The Guilt Trip(39)

“So?” Noah asks again.

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” she says truthfully.

“Is Josh…?” starts Noah, before taking a deep breath. “Might he be…? Could he be…?”

She looks at him, her heart feeling like a ten-ton weight in her chest. “No,” she says decisively, surprising herself.

“But that woman just said he’s the spitting image of me.”

“Is that what this is all based on?” says Rachel, incredulously. “A passing comment by a total stranger.”

“But she’s right though, isn’t she? You only have to look at him.” He walks away, running his hand through his hair. “Her saying that has made me realize what’s been staring at me in the face for all these years.”

“Listen to me,” says Rachel impatiently, though she knows it’s her own frustration that’s making her snap. “He’s not your son.”

“How do you know?” he asks, coming toward her, his eyes glassy.

“Because the dates don’t add up,” she says, though now she can’t remember whether she knows that to be true, or if she’s convinced herself of it ever since.

“It’s got to be pretty close, though—it can only be a matter of weeks.”

“Well, a matter of weeks makes quite the difference,” says Rachel, attempting to laugh, but it comes out more like someone’s got a hand around her throat. Perhaps they do. “Look, this is insane. You’re allowing a throwaway remark to mess with your mind. Don’t you think I would have told you if there was even the slightest chance that you were Josh’s father?”

“But what if I am?” says Noah, taking hold of her arms. “What if you’ve got it wrong? What if he’s mine and we should have been together, as a family, for all this time?”

Tears spring unexpectedly to Rachel’s eyes as she desperately tries to bat away the thought of it. How many times had she replayed the decision she made two decades ago? Imagined how differently it could have all turned out if she’d gone traveling with Noah, pregnant or not? Everyone has a sliding-doors moment in their life; people assume there are many, but they’re wrong. There’s only one defining juncture that, depending on which path you take, will determine the rest of your life. And that was hers.

“Don’t make this about you and me,” she says, her voice catching in the back of her throat. “We had our chance and we made our decisions.”

“You made the decision for both of us,” says Noah tightly.

“That’s not fair,” she says, trying to pull away from him, but he won’t let go. “I spent years waiting for you, and just when I got used to it never happening, you decided…”

He lets go of her like he’s been given an electric shock. “Years?” he repeats.

She takes a deep breath. “You must have known how I felt about you,” she says. “I thought I made it pretty obvious.”

“While we lived together on campus?” he asks, without waiting for an answer. “When we moved into digs together?”

She nods.

Noah shakes his head, seemingly unable to get his head around this new, twenty-year-old, information. “You mean to tell me that on all the holidays we went on, where I went with every girl who looked my way, you were … you were…” He can’t bring himself to say it.

“Lying there listening on the other side of the wall…?” Rachel says, half-laughing. “Well, yes, but I’m not a masochist. I did put a pillow over my ears.”

“But you seemed to positively encourage it,” he says. “In fact, you used to say that living vicariously through me meant that you didn’t have to put the effort into the opposite sex yourself.”

Rachel smiles wryly. “That’s called self-preservation.”

“So, all the time you were playing it cool, you and I could have been together?”

“I was just hoping that at some point the stars would align.”

“Yet when they did, you chickened out.”

“Noah, it was too late by then,” she says, growing exasperated. “You were happy doing your thing and I’d met Jack.”

“But I asked you to come to Thailand with me,” he says. “Begged you.”

Rachel sighs. “The downside of us having a platonic relationship for as long as we did was that I knew how you operated with the opposite sex. I’ve watched you claim victory on countless conquests, heard you say the same words to a hundred other girls that you said to me that night.”

Noah goes to interrupt but she puts her hand up. “There was every chance that you’d be saying them to someone else before we’d even reached Bangkok and I wasn’t prepared to take that risk; I’d rather be broken-hearted at home with Jack, than a thousand miles away with you and another girl.”

“But why didn’t you say anything?” asks Noah. “How could I have known how you felt without you telling me?”

She takes his hand in hers again. “What difference would it have made?” she says, softly.

“The world,” he says, pushing her fringe out of her eyes. “Because, if you’d told me, I would have told you I felt exactly the same.”