‘You’re going to Berlin?’ I ask. We stand apart, our whole bodies tense as we wait for each other to say more, like two bad actors in a play.
‘I told you. I talked about it tonight before you left me. The Preston offices were cancelled, and there was talk of an offer in Berlin. I’ve spoken to my boss tonight and it’s going ahead. I said I’d go.’ He steps towards me. ‘I told you about it,’ he says again, frowning, not understanding. ‘I told you how it had always been my plan to stay with the company, that they have a habit of sending me on random projects. I told you how much I’d dread the flight, how much I hate flying. And you didn’t seem bothered about any of it. You barely seemed to listen. I wondered if maybe you just didn’t feel well. But then you left. And then I wondered, amongst a hundred other possible reasons, if you’d just decided it wasn’t worth spending any more time together, if I was thinking of going there anyway.’
I’d heard nothing about Berlin or his plan when he was talking in the restaurant, because I’d been fading from him, trying so hard not to let it happen in front of his eyes. I am furious with myself, and swallow down my anger to be able to speak to him evenly. ‘I would never do that.’ Daniel going somewhere would not make me want to disappear. It would make me want to drink in every possible second I had with him. ‘When are you going?’
‘In a few weeks. There’s just some paperwork to sort, and an apartment. It’s a year’s contract, to start with.’
I fight the sob that lodges itself in my throat. ‘Are you excited?’
He frowns. ‘I suppose so. It’s all been quite sudden. It’s just designing offices again but like I said, it kind of fits into the career plan I had. I haven’t thought much about it yet though because I didn’t know if I was going to accept it or not.’
‘But Berlin is a good opportunity. It’ll be …’
‘It’ll be fine. I’ll be facing my fear of flying so that’s positive, I suppose. But it feels different now I know you’ve changed your own plans. I thought you were moving away too. But you’re staying here now? Since when?’
‘Since you,’ I say simply.
Daniel stares at me. ‘You only met up with Nina on Saturday to make plans for Thailand, didn’t you? For a year? You seemed so sure that you needed to do it. I wondered if you might not go and meet Nina that morning, and I kind of hoped you wouldn’t. But it was your choice, so I didn’t say anything.’
My stomach crunches at his words. ‘I wish you had. I kept telling myself it was the right thing to do.’ I look down at the pavement that’s sleek with rain, thinking of the other Erica, a strangely superior version of myself who probably wouldn’t ever get herself into messes like this. ‘But then I got to know you. And then when I was offered the job, it just all seemed to slot into place. I realized that staying here would be more of an adventure, in a way, than going away. I was so excited to tell you tonight.’
‘I would have been excited too,’ Daniel says, his voice cool. ‘But you didn’t tell me, did you? You left me in a restaurant making me worry about you for ages when I had no idea where you’d gone, and then eventually thinking you’d played some kind of trick on me.’
‘I didn’t trick you.’
‘So tell me what you did do!’ he explodes. ‘Because I’m struggling to understand what it was that made you sneak from the restaurant, and not tell me that you were leaving me there.’
‘I couldn’t tell you.’
‘You took your bag. You had your phone. Couldn’t you use it?’
‘No.’
Daniel is silent. Thunder rumbles in the distance. ‘I don’t understand why you couldn’t just have stayed in the restaurant and told me your plans. It might have changed everything, Erica.’ There’s a flash of an image in my mind: Daniel on the phone in his flat, telling his boss no, his face tense as he took a risk to stay here with me. My heart sinks.
‘If I’d stayed in Luigi’s with you,’ I ask him, ‘and told you I wasn’t going, would you have told your boss that you didn’t want the Berlin job? Is that what you’re saying?’
He shakes his head. ‘I don’t want to think about it, because it’s too …’ He stops, sighs, starts again. ‘That isn’t what happened. I don’t even know what did happen, because you won’t tell me. Why were you going to change your plans for me when you can’t even be honest with me? It doesn’t make any sense.’
‘I was wrong, and I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I thought I could work round it.’
‘Work round what?’ Daniel’s face is confused, angry.
‘I …’ the temptation glimmers, a pearl in a shell. Tell him. But then the shell slams shut and the impulse fades. Daniel is going. He has made up his mind, and things are over between us before they’ve even begun. He has stepped back onto the safe ground of the precipice from which I thought we were about to jump.
‘Never mind. It’s not something that’s easy to understand.’
‘Well then tell me, Erica!’ he says, throwing his arms up in frustration. ‘Look, maybe you’re used to someone who understands you more. Maybe Mike dealt better with these things than I do. Maybe we wouldn’t have worked together after all.’
‘Mike did not deal with things better than you. This wouldn’t have happened with him. He never asked questions,’ I say quietly.
Daniel lets out a bitter laugh. ‘Oh, so I was right. Mike was breezy if you left him for hours on end with no explanation. I’m sorry I can’t be more like that.’
‘No! I meant that Mike didn’t try too hard to get to know me. And I thought that was what I needed, because I didn’t want people to know me properly.’ Daniel pulls me into a doorway. The relief of the shelter, the absence of the sharp beads of rain pounding onto my skin, is overwhelming.
‘And now?’
‘A few hours ago, I felt like a completely different person. I felt like I should take a risk and forget what I thought I should do or would be safest doing. I wanted to stay. But things have changed now. It’s the wrong time, Daniel. You’re going away for a year.’
‘So you’re just going to forget it? You apparently changed all your plans for me, but now you’re just going to give it all up?’
‘Daniel, I …’ I falter and he stares at me, waiting. I imagined tonight over and over again. I imagined him looking at me in a way that made the pit of my stomach burn, making jokes about not being able to resist staying here and marrying him after all. The way he is looking at me is different to how he has looked at me before, and I feel a new distance springing up between us as he wonders what I could possibly say to explain away tonight. I’ve disappointed him, I realize. He’s thinking that if I can’t stick around for long enough to listen to his huge news about work or to tell him my huge news about falling in love with him – even though I vowed I’d never fall in love with anyone because of how it might end – then surely I can’t be being honest.
My web of thoughts is broken by Daniel’s phone ringing, the hollow polyphonic ringtone louder as he pulls the phone from him pocket. He glances at the screen and looks back up at me. Half regret, half annoyance.
‘I have to take this.’
I nod.
I hear a man on the other end of the line, a man who is obviously so relieved to have Daniel on board that he is still calling him about it at this time of night, a man who has plans for a one-bed apartment in the city (compact but will do the job) and bank transfers and flights.
Daniel puts his arm around me as he listens and speaks, and I press my body against his, the cool rainwater seeping through my coat and dress onto my skin.
‘It’s really happening,’ I say when he hangs up, my voice small.
Daniel kisses my forehead and pushes the soaking hair from my skin. ‘Yeah,’ he sighs. ‘It’s happening.’
I reach up and kiss him: salty kisses of tears and autumn rain.
‘Look,’ he says, the mood shifted from the call, ‘whatever is going on with you, if you want to then we can still see each other,’ he tells me. ‘We can visit. We can email.’
‘I do want to.’
‘Build around it?’
‘Yes.’
He doesn’t ask again tonight, and I don’t try to tell him. We walk, exhausted, soaked, frozen, and fall into bed at his flat, into sleep filled with strange grey dreams of endings and secrets and sadness.