my emails. My heart sank deeper in my chest when Luca’s name failed to appear in the list of three unread emails that materialised on my screen. My phone buzzed atop my notebook and my heart leapt upwards again, a constant boomerang of hopeful highs and crushinglows. I lunged for it, all fingers and thumbs as I knocked it to the floor in my haste to see who the message was from.
‘Woah there.’ Jacob held out a hand to stop me from bending down, reaching for my phone himself and placing it slowly back on the desk. ‘Doctor’s orders,’ he said with a warning tone to his voice. I tapped the screen, everything inside of me plummeting at the sight of my mum’s name.
Just checking in love. How’s your day going? xx
I sighed, turning the phone over. The subtext to that message wasjust checking to see if you’ve had any visions of your dead ex-fiancé today?She’d been ‘checking in’ multiple times a day since I’d been discharged from hospital, fussing around me like a mother bird. Thankfully she’d drawn the line so far at regurgitating food for me, but the way she was going, I didn’t think it was far off.
‘You still not heard from Luca then?’ Jacob guessed, not looking up from his screen. He was reading the latest ‘Forbes 30 Under 30’ list which just added to my rage. I was tired of fucking ‘30 under 30’ lists. You know who I wanted to see? The 55-year-old who’d just graduated university. Or the 70-year-old who’d set up their first business selling hand-knitted scarves on Etsy. Show me that person. Not the bleary-eyed twenty-somethings killing themselves to exceed some unrealistic benchmark set by a society that declares if you haven’t ‘made it’ (whatever the fuck that means) by thirty, you’ve essentially failed.
‘Nope,’ I said, stabbing my mouse with excessive force on the delete button of one of Beryl’s twice-weekly company-wide emails. (This one was requesting that employees refrain from drinking milk directly from the cartons in the fridge. I noticed Rahul shrinking down in his chair to my right, doing a very bad job of not looking guilty.)
‘Well, you can talk to him tomorrow night at the concert,’ Jacob declared simply, as though that were the answer to all my problems, not the very thing I’d been dreading these past two weeks.
‘Call me crazy, but I think two weeks of radio silence means he probably won’t be jumping for joy at seeing me in person. Besides, whatever this’ – I waved my hand through the air, racking my brains for a way to describe what Luca and I had – ‘thingwas between us, it was a mistake.’
Jacob paused his scrolling, spinning in his chair to face me.
‘Oh no, you don’t get to do that,’ he said, wagging his ballpoint pen at me.
‘Do what?’
