by Holly Miller
“You deserve more,” I whisper from the doorway. “I don’t want you to miss out on a single thing.”
I think back again to what Warren said. Maybe you’re no longer the guy to make her happy.
Back at the start I should have gone with my head, not my heart. I know it now as I knew it then. It was on me to hit the brakes, as soon as I sensed my head was losing the battle. I could have been smart. I should have been. Saved us both the agony of this. Because now that I’ve had a preview of the good things destiny has in store for her, I’m not sure I can bring myself to deprive her of them.
Callie’s got time to move on. Make a life for herself, do all the stuff she’s always wanted to. She can be the person, I realize, she can only ever half be with me.
69.
Callie
Seen this?” Liam skims a postcard over to me while we’re cleaning chainsaws in the workshop.
I wipe my hands and pick it up. It’s from Dave, a bird’s-eye view of the Amazon rain forest on the front, a précis of his latest adventures on the reverse. My heart pumps a little faster as I picture his life now, close to the equator—the boiling landscape and exotic discoveries, the shimmering wilderness of the rain forest.
“Weird, isn’t it?” Liam says.
“What is?”
He shrugs, like it should be obvious. “That a year ago Dave was hanging around here, eating crisps and mucking about on the quad-bike, and now he’s on the other side of the world. Bet he never comes home.”
I flip the postcard over. “Yeah. Weird. Sounds like he’s having a blast, though.”
Liam removes the engine casing from his saw, sets it on the bench. “Not my cup of tea. But yeah.”
I laugh. “I know. Six months in a rain forest would be your idea of hell.”
He shudders as though we’re talking an actual means of torture. “Surprised you’ve never done it, though.”
Smiling, I turn the postcard over again. “Done what?”
“Traveled,” he says, characteristically blunt. “You’re always on about it. You should go to Chile, find that bird.”
Blinking back an image of Grace expressing similar sentiments, I slide a smile Liam’s way. “I thought you said I’d have a better chance of seeing a snow leopard.”
He almost-but-not-quite smiles back. “Well, I’m sure you’d have fun looking for it. What’s stopping you?”
I shrug and turn away, mumble something about timing. Liam’s monosyllable disorder must be catching.
“Timing’s perfect, isn’t it?” he counters. “Your contract must be nearly up.”
It’s true—it’s up in a few weeks, and there’s no news yet on the money they’d need to renew it. Fiona’s assured me they want me, but it’s just a case of when and how. At the very least, she says, they could offer me scrub-clearance work in the interim, which would be better than nothing. “In a month,” I tell Liam.
“They said what’s happening yet?”
“Nope. They’re keeping me in suspense.”
Liam frowns. “Didn’t they just get a load of new funding in from the grants award scheme? Sure I saw an e-mail about it last night. You could go off traveling, and then—”
And it’s at this point, with impeccable timing, that the workshop door opens and Fiona sticks her head through the gap. “Callie, can I have a word?”
70.
Joel
Taking a seat at Dad’s kitchen table, I try to remember how long it’s been since the two of us talked properly. Perhaps it was when I’d just quit my job. He was sounding off at me in the back garden, aided by Mrs. Morris next door (who’d eavesdropped on the whole thing and just so happened to agree I was most irresponsible).
Good times, good times.
Pink-skinned and still in shorts from his Monday morning badminton session, Dad hands me a coffee. I notice he’s got one of those straps on his glasses, to hold them to his head while he’s doing something sporty.
For a moment I wonder if it’s cruel to spring this on him without warning. But the clues are starting to mount up fast. I was here only last week when my phone rang from the living room and Amber yelled Warren’s name. I darted back in there, stomach sawn in two, but thankfully Dad had popped upstairs for something. Still, it can only be so long before he clocks what’s going on.
“Well, this is a nice surprise,” Dad’s saying, which really is the most woeful of misjudgments.
I take a moment to survey the kitchen, as if for the last time. Overripe bananas, Bella’s nursery tea towel, marigolds spread-eagling the tap. I look at it all like nothing will be the same once the words are out of my mouth. I suppose in many ways, it won’t be.
“I know I’m not your son, Dad. I know about Warren.”
The color slides from his skin. He doesn’t say anything, or even move his mouth.
“Dad.” I lean across the table. “It’s okay. I know everything.”
The kitchen clock grinds on through the silence. Dad’s become a waxwork, too still to be real.
Eventually he speaks. “How?”
“Does it matter?”
He exhales heavily, which I take to mean no. “He didn’t treat your mother well, Joel.”
“I know.”
Dad’s eyes golf-ball. “Have you seen him?”
“Once. He lives in Cornwall.”
A tut. Like Warren’s some kind of philandering tax dodger and Cornwall is code for Bermuda.
“You should have told me, Dad. That he’d tried to get in touch.”
Dad frowns. “I panicked. I didn’t want him back in our lives. He had . . . no right to you. No right at all.”
Other than being my biological dad, you mean. “But you had no right to keep it from me, either.”
He sighs. Pinches his temples. I can see this conversation’s going to test his commitment to non-communication. “I suppose I thought you’d find out one day. I was probably just trying to delay the inevitable.”
I let the clock tick on. What can I say, really? I can’t forgive him this yet, but still I want to hear his side.
“Your mother did try to tell him she was pregnant, back then. But Warren said he was off traveling before she could get the words out.”
“So you stepped in.”
He exhales. “Not at first. She wouldn’t even agree to a date with me until your first birthday.” A thin smile. “That’s why you were always so close, I think. You had that time together, just the two of you, in that funny little bedsit of hers.”
I trace the outline of a heart onto the table with my index finger. I did always have a special bond with Mum. She’d dance me in her arms around the living room, whisper me stories when my siblings had gone to bed. Confide in me like an old friend. I always assumed it was because I was her firstborn. But news of that year spent together, just the two of us, already feels like treasure to me. Something precious unearthed from freshly turned soil.
I sip my coffee. “So you went on a date and . . . ?”
Still hesitant, he clears his throat. “She moved in soon afterward, fell pregnant with your brother. We got married, then Tamsin came along.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me? Before, I mean. When I was younger.”
“We always planned to. But after she died, I didn’t feel it was my place. I suppose that’s partly why I was so angry when Warren turned up. You have to understand, Joel—we’d built an entire life together by the time she passed. We’d never heard from Warren. I didn’t want to talk about any of that again.” He frowns. Fiddles with his glasses. “Maybe some of my choices weren’t perfect. But in the end, your mother and I were married for twelve years. We had three kids, a house, money, friends. And I believe—I truly believe—she was happy.”
Honestly? I believe it too.
“Look, maybe she didn’t love me in the . . . wild, crazy way she lov
ed Warren. But when she had you kids—well, that was a different kind of wild, crazy love. A better kind. And Warren never wanted a family—that was one of the first things he told her when they met. He knew that much about himself, at least.”
I agree with Warren’s stance. But, luckily for me, I guess, he failed pretty spectacularly to stick to it.
“He knew what he’d lost, though.”
I nod. “Must be why he tried so hard to make contact.”
“No, long before that. After your mum got ill for the last time, I saw him leaving her ward at the hospital. He’d obviously had a few regrets.”
“You saw him?”
“Yes. I’d have known him anywhere. Funny, though.”
“What was?
“Well, she’d only been admitted that morning. I hadn’t told a soul. I suppose your mother must have got in touch with him. I mean, the man’s a lot of things, but he’s not psychic.”
Somewhere inside, a rush of realization.
Dad shrugs like it’s irrelevant in the end, that his wife’s ex-lover rocked up at her deathbed. “So how do you see things working out, between you and him?”
“I . . . I don’t know. Do you mind—me keeping in touch with him?”
“No” is the extent of the encouragement he’s prepared to give me. “But be careful. That’s all I’d say.”
A surge of affection, warm as bathwater. “You’ll always be my dad.”
His frown deepens. “Likewise. You’ll always be . . .”
He doesn’t finish the sentence. But that he even made a stab at it is good enough for me.
* * *
• • •
“Friend of a friend my arse.”
“Joel?”
I’m in my new favorite bolt-hole, the garden, staring at frost-fringed roofs. The air’s icy tonight, but I haven’t bothered with a coat.
“You didn’t hear Mum was dying from a friend of a friend. You dreamed about her, right at the start. You dreamed she’d die of cancer, and you finished it because you wanted her to go and live her life, before it was too late.”
A sigh. “I suppose you were going to figure it out one day. You’re far cleverer than me, thankfully.”
“Yeah, yeah. Tell me the truth.”
“I dreamed . . . I saw her in hospital. Then two nights later, I dreamed about her funeral.”
“So you knew she’d have kids, go on to have a full life. You weren’t a selfish bugger at all—you were the opposite. You ended it because you wanted her to be happy.”
A yawning jaw of silence.
“Yes, all right?” he says eventually. “Yes. She had fourteen years left, and I knew with all my issues and lack of money and drinking, I wasn’t going to make her happy, in the short term at least.”
I breathe my pain into the rimy air, watch it balloon into tiny, angry storm clouds. “So that’s why you’ve been telling me to let Callie go.”
Warren exhales. The line crackles. “When I went to see your mum in hospital, I knew I’d done the right thing. That she’d lived a good life. That she was dying happy. I chose not to mess up what time she had left, and for what it’s worth, I think I made the right decision.”
Unexpectedly, I feel the boulder of guilt on my back lighten a little. Not much, but enough for me to notice. Warren knew too, Mum.
Maybe subconsciously I didn’t want to mess up the time Mum had left, either.
“Just so you know, Joel, with me and your mum it was true love. As a person I was fairly useless, but I loved your mum. When we held hands and looked at each other that last time, everything had been worth it, to know she was happy.”
I think of Callie cocooned in our bed. Of her present and her future and the end. I think about all those things. And then I know what I have to do.
71.
Callie
The night after Guy Fawkes, I call Joel while I’m knee-deep in water in the middle of a marsh to ask if he fancies dinner at the new tapas place in town.
For the past few days I’ve been mulling something over, and now I’m buoyant with excitement about it. All afternoon as I’m trudging around in waders and wellies while the rain pours, I imagine revealing my plan, a beatific smile on my face. I picture myself assuring him that this—this—is why it was the right call not to tell me. Because I’m able to plot a future now that I simply wouldn’t be bothering with otherwise.
* * *
• • •
In the end, I don’t bring it up until dessert.
Joel seems subdued tonight, distracted. His mind is elsewhere, and I start to worry that perhaps my timing’s all off. I know he’s barely slept lately—he’s been as exhausted this week as I’ve ever known him.
But the evening’s escaping, and I can’t wait any longer.
“I had a meeting with Fiona on Monday.”
Joel turns his dark eyes to me, and my nerves are quelled. Despite the low mood, his expression remains loyally loving. “About your contract?”
“They’ve offered me a permanent role.”
“Cal, that’s . . . that’s amazing. Monday? Why didn’t you say?”
“Well, I’ve been . . . The thing is, she’s tipped me off about this cottage that’s coming up for rent on the far side of Waterfen. An old reed-cutter’s place. She took me to see it yesterday. It’s gorgeous, Joel. We could live there, you and me, and we’d be right on the reserve, surrounded by the trees and the birds and the reeds . . .”
His eyes meet mine now, but I can’t quite interpret the look on his face. Is he emotional with pride or something sadder?
“Fiona said she could give me a few weeks’ break between contracts too.” I smile, look down at my half-eaten dessert. “They never need much persuasion to save a bit of cash.”
His expression asks me to fill in the blanks.
Here goes. “You remember Dave, the guy who left soon after I started, to move to Brazil? Well, he sent us a postcard.” I slide it across the table to him. “And it got me thinking . . .”
Joel picks up the postcard, scans it quickly. “You want to do this? Go to Brazil?”
“No. I thought I’d go to Chile, to Lauca National Park. Try to find that bird.”
Joel smiles at me—for possibly the first time tonight—and swigs from his glass. “I think that’s a brilliant idea.”
I spoon up a little more crema catalana. I’m pleased I decided to have three courses—I mean, there are ninety-year-olds all over the place who’ve eaten cheese and drunk whisky and smoked like chimneys their whole lives. “And I was thinking . . . once I’m back we can move into the Waterfen cottage, and I’ll work at the reserve.”
He nods—but so slowly it feels almost redundant. “Well, maybe you shouldn’t come back, Cal.”
I do a sort of mental double take. “What?”
Another swig of wine. “I think . . . you should go to Chile for as long as you want.”
“Yes, a few weeks, like I—”
“And after that, you should go wherever the wind takes you.”
“Well,” I say nervously, “the wind would bring me back here. To you.”
“No.” Though definite, the word sounds wrong, strangely out of context. Like the call of a migrant bird blown off-course.
“No what?”
“You need to live your life, Cal.”
“But I would be—”
“No, I mean, really live. Forget about me. Do all the things you want to do, and more.”
I laugh. “What are you talking about? I don’t want to forget about you.”
“It’s for the best.”
“Joel, no . . . What?”
“This . . . isn’t going to work, Cal.”
Though the restaurant’s warm and full, pleasantly buzzing, our table feels suddenly cold.
“Joe
l,” I breathe. “We have to try. If we don’t, then we may as well give up.”
The look on his face burrows deep into my gut and stays there.
“You are,” I realize slowly, my eyes jumping with tears. “You’re giving up. You’re giving up?”
“I’m . . . accepting reality. That what we have . . . we can’t make it work.”
Across the table, I take his hand. “No, this is . . . No. We belong together, Joel. No one . . . no one can make me laugh like you do. It makes me happy just to wake up next to you every day. No one’s ever made me feel as if the world’s out there for the taking the way you have. Without you, I’d probably still be working in the café, watching my life go by. You’ve made me excited for the future again. We can get through this . . . I know we can.”
He shakes his head. “I’m only going to hold you back, Callie. I don’t want you to miss out on the . . . amazing life you deserve.”
“No. No. An amazing life—that’s the one I have with you.”
Somewhere behind his eyes, a door swings shut. I notice his fingers tightening around the stem of his wineglass. He’s hardly touched his dessert. “Not if I can’t do what you need me to do.”
“What do I need you to do?” But I know, I know.
“You need me to carry on as if nothing’s happened, to live with what I dreamed every day, pretending I didn’t. I can’t do it, Cal. I just . . . can’t.” The words heave from his chest like a dying breath. “You should forget me now. Get out there and live.”
What I want to say is, How? But instead I say, “You’re wrong.”
“Someone . . . someone else could give you so much more than I can.”
I take a sharp breath, startle back from even the thought of it.
Joel’s voice splinters. “I can’t deny you a future, Callie. Possibilities. Nothing would make me happier than to see you happy. And while we’re living with what I dreamed every day, that’s never going to happen. You know that, don’t you?”
Piece by piece, this conversation is taking me apart. My fingers have gone numb, my toes are detached from my feet—but still I’m going to fight for us. “No. I love you, Joel, and I know you love me. This is too good to give up. There’s got to be a way we can . . . Why don’t you go back to Diana?” I say, in desperation. “She said she might be able to help.”
