I didn’t take Adam’s calls for ten days. Not because I was playing mind games or seeking attention, but because I genuinely needed to be on my own, without his influence, to work out what I wanted. I forced myself to go back to work even though I had the time booked off, naively believing that having a purpose would make me feel better, but when I found Adam loitering outside my office, I could no longer ignore him. I’d spent all that time not knowing how I was going to feel when I next saw him, or if I was going to feel anything, so when my breath was literally taken away just at the sight of him, I thought it must mean something. I felt winded, as if the air had been sucked out of me.
“This isn’t fair. You can’t cut me off like this,” he begged.
“Don’t tell me what’s fair,” I said, without breaking my stride as I headed toward Tottenham Court Road Tube station. “I need time and I need space.”
“I need to talk to you.”
“I’m not ready to have this conversation here and now,” I said, increasing my speed.
“Can you just stop for a minute?”
I turned to face him. He’d lost weight. His well-made suit hung off him and his belt didn’t have enough holes to pull it tight enough around his waistband, leaving a gap I could fit my hand in. His face looked gaunt, and it seemed as if he hadn’t shaved since I’d last seen him.
“What for?” I barked, already knowing that it was worse than my bite. I didn’t have the energy anymore, it had all been spent.
“Can’t we please just sit down, talk things through?”
I looked across at Golden Square, its daffodils standing proud; yet, with the sun going down, it wasn’t quite warm enough to take up one of the benches. There was a café on the corner and I gestured toward it. “Five minutes,” I said. “We can go over there for a coffee.” Though I could have killed for something stronger.
“Thank you,” he said gratefully.
Ironically, those coveted five minutes were spent talking about everything other than the reason we were there. I told him that baby Sophie was walking, and he told me his gym membership needed renewing. It felt unbearably awkward making small talk with the man I had lived with. He may as well have been a stranger, I felt that detached from him. A hot tear threatened to fall at the realization, but I stopped myself from blinking and held it in.
Another five minutes was going slowly by, with both of us, at one point, looking out the window, lost for words to say.
“We’ve been here ten minutes and you haven’t even asked about Mum,” he said.
It hadn’t occurred to me. Why would it? Because I knew that she was perfectly fine: free of cancer, free of conscience, and free of morality.
“So sorry,” I said, unable to keep the vitriol out of my voice. “How is Pammie?”
“We’re not going to be able to move on if you can’t accept her and accept what’s happened,” he said. “This is nobody’s fault, Em. It’s just how life pans out sometimes.”
“Am I supposed to forgive her because she says she’s ill?” I asked.
“She doesn’t say she’s ill, she is ill,” he said sternly. “How are you going to feel if, God forbid, something happens?”
I shrugged. I couldn’t care less.
He looked at me through narrowed eyes. “You need to look at the bigger picture here. We can get married anytime. Mum might not be here for much longer.”
“Exactly, that’s why you made the wrong call,” I said. “We should have got married so your mum could be there.”
“Maybe so, but what’s happened has happened, and we need to get through it together.”
“So, how is Pammie doing?” I said, ignoring his veiled plea.
“She’s doing okay, thanks,” he said, a hint of sarcasm in his voice. “We went to her first chemo last week and she’s got another one coming up.”
I felt like I’d been hit by a ten-ton truck. “We?”
He nodded. “Yeah, I took her to hospital last Monday. I just wanted to make sure she was okay. You’d do the same for your mum, Em, you know you would.”
I was struggling to get my head round this. He’d gone with her? To a fictitious appointment? How the hell had she pulled that off?
“It’s so harrowing what they have to go through,” he went on. “Mum’s aftereffects aren’t too bad at the moment, she feels a bit sick and she’s really tired, but she’s been told to expect it to get worse as time goes on.” He rubbed his eyes. “Honestly, you wouldn’t wish it on your worst enemy.”
I was so shocked that I didn’t even have the wherewithal to reach forward and give him a reassuring hand. For the first time since her “announcement” I began to wonder if it could actually be true. The heat of the realization crept up from my toes to my neck, sending a flush across my cheeks. I surreptitiously shrugged my coat off in an effort to cool down.
It hadn’t occurred to me for a second that she’d been telling the truth. I thought about how that would make me look. How my recent behavior would be perceived by those around me. I was banking on her lies being uncovered. For her to be revealed as the cruel fraud she was. But what if it was all true?
“What’s it like in there?” I managed. “The hospital, I mean.” I had to be sure he was saying what I thought he was saying.
“They make it as comfortable as they can for the patients,” he said, my heart sinking with every syllable. “There are a few other women in the room, you know, all having the same thing, which helps Mum, ’cause you know what she’s like, not one to keep herself to herself.” He smiled. “So it’s good for her to be able to chat, to find out what might be around the corner, to prepare herself for whatever it may be. It also helps her to realize that she’s not on her own, which I think is the most important thing.”
He bowed his head. “It’s not looking too good, though, Em,” he said, before his shoulders caved in and shuddered with the rise and fall of his chest.
I moved round to his side of the table and slid along the bench to reach him. He sobbed as I put my arm around him, then grabbed my hand tightly and brought it up to his mouth. “I love you,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
“Ssh, it’s okay.” I was at a loss as to what else to say. I’d spent such a long time with the thoughts in my own head, going over the unfairness of it all, and the conspiracy I felt Pammie had been orchestrating since the day she met me, that I’d not thought about how Adam was feeling. I’d just written him off as a fool, a lesser man for allowing himself to be duped. But that wasn’t how he was feeling; he was bereft. He’d canceled his wedding to the woman he loved, and he believed, for he had no reason not to, that his mother was dying.
“It’s probably not the best place to have had this conversation,” I said, half laughing, as we watched commuters rushing by the window.
“No, probably not,” he agreed, before turning to me and placing a wet kiss on my forehead. “Will you come and see Mum? She really wants to see you, believe it or not, to say how sorry she is.”
Despite myself, I pulled back a little. “I’m not sure,” I said, no longer in control of my thoughts, or how they played out on my lips.
“Please, it would mean the world to her—to us both.”
I nodded. “Okay. Maybe.”
“She’s got chemo again next Wednesday, your day off. Maybe you could drive down and meet us afterward? Unless, of course, I can come back home and we can drive down together?”
I wasn’t sure of anything anymore. Instead of easing the swarm of thoughts in my head, Adam’s revelation that he was going to the hospital with Pammie only served to feed them, making them buzz and whir away until they throbbed at my temples.