Chapter 30 Kate 
ALNWICK, ENGLAND | DECEMBER 2010
Your husband?” Ian asks, facing her. “What?”
Kate’s face and hands are starting to tingle. She hasn’t had a full-blown anxiety attack in months, and she can tell this one is going to make up for lost time.
“Kate?” The hurt and confusion glazing his features breaks her heart. She knows the look on her own face is all the confirmation he needs. “You’re married?”
“Yes, but Ian—”
“I can’t believe this. I can’t believe this, Kate.”
“Ian—”
“You said you had an ex. I thought… never mind. I have to go pick up Audrey.” He brushes past Adam to the coatrack, then breezes out the open door in a frigid gust.
“Ian!” Kate calls again, but he peels out down the laneway. “Goddamnit,” she mutters.
“What did I just walk into?” Adam asks behind her.
She shuts the door and turns, crossing her arms. Adam is here. At the Oakwood. Kate takes in his sandy, styled hair, the grey wool coat atop his slim shoulders. He looks exactly the same, yet is somehow unfamiliar to her now. “What are you doing here?”
“I called three times last night, Kate. You didn’t answer, didn’t call me back.”
“You know I don’t look at my phone much now. And we had an emergency.”
Concern ripples across his face. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. It was Audrey. The owner. My boss. My—” She exhales. My friend. My saving grace. The woman who pulled me back from the brink. “Never mind.”
“And the guy?”
She looks him square-on. “Why are you here?” she repeats.
“I have the divorce papers.” He taps his messenger bag.
She lets her breath out. “Right. Okay.” But the anger surges. “I thought you’d courier them or something. Jesus, Adam.”
“I was in Glasgow this week at a conference. I’m on my way back to London. That’s why I tried to call you last night, to tell you I was coming round.”
She shakes her head. “You could have couriered them.”
Adam shifts his feet, and a little snow falls off, melting into the entryway carpet. “I wanted to talk to you.”
“Okay, let’s talk,” she says, bringing him into the sitting room even though all she wants to do is go find Ian, explain and apologize.
Adam settles in a chair by the fire, Ozzie pressed excitedly against his knees, tail wagging. She sinks into the opposite chair, looking at him expectantly.
“How have you been?” he asks.
She opens her mouth on a curt reply, but catches herself. His expression is genuine. He came all the way here to talk to her, check up on her. She should lower her guard a little.
“Actually, I’m okay,” she says. “This place has been good for me.”
“I’m glad to hear it. Really,” he says. “But you do know you’re in the middle of nowhere, right? I had to take a train and then a taxi to get here.” He lets out a small chuckle.
“It might seem that way to you,” she says, without heat. “But it’s home for a lot of people. Me included.”
He strokes Ozzie’s head. “Home, eh?”
“Yeah. Believe it or not. My parents stayed here on their honeymoon. That’s why I picked it.”
He watches her. “I didn’t know they came up here.”
“Yeah.”
His brow contorts in the way it does when he’s considering something. “I think about ours a lot,” he says. “Hawaii.” They’d spent ten days in bed and diving into the blue pools, drank late into the night in front of bonfires after watching the sun set from Wailea Beach. It was paradise, but it feels like a memory from someone else’s life now. Adam looks down at the dog, clears his throat. “I miss this guy. He like it here too?”
Kate smiles a little. “Yeah. He’s got a girlfriend. Sophie.” She points to the small black lump on the dog bed.
“Didn’t even see her there. Well… that’s nice, buddy,” he says, and Ozzie retreats, curls up with Sophie.
“I sometimes feel like the mistress now,” Kate says. “The girl he cuddles with on the side. I’ve been completely usurped.”
After a moment, Adam reaches down and withdraws a manila envelope from his bag on the rug. “So, here are the papers.”
“Right. Yeah,” Kate says, heart fluttering a little.
“I sold the flat,” he says. “It fetched a good price. That’s all here in the divorce settlement. We split it.”
Kate nods. “Thanks for handling that.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you have a pen?”
She reads through, feeling the burn of his eyes on her. She signs the pages indicated with little red flags, one at a time. It feels at once mundane and profound, to sign off on her marriage like this, to put her signature to all her failures. Claiming, yet releasing them. She signs the final page, hands it back to Adam. They stare at one another.
Adam speaks first. “We had a good run for a while, didn’t we? There were better times. Especially in those first few years. I know it was never perfect, but…” His shoulders droop a little. Kate nods, her eyes prickling uncomfortably.
He clears his throat, tears forming in the green eyes that did her in all those years ago. She remembers the last time she saw him cry, that day at the hospital when the bottom fell out of their lives.
“Do you still blame me?” she asks.
He takes a deep breath. “No. And I think you’ve blamed yourself enough for the both of us.”
He meets her eyes squarely. There’s a sadness in his that she hadn’t been able to see through the haze of her own grief and guilt, and she fully understands, for the first time, that their dreams share the same ghost.
“But a lot of it’s on me, Kate. I’m sorry about the fighting. About work. About… about texting you that night. I was tired, and angry. I shouldn’t have—”
“I shouldn’t have answered.”
There’s silence, and in it Kate hears that last message, the one that changed everything, and for a moment she can’t breathe. Sometimes a tragedy brings people together, and sometimes it’s too big to overcome. A great millstone too heavy to shift, and impossible to carry.
“I still care about you, you know,” Adam says. “I always will. And I’m sorry I didn’t care enough when it really mattered.”
“I care about you, too,” she says. She involuntarily rubs the base of her ring finger with her thumb, surprised to see that the groove has mostly disappeared. “Do you want your rings back?” she asks.
He shakes his head. “No. I mean… they’re worth something, right?”
Kate frowns. “I don’t want to sell them.”
“No, no. I just mean they’re a reminder, I guess. That at one point, things were good. Great, even. I’d like us to remember we had that. I think it’s hopeful for the future, right? Maybe we can both find that again somewhere.” He pauses. “The guy that left, are you…?”
Kate nods. “Yeah. Ian.”
There’s a flicker of sadness, but nothing malicious. No jealousy. “I hope I didn’t mess anything up for you.”
Kate shrugs, straightens. That’ll be her next reconciliation. “No, it’ll be okay. I’ll sort it out.”
They sit for a while in the cold sitting room as the finality of it all comes to rest on them. Kate wonders if this will be the last time they ever see each other, and the ache of their shared loss stirs inside her. No matter where they go, or who they’re with, they’ll always be connected to one another by that thread. The one woven from the battered fibers of their unraveled life.
“Well,” Kate says finally. “You’re never going to get a taxi to come back out here. Let me drive you to the station.”
Half an hour later, Kate is standing up at the kitchen counter, picking at a small bowl of cereal after she dropped Adam off at the train. With his arrival, she and Ian hadn’t eaten breakfast, and though she felt she should eat something, her appetite is lacking. She feels genuine relief after the conversation with Adam, a true sense that some of the weight she’s been carrying for the past year has lifted, and she’s grateful for that. But she’s on edge for Ian to bring Audrey back so she can explain everything that just happened. Tell him how she really feels. They hadn’t even had a chance to enjoy the afterglow of their first night together before it was interrupted.
When she hears the front door open, she sets the bowl down with a clatter and hurries to the hall, but Audrey is alone. “Where’s Ian?”
Audrey gives her an exasperated look. “He’s left,” she says. “He needs space. I told him to walk me to the door and I’d be fine.”
Kate wants to rush past Audrey and find him, but instead she steps forward to take Audrey’s coat. “How are you?”
“What I am is desperate for a cup of coffee that doesn’t taste like wood chips,” she says. “No wonder everyone feels utterly wretched in hospital. Go put on a pot, and we shall discuss the whole thing.” Her voice is quieter, weaker than usual.
Audrey is already settled with Sophie on her lap when Kate brings the coffee into the sitting room. Wordlessly, Kate sets the mugs down on the side table, then builds a fire to warm the room.
Audrey takes her mug and inhales deeply. “Dear God, I thought they were trying to hasten my already imminent demise with that pig-slop instant brew.”
Kate bites her lip at the dark humour. “Audrey—”
“I know, I know. I shouldn’t jest.” She takes a careful sip, though Kate doesn’t fill Audrey’s mug as full as she used to. “But still… as I said last night, we should, er, hurry things along. I’ve more to say. As do you,” she adds, white brow furrowed over her cup. “I understand your ex-husband made an appearance, and that this was a great surprise to Ian. Why didn’t you tell him?”
Kate sighs as her insides squirm. “I wanted to see where things were headed. I didn’t think I needed to yet, and I didn’t want to talk about it. It had no bearing on us, really. I had no idea Adam was going to drop in like that. But Ian took off before I could explain; he wouldn’t even listen.”
“He was reacting to the fact that you had lied to him, Kate. You know why he—”
“Yes, I know,” Kate says. “I know about his fiancée.”
She bounds up out of her chair and goes to the frosted window, looks out over the white lawns surrounding the inn. The snow is entirely undisturbed. Not even a rabbit track runs through it. It covers up everything beneath in a smooth layer of powder.
“Oh, Kate,” Audrey says. “Have I not taught you by now what not to do? The only way avoidance will serve you is to exhaust you completely. You can get some distance on it, think you’ve won, but when you finally stop to rest, you’ve got no energy left to face it once it catches up to you. If you have any hope of moving forward, of a future with Ian, you must deal with your past, just as I have been,” she adds. “It has been painful and complex and I don’t like it. But it’s necessary.”
Kate fiddles with the gold rope on the curtain. If she isn’t careful, it’s going to fray between her fingers.
She can still repair things with Ian. She’s sure he’ll hear her out if she’s as transparent as he is with her. She knows now how rare it is to find someone so open, but the openness does make them more vulnerable, more easily hurt. She should have seen that.
She sits back down in the chair, kitty-corner to Audrey. “I’ll give him some space for today, if you think he needs it,” she says. “I’ll talk to him tomorrow.”
Audrey nods. “Never, ever lose anyone you don’t have to,” she says. “Life will take your loved ones without warning or permission, as we both very well know. And we must endure those losses as part of life. But never let petty circumstance and disagreement separate you; life is too short to let pride get in the way of love.”
Kate opens and shuts her mouth. Love.
“It may be,” Audrey says, “that when all is said and done, you aren’t right for each other for the rest of your lives. But we never know how much time we have left, Kate. Seize even temporary happiness and peace. Please. I wish I had.”
She pats Kate’s forearm. Her hand lingers there, and she gives a little squeeze, her knotted knuckles protruding. Kate takes a deep breath, and finally a sip of her own coffee, her mind turning to Audrey’s loves: Ian’s grandfather, and Ilse. She looks up at her aged friend and sadness clutches at her heart. However much time Kate herself has left, it’s certainly more than Audrey.
“How did your fingers get like that?” she asks quietly. “You still haven’t told me.”
Audrey lifts her hand and rests it on Sophie’s back. “Ah. Well,” she says, caressing the knuckles. “Someone thought I was playing the wrong sort of piano.”