Chapter 4

She was bargaining, she realised, trying to compromise, find a way for them to erase the day and return to how things had been. A small part of her hoped it was all a mistake, a misunderstanding between them, and that now that they were finally talking, they would be able to work it out between them, and they would laugh over how silly they had been as they moved his things back in…

“Em,” he said it gently. “It is not a hobby. I am pursuing it as a career.”

“How?” She was baffled by the logistics of it. Everyone knew that music was a hobby and not a viable career, especially at their age. People took that sort of risks when they were in their early twenties and didn’t have the financial responsibilities to maintain whilst their dreams crashed and burnt, not nearly thirty with two mortgages to pay…

“How?” He repeated. “Well, we want to organise a tour and we are going to record a demo, and there is this manager… I am going to sell the house, and use it to finance…”

“Oh my god,” she pulled back. “Owen!”

“See!” He released her and strode away, around the other side of the kitchen bench, bracing his arms against it. “See, this is why, Em. This is why.”

“But Owen. You can’t just quit your job, sell your house, and run away with a band. People just… don’t do that.”

“People in your sensible world, Em, don’t do that. I don’t care about my job. Designing carparks,” he snorted in disgust. “It is bullshit. This isn’t living, Em, it is… beige.”

“Beige?”

He laughed, and it was no longer a happy sound, the opposite in fact. “Yes, beige, Em. It is humdrum. It is just existing. It is doing the sensible and expected because it is responsible. It is smothering.”

She stared at him, her face pale. “You have never said you feel this way.”

“I didn’t want to…” he paused and raked his hand through his hair. “I didn’t want to hurt you Em. But I have to, or I’m hurting myself. My life, my job, my clothing… It’s all just bullshit. Not what I want, to do, to wear. This person,” he threw a hand towards the photos of them laughing on the wall, “is not the person I want to be.”

“I love you, Em,” he said. “I love you, but I don’t think I am in love with you. I want to be. But there is no… fire to it. I want more.” He drew in a sharp breath, as if shocked by what he had said, and then sighed it out.

“More than me,” she said, bitterly, the tears beginning again, but with the fire of anger behind them. “You want more than me,” she repeated, tasting the bite of those words on her tongue, and feeling a sting, like indigestion between her breasts. She swallowed back the raw pain of those words.

“It is not like that, Emily. It isn’t you, is it us,” he was sorrowful with it. “I am sorry. I hope we can be friends. You have been my friend for as long as I remember. I think it is why I didn’t do this sooner. I didn’t want to lose you as my friend.”

“I don’t want to lose you either.” She sobbed in a breath, the sound ugly and raw, and she pressed her hand to her mouth, shocked by the sound.

“Oh, Em,” he sighed it out and walked back around the kitchen bench to draw her against him. “I am sorry. I wish… I wish I were the person you want me to be, or that we had fire and passion… That would be… great. But it is just not there.”

“Owen,” she did not want to let him go, feared that if she did so, she would never get him back, feeling as if they were saying goodbye but pretending that it was not so.

“Can we be friends? I would like that,” he pulled back and smiled at her, the crooked smile and dimple the same as from their childhood, but there was a lack of light behind the expression, as if he were trying to make something work that he felt wasn’t going to happen, offering a compensation prize to sooth the hurt away. “I had better go. We need to… you know, do this cleanly, Em. It is too easy to go back into old habits because it is comfortable, and that will just make this… drawn out and miserable for us both.”

“Okay,” she released him although it hurt to do so. “Okay, Owen.”

“Okay.” He touched her cheek and then walked to the door. “Message me, hey? We will talk by messages. Give it a few weeks, and then maybe…?”

“Okay.” Maybe what? Maybe they would just be friends? That wasn’t what she wanted, though.

She sank down to the floor as he closed the door behind him and wept into her knees.

“So, what? That is just, it?” Megan stirred sugar into her coffee the next morning. She hadn’t eaten bread since ninth grade declaring it empty calories but loaded sugar into her coffee like it was calorie free.

She had turned up at Emily’s house an hour before, letting herself in through the front door with her spare key. Megan had shaken Emily out of the cocoon she had made in the covers that still smelt of Owen, pushing her into the bathroom, and selecting clothes from the closet, before pushing her reluctant sister into her car. She had whisked Emily away from the misery of the empty house to the rather dubious café tucked in the corner of a dingy and dated building that looked out onto a grimy, shopping street populated by the neon signs of discount carpet and second-hand electrical shops.

Emily didn’t even know what suburb they were in, and wondered if Megan did, or if her sister had just driven aimlessly until she found somewhere that looked as miserable as Emily did and had decided that was an appropriate fit for the situation and so had parked. There was every likelihood, Emily though wryly, that Megan’s slick Audi would not still be there when they returned, or it would be missing its wheels.

“I don’t know. I don’t understand… any of it. How do you just stop loving someone after twenty-two years?” Emily wondered. “How do you just… walk away from your life like that? He is having agents through the house tomorrow. He is actually serious about selling it.” That overly bright early morning message from Owen had sent her into a spiral of self-pitying despair.

“Where are you going to go? He is in your house.”

“I don’t know,” the thought had not occurred to her, she had been too caught up in the misery of not waking up with Owen in bed beside her, not hearing him around the house, in the shower, making coffee in the kitchen… She had missed his clothing in the cupboard, his shoes, his things. It was as if, in one swoop, he had removed himself from her future, the house, and her life, and there was a vacuum left where he had been. “I guess he will move out, and I will move in there.”

“The renovations are mostly done, eh? At least you have that much. The house will be worth more than you bought it. He doesn’t want you to sell that too, so he can reclaim the money you’ve both put into it?”

“Oh my god,” Emily put her face into her hands. “I don’t know. I don’t know Megan. I am still at Owen saying he doesn’t want to marry me and moving next door. I am not ready to think that far ahead. Maybe he will come to his senses and change his mind?”

“Maybe he won’t. I mean, Owen is pretty stubborn like that.”

“I feel sick just thinking about it,” Emily moaned into the palms of her hands. “I need a tissue.”

Megan dug into her purse. “I brought a box.” She whacked it onto the table between them. “This Louis bag is great. Stylish and you can fit a bottle of wine, a box of tissues, and half a make-up case inside it without destroying how it hangs. And I got it at an estate sale,” she added with satisfaction. “At a fraction of what it would have cost to buy.”

Only Megan, Emily thought, would be unbothered by carrying around a dead woman’s handbag, bought at discount from grieving kin. She knew what Megan would say if Emily pointed out the macabre side of her purchase – that is the circle of life, honey, and no one can take their Louis bag collection with them when they die.

“It is so embarrassing to be crying in public,” Emily wiped her face, looking around uncomfortably. The café was a dingy little place with scuffed lino on the floor, and grimy paint on the walls, totally in keeping with the street visible beyond it. The chairs and tables they sat at were sticky to the touch, and the service was disinterested – they had ordered a pot of tea ten minutes before, and the waitress was still standing at the register staring at her phone.

Emily wondered if they should remind her, but then discarded the idea. She didn’t want to draw attention to herself.

At least the café was not crowded, and the other patrons had the air of regulars, bringing out e-readers and newspapers, as if settling in for a long wait… Though, in hindsight, she was not sure if that was a good or a bad thing. More people might mean more people nearby, but with less people, she felt more noticeable, crying in the back booth.

“It is why we have the booth, hon. No one can see. Cry to your hearts’ delight.”

“I don’t know how to do this,” Emily reached for another tissue. “I love him. I don’t want to lose him.”

“It sounds like that is a done deal,” Megan replied. “You have to think self-preservation, now Em.”

Self-preservation was a skill that Megan had honed like a knife. She said her motto was marry up, without the marrying part. Megan always came out ahead after a breakup. She approached it as an opportunity to forever imprint herself in her ex’s life, with a savagery that ranged from petty to chilling and often resulted in the ex in question agreeing to anything just to end the torture. She had lunch with her lawyer, Constance, once a month, they had become such good friends.

“I can’t. I feel like… I just want to curl up in a ball and die.”

“You have never had a break-up before,” Megan was sympathetic. “Most of us have a few practice-runs during our teen years to give us survival techniques for later in life. Here is what you need to do. Call in sick tomorrow. Take annual leave for the week, whatever you need to do, because, believe me, this is going to get messy. These things always do when you have been living together. It is just like a divorce, without the legal proceedings… Unless,” she added with a hint of wickedness. “You want to go that road. I am sure Constance can fit you in.”

“No, no thank you,” Emily shook her head. “And I can’t just call in sick. I can’t just say, sorry, my fiancé has decided to run away with a band, can I have a week off?”

“Why the hell not? Other people do.”

“I am an editor, Megan. I do my job, or I lose it. I am only as relevant as the last book. If I ever hope to become published myself, I have to stay in my bosses’ good graces.”

“The love of your life dumped you on the day you put a deposit onto your wedding dress. That is a pretty big deal,” Megan pointed out.

“Oh my god,” Emily began to cry again. “What am I going to do?”

“Call around and try to get your deposits back?” Megan suggested helpfully.

“What is wrong with me? Why aren’t I enough?”

“Nothing is wrong with you, Emily,” Megan sighed heavily. “Men suck, is all. Take my advice. Call in sick at work. Get your deposits back from the wedding vendors. Ask the agent to sell both houses. Get a new haircut and begin again. It is like they say, you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince. Trust me, I have done this enough times to have it refined to an artform.”

“I love Owen.”

“Yeah, but he doesn’t love you back, does he?” Megan was gentle about it. Brutal and gentle at the same time. “It sucks, babe, it really does. But maybe you and Owen were always just meant to be friends.”