Rachel Burton - The Things We Need to Say - An emotional, uplifting story of hope from bestselling author Rachel Burton

Standing now in Fran’s bathroom, in front of the mirror, he slowly starts to pick up the bottles and jars of creams and gels and liquids that Fran keeps on the shelf above the sink. He feels the weight of the blue glass in his hands and is suddenly overcome with the sense of the irreparable nature of the damage he has caused. Anger and frustration rise up in him like fire and without knowing what he is doing he throws the blue glass jar at the mirror, listening with satisfaction to the sound of glass shattering glass. He throws another and another listening to the sound that splinters the claustrophobic silence of the house. He used to be one of the best spin bowlers in Suffolk; every jar hits home.

When he’s done he stands, breathless, listening to the vestiges of the shattering noises echo around the house. When he looks up he catches sight of himself in the broken mirror once more.

Foolish fond old man.

Fran

As she sees her suitcase travel towards her on the luggage carousel, Fran steps forward to retrieve it. She barely has the energy to drag it towards her and pull it through customs. Will wasn’t the only one who hadn’t slept the night before. She had lain awake for most of the night, turning everything over in her mind. Part of her wishes she hadn’t found out, wishes that Will had played cricket the day before, that it hadn’t rained, that he hadn’t forgotten to take his phone out with him when he went for a run. But part of her knows it was inevitable that she found out, that she never had a choice.

She is tired and hot and feeling a little nauseous, but she knows she needs to pull herself together. She knows she needs to be at her strongest over the next few days, both for herself and for the people coming on the yoga retreat. She thinks about them as she wheels her suitcase out into the main concourse of Barcelona airport – of Elizabeth and Constance and Katrin and David, regulars at her yoga classes in Cambridge, and of the friends they will be bringing. She already feels a sense of support at the thought of seeing their familiar faces the next day.

She stops to buy a bottle of water using the euros that Will had brought home for her on Friday night. Friday night seems like a lifetime ago, when Will was still the man she could trust with anything, when they still had each other. She thinks again about how they had planned this trip together, covering every eventuality. It was the first thing they had done together since the previous summer. She remembers sitting at Will’s desk as they booked her tickets and sorted out her travel insurance, and thinking how together they could find a new kind of normal, how they could be happy again if they wanted to be. But now she doesn’t know what’s going to happen any more.

She realises she is standing in the middle of the arrivals hall of a busy airport getting in everyone’s way as she drifts off into memories. She has these moments a lot these days, as though she is watching her life from the outside, as though she has become slightly disconnected from the world.

When her mother died she’d felt as though everything had changed. Their bond had been special and when it disappeared Fran felt as though her safety net had been taken away. As though her lifeline back to the mothership had been severed and she had been left drifting in space. But since last summer she feels more like the mothership, sitting motionless and calm while life carries on around her, just outside of her reach.

Fran feels closest to the person she used to be when she is teaching yoga – and that’s why she’s here. To try to find out what it is to feel alive again, try to remember who she is.

She had been feeling more alive in other areas of her life recently though, hadn’t she? On Saturday night when Jamie came round for dinner, she laughed in a way she hadn’t done in a year and on Sunday morning when she woke up in Will’s arms, she had felt as though they could start again. It was that longing to start again, that need to get her old life back, that had brought Fran so close to walking away from the taxi this morning, from almost allowing Will’s touch to guide her home.

She felt as though she had woken from a deep sleep, like the fairy-tale princesses of her childhood imaginings, and now instead of the numbness she had grown used to over the last twelve months, she could feel everything.

Yoga had always taught her how to sit with her feelings, to help her remember that everything passes in the end and that sometimes a sensation is no more than a sensation. Right now she can’t imagine these feelings ever passing, but she knows, deep down, that over time the feelings would become less raw, less intense.

Up until yesterday she had been feeling so hopeful again, as though she and Will could find their way out of this. But now, with the future so uncertain, everything feels raw again.

If she really wants to remember who she is, she needs to do it alone, because she might only have herself to rely on now. She knows she’s strong enough to do it. She knows she’s done it before.

But finding out about Will’s affair has reminded Fran of all the cracks that were developing in their marriage, cracks that had started as tiny threads years ago after her first miscarriage when she began to feel afraid. Afraid that she couldn’t give Will the one thing he wanted, afraid that she had waited too long, afraid that one day – if she couldn’t do it – he might leave her for someone younger, someone more fertile. Someone like Karen.

She wonders if it had started to become too much for him. She always thought they were equals, that they held one another up, that she looked after him as much as he looked after her.

Getting the partnership, the role Will had taken that led to his meeting Fran in the first place, was everything that was expected of him by his family, but Will had found it stressful, sometimes unbearably so. The early, heady, honeymoon days of their relationship had been marred by the stresses of Will’s job. He worked long hours and was plagued by tension headaches. Fran would look after him, cook his favourite meals, massage his temples, let him lie down in the dark with his head on her lap quietly, doing nothing, just being there for him.

She’d asked, once, if he ever regretted taking the job. If he ever felt it was too much.

‘The job’s hard,’ he had said. ‘But I don’t regret taking it. If I hadn’t I wouldn’t have met you and meeting you was the best thing that ever happened to me.’

Fran wonders if Will still thought that. She tries to remember the last time she had been able to find the strength to be there for him. Their marriage had shifted gear after her first miscarriage. She wonders if it became a place where Will did all the looking after and if perhaps he’d got tired of that.

As she walks through Barcelona airport she remembers the last time she was here, over six years ago. She and Will, on their way back to England, wrapped around each other and holding a secret, trying again. Their whole marriage seems to have revolved around an endless cycle of trying again and holding secrets. Some of those secrets turned out to be ones that they didn’t share.

Fran thinks about her own secret, the one she holds so tightly that she barely shares it with herself.

She doesn’t know what will happen to either of them now. But she does know that she has to focus on herself, on being strong, on the retreat. She takes a deep breath and rolls the cold bottle of water over her hot brow, letting the water droplets fall down her temples. She swallows down another wave of nausea and heads towards the taxi that waits for her.

JULY 2005

We’d been together just over four months when Will took me to Paris, his favourite place on Earth. He booked first-class seats on the Eurostar and I wound myself up into a ball of anxiety about travelling on a train in a tunnel under the sea. By the time we got to Dover we’d drunk half a bottle of champagne and as the train entered the tunnel he kissed me, distracting me from my fears. By the time we arrived in Calais, all I was interested in was getting to our hotel room.