Valentine’s Day 2006
Geraldine sits in a hard plastic chair, her entire body as clenched as a closed fist. Jamie is playing with an old wooden abacus, clacking brightly colored balls into each other, giggling as he makes them tumble and twist. There is a little corner of the waiting room set aside for children, and it breaks her heart that kids should ever set foot in a place like this.
This is no place for children. No place for her child. No place for her, a young woman who should be in the prime of her life. Not sitting here in a room decorated with cardboard Valentine’s hearts, with her future in tatters.
She feels her fingers start to shake, and without saying anything, Joe reaches out and takes her hand in his. She looks up at him gratefully, wondering at the whimsy of fate that brought him into her life just as it started to disintegrate.
This time last year, she’d just found out about Adrian’s affair. Or at least one of them. He’d sworn it was all over, that it meant nothing, that he loved her. He promised he would do anything to make their marriage work, for her sake, for his sake, for little Jamie’s sake. He begged for a second chance.
And—because she still loved him, and because she wanted Jamie to have his dad around—she gave him that second chance. Agreed to pack up their lives in Dublin, and move to the wilds of County Wexford, taking a reckless gamble on what her world might become.
Moving seemed to be the sensible thing to do. It would get Adrian away from temptation, get her away from the place where her suspicious mind would always work overtime. They used their savings to buy the derelict pub on the hill, and she hoped the project would keep them busy enough to allow the wounds to heal.
It was her idea to ask Joe to come. He’d been working at the hotel for a while, and had become the go-to guy for any problems. Leaky tap? Call Joe. Wonky table leg? Call Joe. Broken heart? Call Joe.
Everyone did it—he was so good at his job, so willing to help, always ready with a smile and a chat. A delight to be around, really.
So when she was considering pulling up stakes and moving, she wondered out loud if he’d want to come. It was a whim, initially—she never really thought he’d take her up on it. She knew from their chats that he was a man on the move, that he had a restless air, as though he was running from something, or running to something. But still—she’d been surprised when he thought it over and said yes. She suspected he needed a project to help his wounds to heal as well.
Adrian hadn’t been as keen on the addition to the team. He obviously sensed a rival in this handsome young chap whom everyone liked so much. Adrian only reluctantly agreed because she insisted, and because she still had the high moral ground. And because Joe would be, he knew, cheap labor in the months ahead.
Adrian was a dick, but at least he’d allowed her that, which was possibly the luckiest thing that had ever happened to her.
They’d not been in Wexford that long when Adrian’s promises to be a better husband, a better dad, a better man, disintegrated into the air like cobwebs on the breeze.
He started up with a local girl who worked at the building supplies depot. Barely out of her teens, still at the age where she thought rom-coms were real and everyone got a happy ending. Presumably they flirted over cement mixers and sandbags, made eyes at each other across a crowded timber yard.
When Geraldine found out—when she saw a love heart and kisses scrawled on a till receipt for three tons of topsoil—she wasn’t even angry. She’d done enough crying and yelling for a lifetime the first time around. Anyway, Adrian was good at arguments—he had a way of not only winning them, but somehow leaving her with the feeling that everything was her fault.
This time, she wanted things to be different. She wanted to stay calm and in control. So she’d confirmed her suspicions by turning up at the yard with a toddler in tow, on the pretense of needing a new nail gun, watching Siobhan behind the counter squirm and blush as she served her.
She’d returned home that afternoon with a new nail gun, and a new determination to escape this life she’d become trapped in before it was too late.
When she’d told Joe—because he deserved to know, after they’d brought him out here—he’d been furious. She still remembers it vividly: he’d been outside, working, wearing a scraggly old T-shirt from some place called Affleck’s Palace and paint-spattered steel-toed boots, not seeming to feel the bitter cold that was seeping from the earth.
He listened, and he asked questions, and then he looked ready to track Adrian down and use the nail gun on him. When she’d said that’s not what she wanted, he’d just looked so sad. So confused.
“I don’t understand him,” he’d said quietly, looking off to the distant gray sea. “I don’t understand how he could have so much, and throw it all away. He has a beautiful wife and a beautiful child, and that’s more than most men could ever wish for.”
“You can’t understand because you’re not him,” she’d replied, finding herself strangely wanting to comfort him even though it was her life in shreds.
“No, and I’m glad. So—tell me what you need me to do. Tell me how I can help,” he’d responded.
That was just over a year ago, and since then, he’d done exactly that—he’d helped. She told Adrian she wanted out, and after the dramatic fake hysteria that she’d expected, he’d agreed. She suspected it was even a relief, even though he never admitted that—he preferred to make her suffer, make her feel like it was all because of her many failings as a wife and as a human being. That she was being stubborn and willful and purposely derailing their plan to make a new world for themselves.
She’d been tempted, any number of times, to give in. It would have been easier, in the short term—but she knew that, in the end, she would be signing the death warrant on her own happiness. Her mother had been trapped in a marriage like this, and her childhood had been a roller coaster of emotional scenes played out over breakfast, tears at the dinner table, her mum looking distraught at the school gate.
She didn’t want that for Jamie, and she didn’t want that for herself.
So they’d finished the renovation, and sold the pub at a better-than-expected profit, and they’d moved on. She’d expected it to be just her and Jamie, which was frightening but also liberating, but instead it was her and Jamie and Joe. That gave her even more courage—the courage to leave completely, and look farther afield for their fresh start.
They’d found the restaurant here, in Cornwall, which was both familiar and distant. The little beaches and coves reminded her of Wexford—but the lifestyle was very different. The building needed work, but Joe assured her he could do that, with some local help. It had a patch of land, where they could grow their own veggies, maybe keep chickens for fresh eggs. It had views of the shimmering sea down in the bay, and a dense green woodland. It had potential.
Over the last few months, it had become home. The three of them lived in a trailer, working on the restaurant, making contacts in the local area, building a vision of what they could make it.
Jamie missed his dad less than she thought he would—partly because he was only small, and adaptable. Partly because Adrian hadn’t been that enthusiastic a father anyway. And partly, she knew, because of Joe.
Joe would entertain him for hours, carrying him around their empire on his shoulders, Jamie’s podgy little hands clinging to his dark hair, giggling each time Joe pretended to drop him. He’d follow him around with a toy tool set, helping him hammer in plastic nails and measure wood. They’d go off into the woods, foraging, Joe creating vivid fantasies about the benign fairy-tale creatures they shared their space with.
When she started to feel tired all the time, Joe had picked up the slack. He’d looked at her with concerned eyes, and taken Jamie off on an adventure. He’d made sure she was eating well, and bought her vitamins, both of them initially assuming that her fatigue was due to the stress of her marriage ending and the trials of relocating and starting a new business.
All of those would have been valid reasons for her exhaustion, for the fact that she felt wiped out every morning, that she couldn’t sleep at night, that the smallest of tasks left her gray and passive and empty of her usual energy.
None of those reasons was right, though. The real reason had been the lump she’d discovered not long after, nestled in a long-untouched part of her left breast. She’d ignored it to start with—put it down to an infection, or a leftover reminder of breastfeeding, or a bump from her attempts to help Joe with the building work.
Eventually, when it hadn’t gone away, no matter how much she willed it to, she had to tell Joe. He’d just looked at her sternly, then given her a hug, and told her it was all going to be all right. That he would be with her, whatever happened.
He made an appointment with a GP, and she was referred to the breast screening center, and she’d had what felt like endless days waiting to hear the results of a biopsy. The results, when they were eventually delivered by a serious-faced woman with incongruously bright red hair, had been exactly what she’d dreaded.
Now she found herself here, in a strange place. With a fledgling business, living in a trailer in a wild wood, financial reserves scarce. Without a husband, without a family, caring for a small boy who depended on her entirely.
The only thing that kept her sane was Joe. Joe, whom she’d not even known for that long. Joe, who was younger than her and yet somehow also older than her. Joe, who had become a one-man safety net.
Now she is sitting here, in this waiting room, ready to start her first course of chemotherapy. Her doctors are optimistic, but she is busy worrying about what will happen to Jamie when she dies. There is a solid weight of advance grief weighing her down—an unbearable anxiety about the future that refuses to bow down to common sense or pep talks or medical miracles.
She is terrified. She watches Jamie playing with the abacus, so innocent and accepting and unaware of the anvil about to fall from the sky and destroy the small pleasures of his life, and tears slide down her cheeks.
Joe pulls her into his body, and crushes her tight. She feels strong arms around her, and soothing fingers in her hair, and a gentle kiss on her forehead.
“It’s going to be all right,” he says, over and over again. “I promise you, Geraldine. It’s going to be all right. I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere as long as you two need me. It’s going to be all right.”
The nurse calls her name from a list on a clipboard. She pulls away from Joe, and he wipes the tears from her face. He holds her steady, and looks deep into her eyes, and says: “You are stronger than you think. You will get through this. You have too much to live for.”
She nods, and decides to try to believe him, and walks unsteadily toward her fate.