by Anna Bloom
Six months of ground zero. Six months of walking into my grey cube of a flat, feeding my cat and then staring at the ceiling.
Six months of grief that is insurmountable.
No amount of Charlie’s health juices will ever lift this doom.
Six months of listening to the whoosh in my ears like the sea that just won’t go away. Whispers chase me, his voice, over and over, telling me to wake, telling me to live, telling me I’m his everything.
The price of love is too high for me. The price of life is beyond comprehension.
The kicker comes in the form of those thoughts, voices that spring into my head, normally when I’m staring at a blank TV screen. Live, Julianna. Live, ma petite fleur.
The voices don’t end.
The scar on my chest will never stop hurting. Every pill I take to keep this heart is a bitter pill to swallow.
“I’m coming in,” Liv calls through the letterbox. “If you’re naked you’d best get moving.”
I don’t bother to answer.
She comes in anyway, plopping herself down on the sofa, reaching for the remote. This is what we do now while Lenny is at nursery. We sit in silence, two sisters side-by-side.
Until today, because she throws the remote down. “Enough is enough. You need to wake up now.”
“Please don’t. Just don’t.”
“You are being a selfish, ungrateful pig. Wake up and stop dreaming!”
I stink eye her. “Why don’t you say what’s really on your mind?” I grind out my words. What does she mean? Is she on drugs? I peer closer, looking for tale tell signs I read about in a trashy magazine.
“Do you realise how much he loved you to do that? The thought of a life without you was so pitiful that he didn’t want to face it. Wanted you to have life instead of him. The only person with a B negative heart to give.”
“I know.” I nod to the folded letter still sitting on the coffee table where I put it my first day out of hospital. The letter with his words, explanations. The guilt that will just bury me six feet under in the end. It seems so ridiculous. Why would he do that? Why did he do that?
“Clearly, the man had no brains.” My cheeks burn to talk about him this way, but it’s easier somehow. If I can just shut off, then I don’t have to feel.
“I’d say he loved you beyond all reason.”
“Still didn’t tell me he was married though, did he?”
“Oh my god. What is wrong with you?”
“What’s wrong with me is the fact that I’m alive. Stupid alive, living a life I never even lived properly the first time, and he, he…”
“What?” Liv steps closer, right in my space, stealing my air.
I’m getting confused. My thoughts are muddled, a swirl of ice cream under the brutal force of a spoon and Paige’s determined hand.
Paige. I miss her.
Lenny. I want to cuddle.
My arms tingle a new sensation that makes me stretch them. Fingertips wiggling against… what is that? Cotton?
“And what would he want from you now, Julia? Huh, what would he want?”
Liv is getting smaller, fading out. Black is sweeping a cloak of night around my shoulders. There’s a loud beeping and it’s pushing away my grey cube of a flat. The sofa disappears. I think I might be in an Oscar winning movie that no one wants to admit they don’t understand.
I wait for his voice, knowing I will always hear it. It will never not be with me, singing in my heart and soul.
“He’d say, ‘Live, ma petite fleur. Live’.”
And if I could do it again… if…
It burns through me. Life. It tears me apart, running hot like lava at the centre of the earth ready to erupt.
I would sit on that bar stool. Would have said yes to dinner. Would have succumbed to that first kiss if I’d known that our last would have meant I’d learned to live.
The only thing I’d ever wanted was to live…
My fingers curl, grasping at warmth.
The whooshing of the sea fades out, leaving me for the first time in what’s felt like months.
“Ma petite fleur, you took your sweet time.”
“Hen—?” I croak his name, choking on an obstruction. There’s something in my throat. He’s here, next to me. My eyes burn. Dreams. Nightmares. That’s what they were I realise as reality bursts through my consciousness before starting to fade again.
“I’m not going anywhere, mon coeur, not ever. You are mine.”
Cool hands take the place of his. Brisk, industrious, the babble of voices that don’t make my inside mellow the way his does. “Stats are good, BP settled.”
“Henri,” I call his name, trying to reach for him.
“I’m here,” he says but he’s too far away.
“Breathe in now please and then out in one long exhale.” I do. There’s a pulling which makes me gag and my windpipe clears of the obstruction.
The sweet tang of hospital air, bleach and disinfectant, scents that never smelled so good, blast my senses.
“Open your eyes.” The warm hand is back, lacing through mine.
I do. It’s not easy. They are stuck with cement, or sand. Hopefully, it’s the golden grains of France and not builder’s sand.
“Henri.” Tears leak from my eyes as I see him. “You’re alive. I had the worst dream.”
His smile… so damn… everything. “You’re alive too, mon amour, I can’t ever lose you. Not ever.”
He falls down to the seat, shoulders shaking, head in his hands, but for the first time in forever I don’t want to cry.
No.
Now I want to live.
Epilogue
Henri
I can’t look down for the life of me. I’m clinging to the security barrier with the resolve of a free climber hanging from a rock face.
I know down below Simone and Gabriella are laughing. Their laughter is lost on the wind, too many damn tourists to make it heard. I know Gabriella will have her arms wrapped around Simone, daughter and mother happy together.
People come up here for fun? They all need their heads examining. I’d rather stick my hand up a birthing cow’s rear end than do this.
But… a promise is a promise.
Even if they do involve standing three hundred metres above the earth. The wind blows and I’m sure the whole damn thing sways.
Best to just get this over and done with.
Until I turn and see her. Hair streaming in the wind, wisps of tangled chestnut waves, her eyes wide as she takes in the view, dangerously close to the edge, and I know this moment can’t be rushed.
Grinning, I step back into a safety zone, casting me in a shadow from the June sunlight.
She is everything. Every dream, every nightmare, every waking moment in between. I could watch her for days and never grow bored, never plan to get bored.
Who knew you could fall so irrevocably in love with someone? That meeting five times would change your whole existence.
Who knew I’d wait forty-two years to understand what living was?
She grins, turning to face me, her hair whipping across her face, which she pulls at with her fingers. “Are you scared, mon lion?” That twinkle in her eyes is devilish; the bud of her perfect rose mouth stretching into a wide smile.
“Not scared, just valuing the power of gravity with new understanding.”
“Come here.” She holds her hand out and I weave our fingers, reminded of the first time I held her hand and something in the action shifted the earth beneath me. “Look, you can see everything. I’ve never seen anything so beautiful.”
I watch her, a smile growing.
“Oh don’t, please.” She rolls her eyes. “Don’t you dare say, ‘I have’.”
“What? I have.” Laughing, I step up close and wrap my arms around her. If we are going down, we are going together. To live without her would be unbearable. No, not even that; it would be impossible.
I don’t often think back to that moment in th
e hospital when she slipped away, her body shutting down into a coma that naturally she couldn’t pull out from. Eventually, she would have stopped existing within that deep sleep. I’d held her so damn tight in my arms, knowing I’d only made it with hours to spare. My stupid pride nearly stealing those vital moments away from me. Feet had pounded outside the door, bursting through as I continued to rock her. Liv’s face, blotchy and pale staring at mine with a wild woman’s eyes. A trolley followed after, doctors busy, not speaking as they lifted her away, putting tubes down her throat, traversing the body I loved so much.
“Here.” Grinning, I pull the diary out of the backpack I’ve been hauling around tourist hell.
“What have you got that for?”
My little flower steps closer, holding out her hand for the battered book.
“We’ve got one thing to still cross off.”
Julia’s eyes widen as I pass her a biro and then drop to one knee.
“But…” she whispers, “it’s not written on there.”
“I know. You can add it and cross it out. That’s the rules, right?”
She nods, her brown eyes shining with obsidian depths.
“Julianna Brown, love of my life.”
People are stopping to stare, eyes on us rather than the view. But this is her dream, and I will give her everything she damn well wants, everything.
“I want to spend every moment of my life with you, as my wife, my heart, my soul.”
“Henri,” she sighs my name but then quirks a smile. Her shoulders drop, a look of serene bliss smooths across her face, lips turning up with a hint of a heart-stealing smile. It’s a look that tells me that the two of us are meant to be. Fate. Serendipity.
Perfection.
With a growl of possessiveness, I pull her down to me, bringing her body against mine. Her heart, a gift from a stranger beating against my chest. “Is that a yes?”
“Everything is always a yes for you.”
My fingers shake, something they’ve never done before, as I slip on a simple band with a square cut diamond—I am after all only a farmer. The happiest and luckiest farmer to ever have walked the earth.
In a kiss that makes my blood pulse in my ears we seal the deal. People clap around us. Laughing, she claps her own hands in glee. “This is the most sappy and romantic moment of my life.”
“Good. Now write it on the damn list.”
“Can I do it when we get down? It really is very touristy up here.”
This. Woman. Seriously.
I stand and pull her up after me. Giving a small wave to our audience we slip back into the lift, the guard giving us a smirk. Yeah, buddy, I know you’ve seen it all before. But I bet you never saw a dying wish come true.
Down on the ground, Gabriella assaults us, inspecting the ring, demanding champagne. “I know the best bar. Come, let’s go.” I hold her back though. “Next time, Gabby, we’ve got a train to catch. In fact.” I check my watch. “We should go and get our stuff from the hotel.”
“We have? Are we going home already?” The kiss of the sun on Julia is vitality personified. It makes my own heart swell. I only realised just a few short months ago when she started to glow, just how ill she was when I met her. Would I have done things differently if I knew? Would I have talked to her more instead of kissing the life out of her and fucking her six ways to Sunday? Who knows the answer to that? We are just what we are. Our history will always stand the way it does. I will always know what it feels like to have her dying in my arms, not once, but twice, and I will always know I will live every moment of my life to the fullest in response to that.
“Not home. Other direction.”
I wait for her to explode. Three. Two. One. “London?” Kisses rain on my skin. PG kisses, because you know, our niece is in attendance.
“I have a hotel booked.”
She squeals again and jumps on the spot. “I’m calling Liv. Telling her the news.” She wiggles her ring under my nose like I haven’t seen it before.
“She knows.”
“She does?”
“Whose permission do you think I asked?”
Julia stares at me and I stare back, then shaking her head she opens her bucket list and scribbles down the wish she’d told me when she’d been a goddess illuminated by candlelight in my room just over a year ago. Grinning, she crosses it through, but then pauses, tapping her teeth with her biro. With a furrowed brow she quickly adds something else and then snaps it shut.
“I thought it was finished?” I ask, reaching for the book, but she shakes her head and slips it into the bag she has crossed over her body.
“It was,’ she replies archly. “Now what time is the train? Because I don’t think champagne is a bad idea at all.”
A week later we are on our way home. Her head is resting on my shoulder on the Eurostar, her breath gentle as she dozes against me. I’m fiddling with the diamond on her finger, watching it catch the light, reflecting the facets of life.
When she stirs she pecks a kiss on my cheek. “Sorry, I don’t mean to keep falling asleep.”
“It’s fine, ma petite fleur.”
My little flower. My English rose. She will always be that to me. Always.
“I can’t wait to get home. I hope the dogs have behaved. If I find Barney in shreds…well…” She stretches, curving her newly bloomed and revitalised body right in front of my face. Talk about torturing a man in public.
“Don’t worry, Odile has them all under control. I’m more worried about the shop still standing.” I kiss the top of her head, attempting a peek down the front of her sundress.
“You leave my shop to me, and you worry about the cows.”
“My cows are fine.” I grin back at her.
With Julia’s drive for perfection, we’ve created a cheese empire; our cheese mafia as she calls it. She runs an artisan shop in the town, and we ship all over France and further afield.
“It makes me so happy for you to think it’s home. I know leaving London is never easy.”
“It’s easier than you know, Henri.” She turns, eyes solemn. “The moment I first got out of that taxi last year, I knew it was meant to be my home. Something about the way it felt, the familiarity. And anyway, I’ve told you…”
“…Vitamin D is essential for your health.” I chime in. For such a long time I thought she was using that as an excuse for letting me stay in France. Then one day I saw her breathing deep, pulling air into her lungs, face tilted up to the sun, and I knew that she’d stayed there because she needed it, loved it. Now our farmhouse is covered in honeysuckle, and hanging baskets swinging every colour under the sun.
“What did you write in the diary, Julianna?”
In the reflection of the Eurostar window, I see her bite her lip.
“Tell me.”
“I wrote baby.”
I stare down at her wide-eyed. “No way. It’s too dangerous, and you know it.” She might have a new heart, but that doesn’t mean every day isn’t a fight to keep it. “No.” I state simply.
“Yes.” She snuggles back down, wrapping her arms through mine. “You know I always get what I want.”
I sigh, kissing her hair. “I know, ma petite fleur, I know.”
The End.
Coming Soon
The Ex-Apocolypse
Book two in the Notting Hill Sisterhood.
Number one life mistake: Marrying the wrong man.
Twenty-nine and a divorced mother of two. It's not quite what I had planned.
Life is funny though, it gives with one hand and takes with the other.
Now it's time to date again, so everyone says, but my ex has left apocalyptic devastation in the place where I once used to have trust and hope.
Enter Ryan Simmonds, cocky, infuriating, and downright irresistible.
He says he can show me how to find the perfect man. The caveat, though, is that I mustn't fall for him.
Which should be easy... right?
Available t
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Acknowledgments
It seems the more of books you write the harder this page becomes.
Therefore I shall keep this short and brief.
Thank you, Nikki A, Andrea Lynn, Sarah and Donna for being my champions with this book.
Thanks to all the girls at GMB for their endless chasing emails asking me where things are.
For my readers who I hope love this book as much as I do, thank you for your continued support.
And of course my long suffering family.
This book came about while I was in the midst of writer’s block on a different project. I started Julia Cameron’s The Artists Way, and within a couple of weeks Julia and Henri just burst into my mind.
So with this in mind, I’ll be enterally grateful to Julia Cameron for unleashing my blocked inner voice and reminding me why I do this.
Anna
Surrey, 2021
