Adam finally showed his face an hour before we were meant to be getting married. Our flat had seen a constant stream of visitors during the day and night that he’d been gone, all checking up on me, making sure I hadn’t thrown myself off a bridge. But only Pippa remained, when he eventually returned home looking disheveled, his face ruddy.
I’d imagined this moment a thousand times, but now, as he stood before me as I sat at the dining table, he looked like someone I’d once known. Not the man that I’d loved and lived with for the past eight months. It felt like we’d shared a fleeting encounter at some point in our past lives, and I could barely recollect the details. I didn’t know if that was my brain’s way of protecting me against the reality. Of cushioning the blow of what was really happening.
I could see Pippa picking up her coat in the corner of my eye, but I stared straight at him, daring him to come back at me. He avoided my gaze.
“I’m going to go,” said Pippa. “Okay?”
I nodded, my eyes never leaving Adam.
The sadness and sense of embarrassment I felt had been replaced by a very real anger now, so close to the surface that I felt like a feral animal being pulled back on its lead. He only needed to say one word, any word, and the chain would be off.
“I need you to understand,” he said.
I was up and out of my chair so violently that it fell backward onto the floor.
“You don’t get to tell me to do anything,” I spat. “I have been through every possible emotion, and you dare to come in here and patronize me, telling me I need to understand?”
For a minute I thought he was going to raise a hand to me—his shoulders were pulled back and his chest was puffed out—but then he deflated, like a popped balloon, and the air literally rushed out of him. I didn’t know which I preferred. At least if he retaliated I had something to work with, something to spar with. But this hollowed-out version of his former self was pathetic to watch, a crumbling ruin that was difficult to garner respect for. I wanted him to stand up and be counted, not collapse in a childlike heap at my feet.
“We need to talk,” he said quietly.
“You’re damn right we do,” I said.
“Like adults.” He pulled out a chair from the other side of the table, the only thing that was stopping me from launching myself at him, and sat down wearily. He looked how I felt. Exhausted.
There was a fleeting moment when I thought she might have told him the truth. Had the guts to tell him what she’d really done. But as I tried to imagine the scene in my head, it just wouldn’t come.
“So?” I asked.
“You need to calm down,” he said.
“And you’re patronizing me again, so if we’re going to get anywhere, you’d do well to stop that.”
He bowed his head. “I’m sorry.”
“So, seeing as I’ve done absolutely nothing wrong, why don’t you start by trying to explain where the hell you’ve been and why you’ve been unreachable for the best part of thirty-six hours?” I was biting the inside of my lip and could feel the metal tang of blood on my tongue.
“I can only try to explain how I felt, how it felt,” he said.
I crossed my arms and waited.
“I was fully committed to getting married today. You need to know that.”
My expression didn’t change.
“But when Mum told us her news, it just felt as if my whole world had imploded. It felt like everything had crashed down around me. I thought of the wedding, the honeymoon, Mum’s diagnosis, and none of it felt real.”
“You lost perspective,” I offered.
“Yes, maybe I did. But it just didn’t feel like I could function. I couldn’t have walked into that chapel and held it all together.”
“No one was asking you to,” I said. “You would be getting married, having just been told that your mother has cancer. No one would have expected you to be anything other than emotional.”
“But it was like a full-on panic attack, Em. I had this crushing feeling in my chest, and my brain just seemed paralyzed. I couldn’t have got myself together in time for the wedding.”
“Yet here you are, seemingly out the other side, with forty-five minutes still to go,” I commented bitterly.
“Are we going to be able to get past this?” he asked, his head down.
“I need to be on my own for a bit, to work this out.”
He looked up at me, his face desolate.
“I don’t care where you go, but I don’t want you here, not until I’ve decided what I want.”
“Are you serious?” he asked.
His words didn’t warrant a reply.
“Mum and Dad are staying here tonight, as they thought they were going to their daughter’s wedding, and have now got nothing better to do. And Pippa and Seb will be here too, so…”
He lifted himself out of the chair. “I’ll go and pack some things.”
“You do that,” I said, turning my back on him to walk into the kitchen, where I poured myself a generous glass of sauvignon blanc.
I heard the front door gently shut a little while later and fell down onto the sofa, crying. I didn’t know whether it was because today should have been my wedding day, or because Pammie had finally won. I’d literally laughed in her face when she said Adam would marry me over her dead body. Now who was laughing?