After the End

by Natasha Preston

I’ll tell her later that it’s not happening, but I can’t be bothered to argue it here. There is no point, and the night has already taken the most awkward turn, so there’s no need to add to it.

  “I might take off soon. I’m pretty tired,” I lie.

  Tired is the last thing I feel. I’m so very awake, my thudding pulse nowhere near calm enough to allow sleep. But the air is getting even thicker, and I need to leave.

  I’ve done, what, ten minutes in Linc’s company. That’s plenty.

  “What? You’ve not even finished one drink yet!” Mel replies.

  Shut up.

  I give her a pointed look. If she takes three seconds to think, she’ll understand why I need to get out of here. I can’t sit around a table and make plans with one of the men responsible for my brother’s death.

  Jabbing my fist into my stomach, I try to take away the pressure that’s coiling inside.

  “I’m going after this one anyway, Tilly,” Linc says, tilting his almost-empty Coke in my direction.

  “That’s not …” I clamp my lips together. He won’t believe me if I try telling him that he’s not the reason I want to go. “I just want to go home.”

  My parents won’t like me being here. They’re more important.

  I thought I could handle it. I thought I could push it aside, but I can’t. Robbie’s death isn’t something that can be ignored. I feel it in every breath I take. Being around Linc only makes it that much harder to breathe.

  “I’ll come with you,” Hanna says, always having my back.

  “No, you stay here and have fun.” I drain the last of my drink and stand up. “Night, guys.”

  I don’t wait around long enough for any of them to respond. I hightail it to the door, gripping my handbag tight. Why I thought that would be a good idea, I’ll never know. Maybe I’m going crazy.

  The cool late-April air hits me as I reach the outside of the bar. Closing my eyes, I focus for a minute on the light wind moving my hair, the smell of Italian food leaking from the restaurant next door.

  Grounding, my therapist, Jennifer, called it.

  I open my eyes and look up at the sky. It’s a clear night, the dark sky dotted with thousands of stars.

  Ground, ground, ground.

  I’m okay.

  “Tilly.” Linc’s voice sends ice creeping down my spine.

  I turn.

  He steps closer, his eyes burning a hole in mine. “If anyone leaves, it’s me. I can’t …” Sighing, he pinches the bridge of his nose. “Just … I’m the one to leave.”

  Right now, I want to be the one to leave.

  “I don’t …” Jesus. I take a breath. “Linc, I want to be okay with being around you.”

  “But you’re not,” he finishes. “I get that, Tilly, and I am so sorry.”

  “I know you are,” I whisper.

  “Tell me what you want me to do. I can get contractors in to renovate the house, if it’s too much, me being here.”

  My parents would jump at that, I’m sure.

  I shake my head. “No, I don’t want this situation,” I say, clutching my heart, “to have that kind of control over me.”

  Besides, he said they couldn’t afford to get contractors in.

  “Should I do better at staying away from you, or do you want to have it all out? Shout and scream at me, if that will help.” He steps closer, and my heart plummets to the floor. “Hell, go full-on and hit me. Do whatever you need to do.”

  From here, I can smell the woodsy scent of his aftershave.

  I clear my throat. “If you’re still needing to ease the guilt, I recommend therapy. I’m not going to be the one to do that for you.”

  His eyes flicker with pain and then determination. “I don’t want you to shout at me for my benefit. I understand my part in Robbie’s death, and while I will never forgive myself, I have accepted it. There is nothing I can do to lessen the guilt; I have accepted that, too.”

  “Robbie wouldn’t want you to spend your life feeling guilty.” I’m not really sure why I said that. But I know that it’s true, and I know that my brother would have wanted me to tell Linc that.

  A ghost of a smile touches his lips. “He wouldn’t, but it’s not something I can control. Robbie wouldn’t want you to spend your life in pain.”

  I dip my eyes, my heart almost ripping out of my chest. “Yeah, well, that’s not something I can control either.”

  “Why don’t you go back inside with your friends and enjoy being out? I’ll go.”

  “Did you drive here?” I ask.

  He frowns. “I walked.”

  We’re only twenty minutes out from the town, but I wouldn’t walk it alone at night. I always get a taxi.

  “Can I walk with you?” I ask.

  He watches me for a second. “Sure.”

  It’s like I’ve left my body, and I’m staring down at this scene below me, screaming. Why do I want to walk with him? I just spent ten minutes in a bar, wishing I were anywhere else.

  Linc starts walking first, and I keep with his pace.

  We walk in the direction of home in complete silence.

  Linc steals a look at me about every seven steps. He’s probably as confused as I am. If I hadn’t blurted out the words, I could have been in a taxi right now, away from him.

  But here we are.

  I should really call Jennifer ASAP because something is up with me.

  “Are you okay, Tilly?” He sounds like he’s asking a bit more than about my immediate health. Like he thinks there’s something mentally wrong with me.

  “I think so.”

  “One minute, you’re practically sprinting out of a pub to get away from me, and the next, you want to walk together.”

  “I remember what happened back there.”

  “All right. Care to share why it happened?”

  “I don’t know how I really feel about you,” I say, the words falling out of my mouth before my brain has time to engage.

  Linc stops. His hand reaches out to stop me, too, but he hesitates and drops it back by his side. I plant my feet anyway and turn to him. We’re alone now, on the edge of town before the long, stretching path to our little village ahead.

  “You can’t forgive me, but you also can’t forget that we were friends. You’re angry because I was so stupid that night and didn’t stop Stanley from driving, but you also know that blaming me isn’t helping anything. You want to hate me, but our past stops you.

  “We were friends, Tilly. We got along so well. When our group was together, it was always you and me messing around or talking until someone made us stop and join in with everyone else. We spent hours watching old horror, listening to old rock, or walking around aimlessly. I miss that. I miss the ease of our friendship and how, no matter what kind of shitty day I had, you would always be the one to snap me out of a bad mood.”

  His words might as well be razor blades firing at my body. Everything he just said is true. I miss our friendship; I didn’t really know how much until I saw him again. Missing someone who was part of something so awful shouldn’t be possible.

  Why isn’t there something wired into me, something that stops me from wanting to be his friend again? I love my brother, so why can’t I fully hate Lincoln Reid?

  “You’re right,” I say. My shoulders sag. “I’m angry with you, and I miss you. I don’t know how those two things fit in the same space. They shouldn’t, but they do.”

  His eyes flicker with different emotions—disappointment, guilt, sadness, and maybe hope. “What do you want to do about this, Tilly? I’ll follow your lead.”

  I shrug, the impossible situation weighing me down like lead. “I don’t know what can happen.”

  I’m not sure how to get past the anger. It’s so much stronger than everything else. Robbie’s death was preventable, and that’s not something I can get past. All Linc had to do was tell Stanley he shouldn’t drive.

  How hard is it to not get into a car?

  “Things will ne
ver be the way they used to be,” I say to myself as much as him.

  He wets his dry lips and swallows hard. “I’m so sorry, Tilly.”

  “I know you are,” I reply and turn in the direction of home again.

  6

  Tilly

  Linc and I walk the rest of the way in a tense silence that makes me want to run in the opposite direction and never look back. This is all my own stupid fault.

  Why did I think this was a good idea?

  Walking home together was an old Tilly and Linc thing—back when we’d hang out in a small pub in town with loose morals and an entire lack of respect for underage drinking laws, and then we’d walk home tipsy, grinning from ear to ear. The new us doesn’t do that. We’re strangers now. We knew each other as teens, but I’m twenty-one, and he’s twenty-three; we’re adults.

  At this point in our lives, I should be finishing up uni, and Linc … well, he never spoke about what he wanted to do. It was part of the mysterious thing he had going on, but I doubt this was part of his plan.

  He keeps a healthy distance between us, walking almost on the kerb. One wrong step, and he would topple over, but that seems to be preferential than getting too close to me. I don’t really know how to take that, so I try not to obsess.

  Up ahead, our houses come into view. His looks like it’s been vacant for years. Linc’s neighbour on the other side mows the front lawn when he mows his own, but that hasn’t been in a while, so even the front garden doesn’t look too good anymore. At least it fits with the dirty windows and dead flower beds.

  “How are you getting on in the house?” I ask.

  It’s nice to have a safe topic. Maybe, if we can stick to surface-level conversations when I run into him—or walk home with him—I can get through the few months he’s going to be here.

  Or I could do what I’m supposed to and ignore him completely.

  He steals a look at me, arching his eyebrow. He’s on to me, but I know he will play along. So much about Linc has changed, and so much is the same. He’s quieter and withdrawn, and he looks like he’s constantly in pain. When we used to hang out together, he would always joke with me and wear a smile. And, now, he doesn’t drink. But not because he’s ill.

  Please.

  “Progress is slow. But Jack and Ian are helping next week, so hopefully, we’ll be able to get the kitchen floor ripped out and made good.”

  I want to know what it looks like inside. Linc’s parents were house-proud; nothing was ever out of place. It’s been left for years, so it must be so different now, especially with four years’ worth of dust. It definitely will look different after the floor is replaced.

  But I can’t go in there.

  “You couldn’t just clean, refloor, and paint?”

  He shakes his head. “Some of the kitchen cabinets were … damaged.” His voice deepens toward the end of the sentence, hinting at something more.

  How were they damaged?

  “Sounds like there’s a story there?” I ask.

  I watch him to try to see if I can detect a lie. Most of the time, Linc is a closed book, and I don’t have a clue what he’s thinking, but very occasionally, like an eclipse, I can tell.

  There are things I preferred to tell Linc instead of Hanna and Mel. Not now, of course. I can’t talk to him about anything deep and real anymore.

  So, why do I still feel like I can trust him with my secrets?

  Because you can.

  Linc is loyal.

  “Do you want to hear it?” he asks on a sigh.

  “Do you want to tell me?”

  A hint of the old him shines through as he smirks, making his eyes lighten. “We don’t bullshit, Tilly.”

  “We don’t bullshit.”

  Those words have been spoken between us many times before. We always demanded the truth from each other, probably because we both equally hate when people don’t say what they mean and waste time in being hurt and angry over it.

  I suppose our friendship was an odd one. We didn’t spend nearly enough time together to be as open and close as we were. But it was easy, and us hanging out together, those are some of the best memories I have.

  “No. No bullshit,” I say, stopping because we’re getting dangerously close to my house.

  My parents can’t see this. They’re not ready to be around him … if they ever will be.

  He stops and digs his hands in his pockets. “I happened.”

  “We said, no bullshit. What does ‘I happened’ even mean?” Oh. “Wait, you damaged the kitchen?”

  “It was a really bad day.”

  “Which one?” I whisper.

  He averts his eyes, suddenly finding something across the street incredibly interesting. So, we never bullshit, but we can and have chosen not to talk if we’re not ready.

  Whichever day it was—and I have a pretty good guess—he isn’t ready to talk about it. I have a hunch it was Robbie’s funeral. That was the worst day of my life. There was no more pretending that he could wake up. When a body is buried in the ground, that kind of kills any chance of hope even if that hope was an impossibility. It was also the first time I spoke to Linc since the accident. I told him to go to hell. Three days later, the Reid family left.

  “What happens now, Tilly?”

  I instantly know what he means as he looks over his shoulder at my house. We’re three doors down.

  “My parents wouldn’t …”

  “Yeah,” he rasps as his eyes finally meet mine again, but I have to look away because the agony behind the dark blue is too much to bear.

  My breath catches as I feel the pain he’s in.

  “You go first, so I know you’re in safely.”

  I still don’t look at him as I walk past. “Thank you,” I whisper, darting along the path while jabbing the heel of my palm into the searing pain in my chest.

  7

  Linc

  I watch Tilly enter her house and wait another five minutes before I start walking again. Partly because I want to make us walking home in the same direction as inconspicuous as possible and partly because I can’t move.

  She’s still not okay with me, and I don’t know if she ever will be.

  This afternoon, at the restaurant, she admitted that she wasn’t okay, but then she didn’t want me to leave the pub, and she let me walk her home.

  What do I do with that?

  There’s no clear path with her. I don’t know if she really wants me to stay away or not.

  I don’t know what any of that means, but I feel a spark of hope ignite in my gut.

  I’ve known for years now that nothing will happen with Tilly. There’s too much bad history, but that doesn’t stop me from wanting everything.

  Where she is concerned, I’ll always want more.

  I trudge the final steps home, my boots thudding against the path.

  Her house is on my left, but I don’t dare turn my head in case I see her parents. They shouldn’t have to make eye contact with me. I owe it to them to make my presence as pain-free as I can.

  My phone pings with a text message as I let myself into the house. It’s strange, being back here. I never thought I would come home. My parents wanted to, but Emma and Dan lost a child, and that’s not something you get over. We could never move back next door to them.

  That is another reason Tilly and I could never be together. Her family wouldn’t want to be in the same room as mine.

  I slam the door with a little more force than needed and tug my phone from my pocket.

  Ian: You cool?

  Linc: Yeah, man. See you later.

  Chucking my phone and keys on the side table, I head into the kitchen to make a coffee. Since Robbie died, I’ve not wanted a drink, and I’ve not touched a drop, but seeing Tilly and knowing I’m hurting her make me want to get off-my-face drunk.

  I won’t. I would never do that to Robbie’s memory. My friend is dead because of alcohol, so what does that say about me if I take up drinking again? Even the s
mell of alcohol takes me back to that day.

  I boil the kettle and look out the window. I can’t see her house from this room, only her front garden, and that’s probably a good thing.

  Shit, I need to get this house finished as soon as possible.

  Seeing her again has made me as obsessed as I felt when I first realised I loved her. It was fucking awful back then. I can still feel the gripping pain of not only the realisation that I’d lost someone I loved, but also that I’d never see her again.

  Now, she’s here, in the flesh, and it’s taking every ounce of control I have not to beg her to forgive me.

  I want a chance.

  I want it fucking all.

  The odds of her giving me a chance for what I want are nonexistent. I’m not stupid enough to think that, even if she were open to more with me, it would work. Families get involved when you’re more. If she and her parents managed to forgive me, they probably wouldn’t forgive Stanley. And what about my parents? Emma was devastated when my mum and dad managed to get a top lawyer to stop Stanley from doing any prison time.

  He’s my brother, and I never wanted to see him behind bars, but I understood why he needed to be there. You should never be able to kill someone and walk away. But Stanley walked away with community service, a fine, and a driving ban.

  Six short months of picking up rubbish for Robbie’s life. Even I can see the injustice in that.

  My hands are itching to reach for my phone and send her a text, so I busy myself with making my coffee. We managed to have a conversation, but that doesn’t mean she wants me to contact her. Besides, I don’t know if she still has the same number.

  If she does, I know it by heart.

  I’m not as sad as that sounds. I have a near-identic memory and can probably recall every phone number I’ve ever had.

  I take the coffee into the living room and sit down. It’s been a while since I’ve sat in here. I’ve actively refrained from coming here. There are a lot of memories in this room. My parents always worked long hours, so on the occasions when Tilly hung out at mine, our group would be in here, watching old horror movies.

  Her ghost is stronger in this room than anywhere else.