Chapter 10
Phoebe
And so here we are again.
I can’t see Remy’s blue eyes behind his dark glasses, but I watch his attractive, suntanned face as he checks over my equipment. He looks quite a lot older than he did nine years ago – more weather-beaten, somehow, but in a good way. He’s in his early thirties, now.
‘All good?’ I ask in French.
‘Oui,’ he replies with a smile.
Josie was still asleep when I left her this morning, and it’s probably just as well because I know she’d try to talk me out of this. I wrote her a note, reassuring her that I haven’t lost my head. Honestly, I’ve never felt clearer about what I need to do.
I fell hard for Remy when I was younger. Our relationship was a rollercoaster ride of epic proportions, but there were times when I hated feeling out of control. So today I’m testing myself. I need to know that I’m in control now, and then I can walk down the aisle and commit to a life in Manchester with Angus, knowing with absolute certainty that I’m on the right path.
I doubt Angus would understand my mindset so I’ve begged Josie to tell him I’ve gone shopping if he calls. I hate the thought of him freaking out when I’m sure there’s nothing for him to worry about. I love him so much – I always have, and never more than I do right now. When I think about what we’ve gone through, how many years we’ve been together, I can’t imagine ever throwing it away...
It was Dad’s death that brought Angus and me back together. We lost him suddenly in the spring, six months after I returned from France. I was only nineteen and it came as such a shock. Dad was fit and healthy – the least likely person to have a heart attack, it seemed. And then Mum woke up one day to find him gone, just like that.
Angus came to the funeral. We had vowed to stay friends, but he and I hadn’t spoken much in the months since I’d got back. Seeing his beautiful but bloodshot eyes did something to me. Maybe it was my grief, but everything I’d felt for him came rushing back. I desperately wanted him to hold me, to be close to him again, and when he took me in his arms, I felt safe. He held me tight while I cried into his shoulder, and I didn’t want to ever let him go again. I think I fell back in love with him then, right there, on that spot – if I’d ever fallen out of love with him in the first place.
We were both at different universities in London, so after the funeral, we saw each other regularly and soon it felt as though we’d never been apart. I’d told Angus about Remy, but we rarely spoke about him or the couple of girls from university that he’d had fleeting relationships with – we were both keen to move forward and that suited me fine. Angus finished his journalism course a year before I completed my degree, but instead of moving back to Manchester to be close to his mum, which was always his intention, he found an apartment in Kentish Town, an easy tube ride away from my campus, and we moved in together.
Mum said I was too young to be living with a boy – even Angus, whom she adored – but her heart wasn’t fully in the argument. I think she was glad that I had someone to love, someone to help me come to terms with our loss. She missed Dad terribly, and I was still beside myself with grief.
Living with Angus fortified our relationship, and when Rose finished university and moved to London, too, my bond with her strengthened. She got a job at the Whittington Hospital in Highgate, where Mum used to work, and the three of us hung out regularly. Angus to her was like the big brother she’d never had, always checking out her boyfriends and making sure she felt safe.
But Eliza kept her distance, and even to this day I feel a block between us. When I think about the years we spent as teenagers, lying on my bed with our limbs intertwined, reading magazines or pouring our hearts out over the boys we fancied, my chest hurts. She’s grown up, gone her own way, and I still miss her so much. I miss the little girl that she was, the little girl who once punched Heidi Maunder in the face because she picked on me.
But you see, the thing that I couldn’t admit to Josie at dinner yesterday, or to anyone else in the world, is this: I know that Eliza keeps her distance because she’s in love with Angus.
And I know that he has feelings for her, too.
I’ve seen it on their faces and in their demeanour when they’re near to each other, and a few years ago, it struck me like a bolt out of the blue that something had happened between them when I was on my gap year. The feeling was intuitive, and I sensed that they’d both laid whatever had passed to rest, but it made everything clear. That was why Eliza had begun to detach herself from me. I’d always thought she was bitter about being left behind at the age of eighteen – and maybe she was, a little. But the truth was entirely more complex. I suspect she gave up Angus because she didn’t want to hurt me and had never come to terms with the loss.
Angus has always been easy to read – he’s open and honest and I believe he would tell me the truth if I asked him about it.
But Eliza has tried so hard to keep her emotions hidden that I sense it would crush her if I brought it up.
So I never did.
Who am I kidding? I’m too scared to.
Sometimes I feel guilty that I got to Angus first because Eliza would be so much happier with him by her side.
But the problem is I would have to fall spectacularly out of love with him, or spectacularly in love with someone else, for them to ever stand a chance.
Last night, I came to the following conclusion, and my words are still ringing around my head now as I stare at Remy trudging through the snow ahead of me: if Eliza and Angus are meant to be together, the stars and the planets will have to align to make it happen.
Because I can’t let him go easily. And while Eliza knows that I still love him, she won’t touch him with a bargepole.