She remembered much later, lying beside him in the darkened bedroom, letting her fingers draw swirling patterns on the damp skin of his chest.
The weather had finally broken and the rain beat steadily on the slates overhead. It was going to be a wet ride home, but Edith didn’t care.
“I did hear something else tonight,” she admitted. She felt his skin stiffen, couldn’t be sure if her words or her touch caused it.
“Oh aye?”
“Mm. Dad said they’re looking for someone called Pete Tawney. That’s…not you, is it?” she stumbled. “I mean, you’re Patrick Bardwell… Aren’t you?”
This time, there was no mistaking the quiver. “Would it matter,” he asked, careful, “if I wasn’t?”
She propped herself up on one elbow, stared down at him. It was hard to make out his expression in the gloom. “Does that mean I can change my name, too—after?”
“After what?”
“Well, after we’re away from here.”
For an endless, utterly deafening moment, he lay silent. Then he sat up abruptly, twisted to grip her shoulders, close enough to see his face now.
“There’s no future with me,” he said, quiet enough for her to hear the sound of her heart, breaking into fragments. “Never was. Never will be. Never done anything to make you think things were different, have I?”
“You’re just saying that because you think I’m too young, but I’m not! I’m nearly eighteen—a grown woman. Haven’t I proved that? I’d go anywhere with you!”
“Where I’m going, you can’t follow.”
“So, what am I to you?” She began to cry then, ugly rivulets that sent her vision blurring. “Just a cheap lay? A quick—”
“Don’t!” he said roughly, shaking her. “I never thought of you that way. We both knew I wasn’t going to be around forever.”
“But I l–love you, Patrick! I—”
“No, you don’t,” he said, certain as stone. “You might think you do, but you don’t.”
A huge hiccup welled up, turning into a wail of fresh tears. Edith wrenched free and scrambled out of bed, unable even to look at him. He sat quietly amid the rumpled sheets, watching her snatch up her clothes, fumble into them. At the doorway, she hesitated, threw him one last look of utter reproach, and fled into the downpour.
She still harboured a last slim hope that he’d come after her, call her back, tell her it was all a mistake, that she was the one for him after all.
Nothing followed her out into the night but her own humiliation and despair.