Just Last Night(106)
45
After
You were alive again last night.
It wasn’t a nightmare, Suze—and I’ve had plenty of those—it was just another world, exactly like this one but with a dramatic difference. Your presence. Your presence, which I took for granted.
In this place, we were cheerfully organizing a ski trip, sitting at a school desk, while next to a busy motorway. The cars thundering past made the table shake but neither of us were bothered. How about Switzerland? you said. We had plans.
(I wonder if Switzerland was some subconscious thing because that’s where Hester was, when you and Ed . . . ? Haha, by the way, in return? You never get to complain about Finlay. PSYCH. Yeah don’t argue. You know I have you.) It will always be this way, I’ve come to realize. You are never behind me, Susie. You are never something that happened. You are always alongside me.
I clumsily scrabble for my phone in the blackness, scroll down, and find the last text from Susie. Those words in a speech bubble on my handset. It still feels impossible there is no chance of any more, that it was a final word. That she’s not there, behind that screen, hovering out of sight. Waiting for a cue.
I type a reply:
SO much to discuss. Speak soon. I love you. xxx Across the room, where I’d plugged her phone in to charge, there’s a firefly glow as it lights up, as if in response.
I hear her, clear as a bell, in my head.
Love you too, you iridescent beast. xxx PS still have to say, my brother, GROSS
We make each other so happy, though!
I am not sure that doesn’t make it MORE gross. That’s what Mr. Pulteney the geography teacher said when we found out he and his wife were nudists, remember?
I laugh to myself. I will always hear Susie in my head. It’s an ongoing conversation. Lifelong.
Fin stirs awake. “You OK? Did I see a light on?”
“I’m fine.”
“That cat is not only heavy, he’s soaking!” Finlay says, registering Roger’s presence, and Roger yowls territorially, in reply.
“Rog is as Rog does.”
Finlay pushes his arms around me, and we lie in silence, side by side, for a while, listening to the swish of greenery in the wind beyond the window.
“I think the rain’s stopped,” he says.
I twist around to face him.
“So do I.”
Acknowledgments
Much editorial gratitude with this one: first, to my editor Martha Ashby, who was not only hugely enthusiastic at outline stage, but also, before departing for maternity leave, fielded a lengthy phone call from me where I wailed I’d bitten off more than I could chew. She calmly informed me I had not, I would be carrying on, and it would be great. Without those words this book wouldn’t be here, so thank you, Martha, for your faith. Further gratitude to my skilled caretaker editors throughout rocky old 2020, Lynne Drew and Sophie Burks, whose good humor and unflappable approach have made them a joy to work with. I especially appreciated being pushed to get each draft to where it needed to be, without ever feeling like I was being pushed. Cheers to you all, ladies, I look forward to raising a glass when it’s legal again. And thank you to the whole HarperCollins team, both UK and USA, for their support and energies, I’ve missed seeing you all!
Thank you to my agent, Doug Kean, who’s always a cheerful pleasure to work with. It’s like a marriage now, except we don’t argue over choices of coffee table.
My first-draft reading crew: Tara, Sean, Katie, Laura, I couldn’t do this without you. Special shout-out to Kristy Berry on this one for saving my sanity. Thank you to Carol Clements for her patient, legal expert advice on wills and probate. If I’ve mangled it, that’s on me.
And thanks always to Alex, who has the not-always-joyous but completely essential task of telling me to stop catastrophizing, carry on, and that maybe it’s quite late to still be in my pajamas.
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Meet Mhairi McFarlane
Sunday Times bestselling author MHAIRI MCFARLANE was born in Scotland, and her unnecessarily confusing name is pronounced Vah-Ree. After some efforts at journalism, she started writing novels and her first book, You Had Me at Hello, was an instant success. She’s now written seven books, and she lives in Nottingham with a man and a cat.
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Author’s Note
Dear Reader,
I really hope you enjoyed Just Last Night, and that the British slang wasn’t too impenetrable. (I never realized how many colloquialisms I use until I had international readers.)
As is probably obvious, I wanted to write about grief in a romantic comedy setting. It might at first seem like an unusual combination, given that we associate the genre with lighter topics. But in life, humor and tragedy exist alongside each other. We still laugh through the darkest times, so why not present that in a novel?
I’ve never experienced a sudden loss in the way the characters do in the book, but I have lost people I love. Something I’m learning is that while detail is personal, so much of what we go through is universal. One observation in Just Last Night that I pulled straight from my own life is the moment when Eve is startled by the realization that she is no longer shocked to think of Susie’s death, because it’s been absorbed into her daily reality. At the time it happens, it seems impossible that it will ever become routine. Grief is a unique pain in that it’s grueling and yet, in some ways, we don’t want to get past it to the point where our loss becomes normal. Perhaps in bereavement, we long to go backward instead of forward, and that resonates in the way Eve endlessly replays her missed chance with Ed. Wait, this is turning into a writing workshop for me!