himself. Her voice was tiny. ‘I thought you were gone.’ Present-absent in the way only a teen could be.
‘No. I was still there.’
Her chest tightened. ‘Why?’
He considered her from under lashes crusted with salt. ‘We were friends. Friends don’t abandon each other.’
Beth’s cheeks flamed.
‘I wasn’t having a dig, Beth.’
She shook her head. ‘I know. But it doesn’t change what happened.’ She stared at him. ‘You deserved better.’
You still do. Her tight heart pushed rich pulses of blood around her body and they throbbed past her ears. Her eyes stuck fast to his. She made her decision.
‘I need to tell you something. About my last days drinking.’ She took a second to gather courage by trailing down to the whale’s exposed tail and draping the soaked blanket over it. Water cascaded over the vicious arrow-head wound.
She took a deep breath and then met his eyes again. ‘I forgot you, Marc. When I was deep in the hands of my addiction, I kind of. blocked you out. For years.’
His nostrils flared. His hands stilled.
‘After graduation I thought about you every day. Wondered how you were. What you were doing. Thought about what I had done. I thought about the connection we used to have, the stories we had in common. Every day I tried to recreate with my husband what I’d had with you, and it just wasn’t working. As I slipped further and further into numbness I think I just …’ She swallowed and took a shuddery breath. ‘Remembering you hurt. So I just stopped.’
Those beautiful hands tightened on his towel. Just as they’d tightened in her hair while he’d kissed her. Last night. All those years ago.
‘I can understand that.’ Hurt thickened his already gravelly voice.
She shook her head. Forced herself to continue. ‘One day I woke up and there you were, blazing and persistent at the front of my mind. Like a ghost with a mission. Except I was the ghost. And I realised I’d been. non-existent for so long. I remembered how you used to believe in me no matter what but, this time, instead of that making me sad, hurting, it made me determined.’
She turned her eyes back to his. ‘You gave me strength, Marc. I stopped drinking because of the memory of the boy who had so much belief in me. More than I’d ever had in myself. And because of the goodness in you that I’d always wished was mine. The strength of character.’
His eyes dropped away, which meant she could breathe.
‘I just wanted you to understand the part you played in pulling me out of the morass. I can’t thank you because you didn’t even know it was happening. But I can acknowledge it. And I think I understand it now. What it meant.’
She clamped nervous hands together. ‘Drinking helped me forget how I’d treated someone I loved. How the choices I made snowballed into a lousy life with a lousy husband and a lousy future. That I’d done that to myself. But the memory of my feelings for you saved me when everything was lost. When I was.’
His frown folded his handsome face and his jaw twitched with tension.
She drew in a massive breath for strength. ‘You filled my heart in high school, Marc, and I think you filled it right through my marriage, except I couldn’t bear to acknowledge it. One day I just … forced you out of my heart to protect myself.’ She laid a hand on the whale. ‘But then I crashed into the water with you yesterday and discovered you were still the same loyal, generous, brave person who I loved back then. You haven’t changed.’ She dipped her eyes, then forced them back up. Took a deep, deep breath. ‘My feelings haven’t changed.’
His silence screamed.
Mortification waited greedily in the wings but she held it back. ‘I don’t expect anything in return—’ much as she wished for it ‘—I just wanted you to know. That you’d changed my life. That you’d saved my life. That our stories are connected.’
His neoprene chest heaved up and down, his eyes blazed hot and hard into hers. The hundred variations of things he might say whispered through her head. Then he finally spoke and it was laced with agony.
‘I’m not a crutch, Beth.’
Her stomach plummeted. What? ‘No, I—’
Sudden shouting from the direction of Marc’s car split the quiet of the pre-morning. A dozen figures appeared at the dune tops, silhouetted against the dawning sun. They carried coils of rope slung over their shoulders and more blankets. Beth should have cried with relief that the cavalry had finally arrived but she wanted to scream at them for just five more minutes. It felt vitally important that she have just a bit more time alone with Marc.
She swung her eyes back to him.
His voice was hard. Hurried. ‘I can’t be the thing that sustains you, Beth. You can’t swap one fixation for another, put that kind of responsibility on me. I lived with that for years.’
His mother … She opened her mouth to try and explain again as people started streaming down the dunes towards them. Euphoria that assistance had finally arrived crashed headlong into the sudden shot of urgent adrenalin surging through her body. In that moment she felt the best she had all night.
And the absolute worst.
Marc lay his shredded, saturated towel along the whale’s broad back for one last time. Then he pinned her with his gaze. ‘Me accepting that you’re sorry for what happened a lifetime ago. Are you expecting that it will change anything? Other than for you?’
‘I …’ Was she? What did it really change, other than to mark the completion of her list? One more step in her road to healing.
‘Because it doesn’t change anything for me, Beth.’ He cast her one final tired look and then dragged his exhausted legs out of the water.
The earth shifted under her feet. In all her imaginings, it had never occurred to her that Marc would accept her apology but that he might not truly forgive her. Realise the depth of her feelings but not value it. Each was meaningless without the other.
Her heart pounded. ‘I thought, maybe if you understood …’
‘I understand more than you know.’ His tired eyes rested on her. ‘It’s been ten years, Beth. Any feelings we had are nothing but a memory. We’re both different people now. If I helped you to get over—’
Could he still not say the word?
‘—everything, I’m glad.’ His eyes lifted. ‘But I’m not some kind of lucky charm to keep you sober. And telling me you were alcoholic doesn’t go any way to restoring the lost trust between us. Did you honestly expect it would?’
An awful realisation dawned with the sun that suddenly peeked its warmth above the sand dunes. She had expected that, yes. That her cosmic reward for finding him and confessing her shame—her many shames—would be a beginning as blazing and new as the sun climbing over the horizon. That the man who had played such an important role in her recovery would be given back
