Still Me (Me Before You #3) - Jojo Moyes Page 0,108
the distraction that Eddie created so that I didn’t have to be the focus of attention. I lay in the bath and on the bed in the little box room, wiped away the odd tear and hoped nobody would notice. Mum brought me tea and tried not to talk too much about the radiant happiness of my sister.
And it was lovely to see. Or it would have been, had I not been so heartbroken. I watched the two of them surreptitiously holding hands under the table while Mum served supper, their heads bent together while they discussed something in a magazine, their feet touching as they watched television, Thom wedging his way between them with the confidence of the utterly loved, indifferent to who was doing the loving. Once we were past the huge surprise, it made perfect sense to me: Treena was so happy, relaxed in this woman’s company in a way I had never seen. Occasionally she would cast me fleeting glances that were shy and quietly triumphant, and I would smile back, hoping it didn’t look as fake as it felt.
Because all I felt was a second gigantic hole where my heart had been. Without the anger that had fuelled me for the past forty-eight hours I was a void. Sam had gone and I had as good as sent him away. To other people the end of my relationship might have been comprehensible, but to me it somehow made no sense at all.
On Boxing Day afternoon, as my family dozed on the sofa (I had forgotten how much time in our household was spent either discussing, eating or digesting food), I roused myself and walked to Stortfold Castle. It was empty, bar a brisk woman in a windcheater with her dog. She nodded hello in a way that suggested she wanted no part in any further conversation, and I made my way up the ramparts and onto a bench where I could look out over the maze and the southern half of Stortfold. I let the stiff breeze sting the tips of my ears and my feet grow cold, and I told myself that I wouldn’t always feel so sad. I let myself think about Will, and how many afternoons we had spent around this castle, and how I had survived his death, and I told myself firmly that this new pain was a lesser one: I was not facing months of sadness so deep it made me feel nauseous. I would not think about Sam. I would not think about him with that woman. I would not look at Facebook. I would return to my exciting, eventful, rich new life in New York, and once I was fully away from him, the parts of me that felt scorched, destroyed, would eventually heal. Perhaps we had not been the thing I’d thought we were. Perhaps the intensity of our first meeting – who could resist a paramedic after all? – had made us believe the intensity was ours. Maybe I had just needed someone to stop me grieving. Maybe it had been a rebound relationship and I would feel better sooner than I thought.
I told myself this over and over again, but some part of me stubbornly refused to listen. And finally, when I got tired of pretending it was all going to be fine, I closed my eyes, put my head into my hands and I cried. At an empty castle on a day when everyone else was at home, I let grief course through me, and I sobbed without inhibition or fear of discovery. I cried in a way that I couldn’t cry in the little house on Renfrew Road, and wouldn’t be able to once I got back to the Gopniks’, with anger and sadness, a kind of emotional bloodletting.
‘You fecker,’ I sobbed into my knees. ‘I was only gone three months …’
My voice sounded strange, strangled. And like Thom, who used to look at his own reflection deliberately when crying and then cry even harder, the sound of those words was so sad and horribly final that I made myself cry even harder. ‘Damn you, Sam. Damn you for making me think it was worth the risk.’
‘So can I sit down too, or is this, like, a private grief fest?’
My head shot up. In front of me stood Lily, wrapped in a huge black parka and a red scarf, her arms folded over her chest, looking as if she might have been