What Might Have Been

by Holly Miller

  “Oh, you know. Girl meets boy. That kind of thing.”

  “A love story?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Is it about you?” she asks Caleb, winking at him and smiling conspiratorially at me.

  Looking uncharacteristically uncomfortable, Caleb clears his throat. “Not as far as I know.”

  Just as I’m opening my mouth to say something—anything—that isn’t to do with Max or love stories not featuring Caleb, the dining room doors fling open, and the kids start streaming through it in magicians’ hats, babbling about magic and whacking one another over the head with little plastic wands.

  “Nice to talk to you both,” Briony says, patting me on the arm, and then she is gone.

  “Let’s go outside,” Caleb says, his voice terse, and I sense a curl of dread in my stomach, something I’ve never felt with him before.

  * * *

  —

  We head into the garden. The air is lemony with sunshine, rich with the scent of damp grass from the sprinklers ticking over the vast lawn in an attempt to offset August’s record temperatures. It’s newly cut, mown weekly into English country stripes by a gardener who’s also cultivated the multicolored mass of dahlias, roses, chrysanthemums, and geraniums bursting from every border.

  The sky is a vast blue lake, its surface unbroken except for the occasional dart of a song thrush or blue tit. At the garden’s farthest point, I can just make out Tash’s recently created outdoor office, nestling beneath the long tendrils of a silver birch, the facing wall made almost entirely of one-way glass.

  It feels good to be out here, away from the cartoonish playlist Tash has on loop in every room, the clamor of overexcited children, the heated undercurrent of parents gossiping.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, the words tumbling from my mouth as we pause by the side of the house, out of sight of everyone inside.

  Caleb shakes his head as we face each other, and I can’t quite read his expression—sadness? Anger? Embarrassment?

  “I overheard you that night,” he says. “In Jools’s kitchen.”

  I shut my eyes for a moment, the recollection of what I said trickling through me liked iced water. “I’m so sorry.”

  “It was a bit weird,” he says. “I thought everything was going pretty well between us, but then you suddenly start acting distant, and then I overhear you saying you think I’ve got baggage and that you feel weird about me and Helen still being married . . . and to top it all off, you tell your best mate you always thought you and Max were meant to be, that he might be your soulmate . . .”

  The tears brim in my eyes. I reach out to touch him, but he’s stuffed both his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “No,” I say, fiercely. “I was just . . . Max sent me a message out of the blue, and I was momentarily confused about—”

  “Good to know.”

  “Not like that. I’d been feeling a bit strange about Helen, and . . .” But I trail off, clueless as to how I might explain away emotions I no longer fully feel.

  “Lucy, you’re going to have to fill me in here, because I have no idea where Helen comes into all this.”

  I say nothing for a couple of moments. My right hand finds the wooden bracelet around my opposite wrist and spins it anxiously. “I suppose . . . the IVF thing freaked me out slightly. And you are still married.”

  “Yeah—on paper,” he says, stiffly. “As far as we’re both concerned, the next step is divorce.”

  I swallow, feeling relief ripple through me, despite everything. “Okay.”

  “So, what are you saying, Lucy? Do you think you’ve made the wrong choice, between me and your ex?”

  “No. I never asked Max to send me that message.”

  “But you still thought about replying.”

  “I didn’t. I wouldn’t. You’ve got it all wrong.”

  “Actually, I got it from the horse’s mouth,” he says, his eyes horribly cool against me. He tips his head back toward the house. “And then that woman in there says she thought you were with Max.”

  I swallow and shake my head. “No. Honestly. I don’t have any feelings for Max. I’m not in touch with him. I don’t want to be in touch with him.”

  I feel a hot sweep of shame whenever I reflect on that night in Jools’s kitchen. Time apart from Caleb over the past few weeks has made me realize just how much I want to be with him, and how stupid it was to feel thrown off by the idea of him trying to have a family with Helen. Perhaps he shouldn’t have downplayed its role in his split with her, but as Jools pointed out last week, if it’s not a deal-breaker, it’s crazy to waste any more time worrying about it. I hate being apart from Caleb. I think about him all the time. The idea of splitting up makes me feel cold with misery.

  I’ve realized—perhaps too late—just how strongly I feel. How convinced I am that Caleb—not Max—is the one for me, the person I’m meant to be with.

  “So is this what these past few weeks have been about? You’ve been punishing me?” I say quietly.

  Caleb shakes his head. “Actually, I’ve been trying to figure out what I’d do if you told me you were getting back with . . . him. Because the truth is, Lucy, I love you. I’ve fallen in love with you.”

  I stare at him, my breath suspended in my throat.

  The smile appears first in his eyes, then at the corners of his mouth. “Seriously, I love you. You’re the best person I’ve ever known, hands down. I’ve even started to believe—” He breaks off, then looks down at his feet.

  I reach out and touch his arm. “Believe what?”

  He swallows. “I’ve never bought into the idea of soulmates, Lucy. All that stuff about it being written in the stars. Not even when I was married. You know that.”

  I nod, hoping very hard that the next word I’ll hear will be but.

  “But I’ve finally been starting to wonder if maybe all this time I’ve had it wrong. That actually, I was meant to meet you that night at The Smugglers. That you and me . . . we’re meant to be together.”

  My heart begins to pelt with happiness.

  “And the idea that you might not feel the same way . . . it’s just been killing me. I’m sorry.”

  “I do,” I breathe. “I do feel the same way. I love you, too. I’m so sorry for nearly messing everything up. I don’t want to break up with you. Ever.”

  His smile broadens. “Serious?”

  “Serious,” I repeat.

  He takes a step toward me, close enough now that we’re almost touching. My back is pressed against the sun-warmed brickwork. Then he lifts his hand, places it on the wall above my head, his eyes steady on my face. His expression is so fiercely charged I get goose bumps. And then he leans forward, kissing me with an intensity I feel right down to my toes. He presses himself against me, and all at once I am burning for him. “I’ve missed you, Lambert,” he breathes.

  “I’ve missed you, too.” I’m so desperate to suggest we sneak off upstairs to my bedroom, or even down the lawn to Tash’s garden office, but my conscience just about reins me in. This is my nephew’s sixth birthday, after all, not a university house party.

  “Later,” Caleb murmurs, the word landing square in my solar plexus. “We’ll make it worth the wait.”

  I kiss him again, my stomach stormy with wanting, then lean back against the wall to collect my stolen breath. Over on the lawn, a squirrel hops across the grass before scaling the silver birch, making its leaves shimmer like water with the disturbance.

  “I think,” I say, after a few moments, “I used to believe Max was my soulmate because I never really got closure.”

  He nods. “Maybe if you’d stayed together, you would have realized eventually that you weren’t actually . . . meant to be.”

  I smile. “You know, the night I first met you, at The Smugglers, my horoscope told me I was going to bump into my soulmate.” />
  He cocks an eyebrow. “Oh, really?”

  “Yep.”

  “How come you’re only just telling me this now?”

  I reach out and prod him gently in the ribs with a single finger. “Because you never believed in soulmates, remember?”

  Exhaling, he smiles. “All right. I’ve been giving you a hard time about this, but . . . I have something to confess.”

  I wait.

  “I wanted to tell you this when we first got together, but I thought you might think it was a bit weird.”

  I smile. “Should I be nervous?”

  He scratches the back of his neck, then releases a breath. “That day I met you in The Smugglers, when you ran outside to talk to Max, you both looked so . . . I don’t know. Giddy, or something. To be seeing each other. Anyway, I walked out the front door to leave, and I was going to say good-bye to you, but you were so absorbed in each other that . . . Anyway, I had my camera with me, so I took a quick shot. It just struck me, how you were looking at each other. I was going to e-mail it to you, if you got in touch. I thought maybe it could be an icebreaker, or something . . . until I realized that’d be slightly shooting myself in the foot.”

  “Do you still have it? The photo?”

  He shakes his head. “Deleted it. Felt a bit weird about keeping it once we’d got together.”

  I frown. “Why are you telling me this?”

  He shrugs. “I could see that night how much Max meant to you, and I guess . . . it goes some way to explaining why I feel a bit . . . sensitive about him. Aside from him being some sort of overachieving Adonis, obviously.”

  “He’s not,” I say quickly. “But thank you. I appreciate you being honest.”

  He dips his face to mine. “Any chance you could kiss me or something, so I don’t feel like quite such an idiot?”

  I laugh, lean forward, and oblige.

  We’re just about to head back inside when, from the back of the house, a door slams, making us both jump.

  I peer around the brickwork to see Tash and Simon on the patio. Tash is crying, her face covered in blotches.

  I glance at Caleb, eyes wide. He shakes his head, raises a finger to his lips.

  “Tash,” Simon is saying. “You’re overreacting.”

  “Overreacting? You went for a drink with her, of all people, and you think—”

  “For the hundredth time, it wasn’t a drink, it was a sodding work thing! There were about a hundred other people there!”

  “I said to you that if you saw her again, that would be it—”

  “I haven’t been seeing her, I bumped into her. What did you want me to—”

  “Natasha?” My mum is stepping out onto the patio, her timing impeccably ham-fisted as only a mother’s can be.

  My dad’s bedridden at home today with a migraine, apparently, which is odd—I can’t remember the last time he was ill, and I didn’t know he suffered from migraines, either. Not to mention the fact that he adores his only grandchild. Maybe all the redundancy stuff has flared up again: I know how much that stresses him out. And Mum’s looked pretty miserable today, though she’s been trying to put a brave face on it. I guess she’s just used to always having Dad by her side.

  “Dylan wants to know if we can cut the cake,” Mum’s saying. There follows a pause as she clocks Tash’s face. “Are you . . . okay, darling?”

  “I’m fine,” Tash snaps, her voice so caustic it chills me. “I’ll be inside in a minute.”

  There’s another pause before Mum retreats, pulling the door shut behind her.

  I feel my pulse invade my throat. I’ve seen my sister get angry before, but I’ve never seen her lose control like this.

  “Tash,” Simon says, his voice strung out like it’s being physically tugged from his chest. Ridiculously, he’s still wearing his top hat, hired—I hope—to align with today’s theme. “Andrea was a mistake. I don’t know how many times I need to tell you that.”

  “If you can’t stay away from her, then I don’t even know what we’re doing, Simon.”

  Across the lawn behind them, a blackbird whooshes past in a flurry, as if startled by all the commotion.

  “Tash. It’s Dylan’s birthday.” Simon is pleading now.

  And then she simply nods, turns, and walks back inside. Simon follows her, closing the door behind him, and the garden goes quiet.

  I turn to Caleb. “Who the hell is Andrea?”

  * * *

  —

  It’s probably the first time I’ve ever confronted someone about an argument I’ve witnessed by eavesdropping, which must be why I get it so wrong.

  I catch Tash as we’re clearing up in the kitchen. Dylan’s enduring a painful comedown from his sugar high in the living room with Mum, sobbing about some boy who kept snatching his deck of cards, while Caleb’s helping Simon dismantle the decorations.

  “Tash,” I say, clumsily, glancing over my shoulder to check nobody’s hovering behind us, “who’s Andrea?”

  The stack of paper bowls in her hand goes limp as she stares at me. “Have you been talking to Sarah Meadows?”

  “No, I—”

  “Where did you hear that name, then?” she says. Her eyes have gone weak and watery. In this moment, she looks utterly broken—and it breaks me to see it. My instinct is to put my arms around her, but I have a sense she’d shake me off. Her sadness has a particularly angry edge to it.

  I’m unsure how to answer without revealing our presence in the garden earlier. For some reason, I can’t bring myself to confess we heard the whole thing. Probably because right now, she doesn’t seem as though she’d take it too well.

  Luckily, her question seems to be rhetorical. “I don’t want to talk about it, Lucy.”

  “I just want to know if you’re okay—”

  “I’m okay. We’re okay. But please don’t say her name again. I mean it.”

  Go

  Tash and I agreed beforehand, over a series of scantly worded messages, that we wouldn’t sit down to talk until after Dylan’s birthday party was over. Fortunately, the abundance of people makes it fairly easy to avoid her until Dylan’s safely in bed being read to by Simon, and Tash is leading me to the new garden office she’s had built beneath the silver birch at the end of her garden. It’s so far from the house I have to squint to see it at first.

  Surprisingly large inside, the space is simply furnished, with a desk, printer, potted plant and bookshelf, and a sofa with two matching chairs arranged around a dormant wood burner. The air is thick with the lingering scent of damp grass and the freshly cut timber of the roof and walls. There are several monochrome canvases of Tash, Simon, and Dylan on display, grinning between various poses, the best shots from a photography session Mum got Tash for Christmas last year.

  I’m not sure if Tash sees me smiling sourly at the sight of them, but she passes me a throw (cashmere, of course—“In case you get chilly”), then gestures for me to sit. I take the sofa next to the glass wall facing the garden, so she perches on a chair, tucking her feet up beneath her like a child. She’s wrapped herself up in a vast black cardigan that comes down to her knees, completely covering the minuscule silver playsuit she’s been wearing all day. I’m relieved, since this means I no longer have to look at her bare skin and picture Max stroking it, or take in the sight of her trim legs and imagine them wrapped around him.

  Still, Mum was right. She has lost weight, an alarming amount. Her clothes are so big on her now she looks like a child playing dress-up.

  “Thank you for coming,” she ventures, our eyes locking properly for the first time since she doorstepped me two months ago. “I know how hard it must have been for you.”

  “Well, I’m glad I did.”

  Her expression lifts. “That’s good.”

  “Dylan’s . . . None of this is his fault.”


  She swallows. “No. He wasn’t even born when all this happened.”

  I nod agreement.

  “And . . . thanks for his present,” she says. “You really didn’t have to spend that much.”

  I bought Dylan a pricey box of Lego in my lunch hour on Thursday, barely even looking at what was in it, just wanting to get him the best set I could to make up for not having seen him for so long.

  “Do you want me to explain more about that night?” Tash says. “Or—”

  I shake my head.

  “Would it help if I told you . . . I know how you feel?”

  I frown at her, confused. “Well, unless I’ve somehow slept with Simon without realizing, I don’t think you do, actually.”

  “Simon had a one-night stand,” she says, quietly. “Just before Christmas, the year we got married. A woman called Andrea. She worked with him.”

  I stare at her. Simon, Dylan’s father? The most passive, harmless man I know? “But you’d only been married—”

  “—five months.” She nods. “Yep.”

  I want to say I’m sorry, but the words won’t come. So instead, I just say, “Oh. Right.”

  “Simon changed jobs not long afterward. And somehow, we got through it. We went to therapy. We’re still going, actually. Although . . .” She trails off, looks down. “People still gossip. I overheard someone saying her name earlier, and it was all I could do not to . . .” She shakes her head. “But I didn’t want to cause a scene, do anything to make you think coming here today was a mistake.”

  I lift the cashmere throw from my knees. It’s humid in here, the air still hot from the mini heat wave of the last few days. Or maybe it’s just the years of unspoken betrayal simmering between us. “Why . . . Why are you telling me this? It’s hardly the same.”

  “No, but I guess I wanted to say . . . that good people can do awful things sometimes, Lucy.”

  “I’m confused. Who’s the good person here? You? Andrea?”

  She flinches slightly as I say her name. “I just mean people can make mistakes, sometimes. That’s all.”