After the End(67)

“Great.” There will be a to-do list on Alison’s desk. Upgrade for Mr. & Mrs. Runcliffe, download e-learning package, see how Pip’s doing. “Tick!”

“Sorry?”

“Nothing. How are you?”

“Bit fragile, to be honest. Dinner at Phoebe and Craig’s, and you know how they drink. Fiona was pissed before the starter and—” She breaks off.

They were carrying on without us. As if we’d never happened.

“It was a last-minute thing,” Alison tries. “We didn’t think you’d . . .”

“It’s fine. I’m fine.” I say an abrupt goodbye and put down the phone. I turn off the ringer, watching Alison—Isaac & Toby flash up silently a dozen times before it stops. It was a club, I realise. Membership cards issued along with the babies. And now our names have been taken off the list. Three years’ membership invalidated by nine months without my son.

I look at my spotless kitchen, at the pile of books to be returned to the library. I think of everything I fit into my day—the cleaning, the cooking, the ten thousand steps I can do before lunch—and how empty the week still feels. How I’m simply killing time until Max comes home. And I realise it’s time to go back to work.





twenty-nine





Max


   2016


You can’t leave me.” Please don’t leave me. “Not after everything we’ve been through.”

“You left me.” Pip is still crying, but her voice is hard. She has never forgiven me.

“That was different. Dylan was . . . It was temporary.” Those weeks in a hotel are a blur to me now, like a movie I watched too long ago to remember. All I know is that I never once thought that my marriage was over; just that I couldn’t share a bed with someone whose decision I was fighting through the courts. I never stopped loving Pip, even when I hated her. I never thought she stopped loving me.

“Would you have come back if the court order had been granted?”

If Dylan had died? I think of the man I was four years ago, of the precarious state of my marriage back then. “I don’t know,” I say honestly. It is impossible to imagine life any other way.

“We stayed together because of Dylan.”

My stomach tightens. She means it. She’s really leaving me.

“But Dylan’s gone, and we’ve said goodbye to him, and now it’s time to move on.” Her brow is furrowed, like she’s in pain, and I think, If this is physically hurting you, why are you doing it?

I cross the room, get down on my knees, and put my hands around hers, but she pushes me off and stands up, leaving me on the floor. “Pip, please. I love you, and I know you love me.”

She looks out of the window, her back to me, and even though I can’t see her face I know what she’s going to say.

“It was the wrong thing to do.”

After the court ruling, Pip went to the hospital. I found her outside, sitting on the bench beneath the oak tree. She started talking before I reached her, fast and loud, as though she wanted the words out of the way.

“I don’t agree, I will never agree, but if you’re taking Dylan to America then I’m coming too, and I don’t want to ever talk about the court case, or who was right and who was wrong—I don’t want to waste any more time not being with Dylan.”

We flew to Houston the following week, in an eight-seater chartered air ambulance that would have felt like the height of luxury, had it not been for the medical crew, intensive care bed, and oxygen tanks required to keep Dylan alive. Dr. Sanders’s team met us at the airport with an ambulance, and twenty minutes later Dylan was under the care of Houston ProTherapy. And Pip had been true to her word. No recriminations—not even when another bout of pneumonia put Dylan back on a ventilator—no what-might-have-beens. Pip and I stood shoulder-to-shoulder, for the six months we spent in Houston, and for the years since.

Until now.

It was the wrong thing to do.

I scramble to my feet. “How can you say that?” I don’t mean to raise my voice, but it doesn’t comply. “We had three years we would never have had. He lived for three more years!”

“On his birthday,” she says, so quietly I can barely hear, “you and I ate cake and drank champagne. Dylan had synthetic milk through a feeding tube.”

My hands, loose by my sides, start to tremble. I fold them into fists, and the tremor moves to my elbows.

“When other kids get colds, they get Calpol. Dylan got suction, catheters, nebulizers, inhalers, antibiotics, seizures.” Her voice is rising. “Morphine when he was in pain.”

“Hardly ever—”

“Too often!” Pip spins round to look at me. “He had seventeen different types of medication. Every. Single. Day.”

“They kept him alive—”

“That wasn’t a life!” She screams like she’s being attacked, like there’s no one for miles, like she needs the whole world to hear.

And then she leaves.

Part of me has been waiting for this day for three years. Throughout all the arguments—all the loaded looks and recriminations—I’d kidded myself that Pip stayed because, underneath it all, we had something worth fighting for. Only it wasn’t about us, was it? She stayed for Dylan.