After the End(76)

Frustration makes me dogged.

“But do you think it was the right decision?”

“All the evidence pointed towards—”

“No!” A couple on the next table look up. “What do you think? Was Max right? Should we have given Dylan a better chance at life?” Leila’s looking down at her coffee, and I’m suddenly incensed by the lack of eye contact, the lack of compassion. I raise my voice, heedless of the other customers listening. “Maybe Dylan would have walked. Maybe he would have known who we were. Maybe he would have enjoyed music, or stories, or—” I break off, because my heart is bursting with love and guilt and loss, and I’m thinking of Max and how I almost lost him too, all because he did what he thought was right.

“Was Max right?” I finish, quiet now.

Leila looks up, and I’m horrified to see that she’s crying. Tears stream down her cheeks and she wipes them away with angry hands. “I don’t know. I just don’t know.” Not a doctor, now, but a woman haunted by a decision she had no choice but to try to make. “And, Pip, I promise you, there isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t think about your boy.”



* * *





We stay in the café long after our cups are empty, talking about life after Dylan. She tells me about her mother in Tehran, who refuses to consider moving to the UK to be with Leila, despite worsening health, and I tell her how I’m too scared to have another baby. We don’t try to solve each other’s problems, but we listen, and sympathise, and say What will be will be. Because the future isn’t always in our control.

“I’d better go,” Leila says, when her mobile has buzzed for the third time in a few minutes.

“Work?” I picture the busy PICU ward, a critical child, anxious parents.

“A friend.” She hesitates. “Boyfriend, I suppose.” Her cheeks colour, and she looks suddenly shy. “In fact, in a funny sort of way we’re only together because of Dylan.” She shakes her head at my confusion, and smiles. “It’s a long story.”

We stand, and it’s awkward for a second, and then we both move at once, into the sort of hug that says everything and nothing.

“If you ever want to talk about it again,” she says, “you’ve got my number.”

“And you’ve got mine. Thank you.”

Outside, we say goodbye, and as I go to my car I see her cross the road to where an older man is leaning against a lamppost. His face lights up when he sees her. They embrace and walk away, her arm tucked through his. She will tell him, tonight, about meeting me and about what we said. She’ll say how I cried, and she cried, and maybe she’ll cry again and he’ll hold her and say everything she said to me. That there are no right answers, no crystal balls. Only instinct, and hoping, and doing what feels right.

I envy their closeness—the way they fit seamlessly into each other, the way Max and I always used to—and I wonder how Dylan could possibly have played a part in bringing them together. I think how Max was never supposed to be on the flight I was working, the day we met, and how we found ourselves in the same bar hours later. Serendipity, Max called it. Destiny, I called it. Some things are simply meant to be.



* * *





    Alistair and Tom have invited us for Sunday lunch.” I show Max the text. Above it, in a stream of messages that continued long after Alison, Phoebe, or Fiona stopped trying, are two years’ worth of refused invitations. Dinner next weekend? Working, sorry. Walk by the river? Sorry, we’re busy. At times, when it was all too much, the message thread is silent on my side, with gentle persistence—Coffee? Lunch?—and support on Tom’s. Hey you. Thinking of you. Hope all’s OK.

“Do you want to go?” Max looks for my lead. He hasn’t avoided invitations, as I have, but then the social calendar fell to me by default, once cocktails and dinner became soft play and picnics. I realise I don’t know how he feels when he sees families with children, whether he turns over the TV channel to spare his own feelings or mine. Somehow over the last two years we have stopped talking—we each have tiptoed around the very person who understands.

“I think we should. We haven’t been out with anyone, since.” The sentence is complete—our own shorthand for life after Dylan.

Max gives a wry smile. “We haven’t been out as a couple, either.”

I look away. It’s not right that seeing Tom and Alistair should feel easier than going out for dinner with the man I love. It’s not right that we eat on our laps in front of the TV every night we’re together, or that we talk more by text, several time zones apart, than we do face-to-face. Max and I were a couple long before we became parents—surely we can get that back now we aren’t?



* * *





You said you’d get horseradish.”

“I said we need horseradish.”

“You said you’d get it!”

“I didn’t!”

I catch Max’s eye and we both laugh.

“Glad to see it’s not just us,” Max says. Tom and Alistair break off from their bickering and grin good-naturedly. Alistair rolls his eyes.

“If it was down to Tom, the cupboards would be bare, and this one”—he drops a kiss on Darcy’s curls—“would starve.”