The Life We Almost Had
Page 1
AMELIA HENLEY is a hopeless romantic who has a penchant for exploring the intricacies of relationships through writing heartbreaking, high-concept love stories.
Amelia also writes psychological thrillers under her real name, Louise Jensen. As Louise Jensen she has sold over a million copies of her global number one bestsellers. Her stories have been translated into twenty-five languages and optioned for TV as well as featuring on the USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestsellers list. Louise’s books have been nominated for multiple awards.
The Life We Almost Had is the first story she’s written as Amelia Henley and she can’t wait to share it with readers.
Copyright
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2020
Copyright © Louise Jensen 2020
Louise Jensen asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © June 2020 ISBN: 9780008375751
Version 2020-06-15
Note to Readers
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Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780008375744
For Glyn Appleby,
With much love.
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Note to Readers
Dedication
Prologue
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Part Two
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Part Three
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Part Four
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Chapter Sixty-Two
Chapter Sixty-Three
Chapter Sixty-Four
Chapter Sixty-Five
Chapter Sixty-Six
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Chapter Seventy
Chapter Seventy-One
Chapter Seventy-Two
Chapter Seventy-Three
Chapter Seventy-Four
Chapter Seventy-Five
Chapter Seventy-Six
Part Five
Chapter Seventy-Seven
Chapter Seventy-Eight
Chapter Seventy-Nine
Chapter Eighty
Part Six
Chapter Eighty-One
Chapter Eighty-Two
Chapter Eighty-Three
Author’s Note
Book Club Questions for The Life We Almost Had
Acknowledgements
Extract
About the Publisher
Prologue
Seven years. It’s been seven years since that night on the beach. I had laid on the damp sand with Adam, his thumb stroking mine. Dawn smudged the sky with its pink fingers while the rising sun flung glitter across the sea. We’d faced each other curled onto our sides, our bodies speech marks, unspoken words passing hesitantly between us; an illusory dream. Don’t ever leave me, I had silently asked him. I won’t, his eyes had silently replied.
But he did.
He has.
My memories are both painful and pleasurable to recall. We were blissfully happy until gradually we weren’t. Every cross word, every hard stare, each time we turned our backs on each other in bed gathered like storm clouds hanging over us, ready to burst, drenching us with doubt and uncertainty until we questioned what we once thought was unquestionable.
Can love really be eternal?
I can answer that now because the inequitable truth is that I am hopelessly, irrevocably, lost without him.
But does he feel the same?
I turn over the possibility of life without Adam, but each time I think of myself without him, no longer an us, my heart breaks all over again.
If only we hadn’t…
My chest tightens.
Breathe.
Breathe, Anna. You’re okay.
It’s a lie I tell myself, but gradually the horror of that day begins to dissipate with every slow inhale, with every measured exhale. It takes several minutes to calm myself. My fingers furling and unfurling, my nails biting into the tender skin of my palms until my burning sorrow subsides.
Focus.
I am running out of time. I’ve been trying to write a letter but the words won’t come. My notepaper is still stark white. My pen once again poised, ink waiting to stain the blank page with my tenuous excuses.
My secrets.
But not my lies. There’s been enough of those. Too many.
I am desperate to see him once more and make it right.
All of it.
I
wish I knew what he wanted. My eyes flutter closed. I try to conjure his voice, imagining he might tell me what to do. Past conversations echo in my mind as I search for a clue.
If you love someone, set them free, he had once told me, but I brush the thought of this away. I don’t think it can apply to this awful situation we have found ourselves in. Instead I recall the feel of his body spooned around mine, warm breath on the back of my neck, promises drifting into my ear.
Forever.
I cling on to that one word as tightly as I’d once clung on to his hand.
I loved him completely. I still do. Whatever happens now, after, my heart will still belong to him.
Will always belong to him.
I must hurry if I’m going to reach him before it’s too late. There’s a tremble in my fingers as I begin the letter, which will be both an apology and an explanation, but it seems impossible to put it all into words – the story of us. I really don’t have time to think of the life we had – the life we almost had – but I allow myself the indulgence. Memories gather: we’re on the beach, watching the sunrise; I’m introducing him to my mum – his voice shaking with nerves as he said hello; we’re meeting for the first time in that shabby bar. Out of order and back to front and more than anything I wish I could live it all again. Except that day. Never that day.
Again, the vice around my lungs tightens. In my mind I see it all unfold and I feel it. I feel it all: fear, panic, despair.
Breathe, Anna.
In and out. In and out. Until I am here again, pen gripped too tightly in my hand.
Focus.
I made a mistake.
I stare so intently at the words I have written that they jump around on the page. I’m at a loss to know how to carry on, when I remember one of the first things Adam had said to me: ‘Start at the beginning, Anna.’
And so I do.
Speedily, the nib of my pen scratches over the paper. I let it all pour out.
This is not a typical love story, but it’s our love story.
Mine and Adam’s.
And despite that day, despite everything, I’m not yet ready for it to end.
Is he?
Part One
‘This will be the adventure of a lifetime.’
NELL STEVENS – ANNA’S BEST FRIEND
Chapter One
Anna
Seven years before
The date I met Adam is forever etched onto my mind; it should have been my wedding day. I tucked my hair behind my ears; rather than being strewn with confetti, it was greasy and limp. Unwashed and unloved.
The plane taxied down the runway before it rose sharply into the sky, a frothy white tail in its wake. Out of the window was nothing but cloud, as thick and woolly as my thoughts. Each time I remembered the way I’d been dumped, virtually at the altar, my face burned with the shame of it.
Goodbye.
I wasn’t sure if I was saying farewell to England or to the man who had broken my heart.
Fingers threaded through mine and squeezed. Tears threatened to fall as I gazed down at my ringless hand. Ridiculously, one of the things that had excited me most about my honeymoon had been the anticipation of the sun tanning my skin around the plain gold band I’d chosen. Knowing that even if I removed my jewellery to go into the sea, the thin, pale strip of skin circling the second finger of my left hand would act as a clear indicator that I was married.
That I was loved.
‘Stop thinking about him.’ Nell clicked open her seatbelt as the safety light went out, and signalled to the cabin crew for a drink. I smoothed out the creases in my floaty linen dress and it struck me I was wearing white. Miserably I fiddled with the neckline, not embroidered with tiny pearls that shimmered from cream to lilac to pink under the lights, like the dress I had picked out. It was hard not to cry again remembering the perfectness of that day. Mum covering her mouth with both hands when I glided out of the changing rooms and twirled in front of the many mirrors. Everywhere I looked I had beamed back at myself.
‘That’s the one,’ Mum had whispered like we were in a church, not a bridal shop, but I didn’t need her to tell me that. I knew it was the one.
It was such a shame he wasn’t the one.
‘It won’t always hurt this much,’ Nell said; not that she’d know. She was usually the one breaking hearts, hers was still intact. ‘You’ve had a lucky escape. He wasn’t good enough for you. Besides, twenty-four is too young to be married. This isn’t the 1950s.’
‘If it were the 1950s, I’d have been married years ago and popped out a couple of kids by now.’ My throat swelled at the thought. I might have been young but I couldn’t wait to be a mother. Would I ever have children? I’d thought my future was mapped out, but now all I had was doubts and fears and a mountain of wedding gifts to return.
‘I can’t see you slicking on lipstick and tying a ribbon in your hair five minutes before your husband gets home. And that’s after a day cleaning windows with vinegar and beating carpets.’
‘I know who I’d like to beat,’ I muttered darkly.
‘I’ll drink to that.’ She flashed a smile. ‘And from now on, the only vinegar will be on the chips he told you that you shouldn’t eat.’
‘He was worried about my health.’
‘Bollocks was he. He was worried you’d realize you’re a normal-sized, goddess of a woman and leave him for somebody who didn’t keep calling you chubby. Anyway, let’s not give him a second thought. I’m ready to get this party started—’
‘Nell—’
‘I know, I know.’ She caught sight of my expression. ‘This isn’t what you wanted. I’m not the one who should be here and you’ve no chance of joining the mile-high club now—’
‘Nell—’
‘But. You can either spend the next ten days crying by the pool or try and make the best of it. I know you loved him, Anna—’
‘Nell Stevens.’ Her concerned eyes met mine and I knew she was worried she’d pushed it too far. ‘I just want to say… thank you. Not just for persuading me to come but… for all of it.’ Nell had dropped everything when I had called her at work, sobbing uncontrollably two weeks before my big day. She had kept me stocked up on vodka and ice cream while she phoned around the guests, explaining it was me who had had a change of heart. It was Nell who had talked me out of confronting Sonia Skelton when the rumours about her and my fiancé surfaced, and her who confiscated my phone at night so I couldn’t drunk-text the cheating scumbag at 3 a.m. She allowed me to retain some dignity, on the outside at least. Humiliation still stung each time I thought of him, and I thought of him often, but oddly my feelings around him were tangled in a mass of embarrassment and regret, underpinned with a slow, simmering anger. I’d wasted three years of my life. Honestly, I wasn’t sure it was him I actually missed or the idea of him. If you have to ask yourself ‘is it love’, it probably isn’t, is it?
Our foreheads touched and again her fingers entwined with mine. There was no need for words until our drinks were delivered. Nell dived on the miniature bottles with a ‘woo hoo’.
‘You’ve a lot to be grateful for.’ She unscrewed the gin and fizzed tonic into my glass.
‘Alcohol?’
‘That goes without saying. But the travel agent didn’t have to let you change the name on the ticket. Now you’ve got someone to rub sun cream on your back without expecting to get laid, and someone to hold your hair back when too much Sex on the Beach makes you sick.’
‘I’m not going to have sex on the beach or anywhere else… Oh.’ I realized she was talking about the cocktail.
‘You never know. We might meet two nice boys.’
‘No boys.’ I swigged my drink, bubbles tickling my nose. ‘No boys ever again.’
I raised my glass, arm hovering in the air until she raised hers.
‘This will be the adventure of a lifetime,’ she said and we chinked. She turned out to be right.
But rather than flying away from something,
I was flying towards something.
Towards him. To Adam.
I just didn’t know it then.
By the time the coach dropped us off at our hotel on the Spanish island of Alircia, it was nearly midnight but I still called Mum to let her know I’d arrived; she’d only worry otherwise.
‘We’re here.’ I tried to keep the sadness out of my voice but Mum heard it anyway.
‘It’ll get easier, Anna,’ she said, but I knew being alone hadn’t got easier for her. ‘Better with no one than the wrong one.’
‘I know.’ I did know. I’d accepted his proposal for myriad reasons: because of what I’d been through, was yet to go through, but none of them the right reason. The only reason.
Love.
I told Mum I’d speak to her soon. Nell and me hovered near the pots of exotic plants and flowers, waiting for the driver to empty the luggage hold; Nell plucked a bright pink bougainvillea and tucked it into my hair.
‘It’s so beautiful here,’ she exclaimed, but I barely registered the fairy lights twisted around the thick trunks of the palm trees that circled the pool. We wheeled our suitcases towards reception to check in. I was hot and exhausted. The gin I’d drunk earlier had left a residue on my tongue. A throbbing in my temples.
‘Check this out!’ Nell, typically, had abandoned her luggage and was sauntering into the bar. ‘Nightcap?’
‘I’m shattered.’ I was struggling with her case and mine. ‘I just want a shower and my bed.’
‘Spoilsport.’ She said it lightly but I felt a pang of guilt. I knew she’d used all her annual leave this year and had taken this time off unpaid to support me. The least I could do was let her have a drink.
‘I suppose because it’s all-inclusive it would be rude not to,’ I said.
I stayed with our things, stifling a yawn and hoping Nell would order us shots as she sashayed to the bar. Instead of something we could knock back quickly, she returned with two glasses brimming with orange liquid and stuffed with pink parasols, cocktail sticks spearing glacé cherries.
‘I asked for something fun,’ she shouted over Madonna who was ‘True Blue’. What was it with Spain and their fascination with English Eighties music?
I took a sip. ‘Jesus. We’ll sleep well after these.’
‘You think? I can only taste the orange. You’re such a lightweight. Hey, one o’clock.’