The One That Got Away by Melissa Pimentel (33)

Now

It was early again when I woke up the next morning – it seemed my body had made an executive decision to resist the new time zone and would hold out until the end. I didn’t feel hungover this time, or tired. Instead I was almost too-awake, my heart was racing in my chest from the moment I opened my eyes.

It came back to me in pieces, snatches of memory dropping into my mind like slides in a projector, and then the reel began and I saw it play out in full. How did that song go again? Didn’t we almost have it all?

I sat up and looked out of the window: the sky was a muted gray and it was misting gently. The fluke sunshine had disappeared and I was finally going to get the English weather I’d been promised in so many picture books and bad romances.

I pulled on a pair of leggings and a sweatshirt and unspooled the waterproof cagoule from its little protective travel pouch. I laced up my sneakers and headed down the stairs. No one was up yet, not even Mrs Willocks, and a hush had fallen on the house, as though a spell had been cast. I pulled open the door and hurried down the driveway, worried that someone might hear me. I wanted to escape unseen.

I’d eventually returned to the party, brushing the sand off my feet and slipping them back into the heels that had started to hurt. I’d put a smile on my face and drunk champagne and laughed at Dad’s jokes and cheered when Charlie’s thirteen-year-old cousin did the worm in the middle of the dance floor. I’d danced with Chris and tossed my head back and laughed when he said something funny, and I hugged my sister at the end of the night and told her she was the most beautiful bride I’d ever seen. At one point, I saw Ethan typing furiously on his phone, but I didn’t speak to him. I’d gone to bed without seeing him. His flight home was scheduled for early this morning – around eight – so I figured I’d stay out of the way until I could be sure he was gone.

I let myself through the kissing gate and walked through the field and past the sheep and up the steep hill. The mist turned heavy and the thin fabric of the cagoule stuck to my body. My sneakers squelched. Across the fields, the fog that had been rolling in gentle waves rose and joined up with the rain, turning the hills a hazy blue-green.

I found it without much trouble. The seat of the bench was beaded with rain and I used my hand to brush it off, wiping my wet hand on the edge of my sweatshirt. The plaque had fogged up in the cold, and I wiped that clean, too.

I hadn’t realized where I’d been headed until I’d arrived, but I was glad I’d come. The bench was still wet and the backs of my legs were soon damp as I sat. The cagoule, I was discovering, wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. I shivered and hugged my arms to my chest and looked out across the hills to the sliver of dark-gray sea.

I pulled out my phone and sent a text.

Little specks of rain appeared on the screen and I shoved it back into my pocket. I thought about Jess, pushing a new life out somewhere across an ocean, and smiled.

I knew I should be upset, and of course I was – the dull ache in my chest was making me feel slightly nauseated – but I could feel something else behind it. Something that felt a little bit like relief, or excitement, or a combination of the two.

In a weird, slightly masochistic way, I was glad about what had happened the night before. It hurt, sure, and that sucked. But it had also made me free. I realized that I’d been wearing my guilt like a hair shirt for years, taking it off only to admire the hardened, shiny scars beneath. I was the girl who did something terrible to the boy she loved, and I turned myself into the woman who had done something to the man she’d loved and could therefore never be loved again. After a while, it had stopped being about Ethan and had become about me trying to prove to myself that I didn’t need love from anyone. I decided that, instead of opening myself up to the possibility of being hurt (or, worse, inflicting hurt), I would turn myself into a single, solitary, Teflon-covered bullet. Sad about something? Tough it out. Feeling lonely, or overwhelmed or scared? Tough it out. There was no room for sympathy. How could there be, after what I’d done?

When I was a teenager, I’d drive around Beechfield on my own at night, aimlessly heading down back roads and singing along with Joni Mitchell, thinking someday I’d get out of this place and I’d never, ever look back. I was going to follow my mom to New York. I was going to slough off my small-town skin, and the bright lights of the big city would embrace me as one of its own.

But when I moved to New York, I realized that it wasn’t all that keen to open its arms to me, that I’d have to work and work and work in order to pry them open even an inch. So I did. I worked and worked and worked, and one day, I looked around and realized that I’d made it. I’d spent ten years trying to prove a point to myself, and I’d finally proved it.

But here’s the thing that I’d realized: I sort of hated my life. Not entirely – pieces of it were great – but I’d been living on autopilot for too long, wearing grooves in the sidewalk between work and home and the gym. It was as if I’d been eating the same meal over and over again and had suddenly remembered that the world was full of other dishes waiting for me to taste them. Pasta covered in tomato sauce and parmesan, freshly baked bagels slathered in cream cheese, a slice of the triple-layer chocolate cake with vanilla frosting that Jess had made for Noah’s second birthday: all the things I’d passed up over the years, shaking my head and begging abstention. From now on, I was going to eat the damn cake. I was going to sleep in on Saturday mornings. I would forget about the laundry and the dusty skirting boards and instead I would take a book – one I actually wanted to read, not one I felt I should out of some compounded cultural obligation – and sit in the park with a coffee and a croissant and fall asleep in the sunshine. I would cut myself a little slack.

I was going to quit my job. The thought came to me fully formed and iron-clad. I was going to travel, but not in a ‘run off to Italy and take a pasta-making course’ kind of way. I’d go down to Florida and spend some time with my dad and Candace. Maybe I’d go back to Beechfield and stay with Piper and Charlie, though not for so long that we’d end up killing each other. I’d visit Jess in New Jersey, and get to know Noah better, and the new little one, whoever she might be.

Maybe I’d go back to New York at the end of it, maybe I wouldn’t. The thought of not having to fight so hard every day made me feel almost giddy. I had forced myself to love that place for so long. The idea that I didn’t belong there – that I couldn’t belong – had been so crippling that I’d moulded myself into someone who did belong, sharpening my elbows and edges every morning before I left the house. I had no more axes to grind now. I could finally let myself soften a little.

My phone buzzed with a text message.

I closed my eyes and let the rain fall, and felt, for the first time in a long time, grateful.