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

‘Stansted then?’ he asks.

‘Yes, please,’ Fran replies quietly. As the cab moves away she turns to look out of the rear window. Will stands on the pavement, his hands in the pockets of his pyjama trousers, watching her drive away.

Will

He sits in the bathroom, Fran’s bathroom, on the edge of the bath. He hasn’t been in here for months. He hasn’t been in here since she was pregnant – he hasn’t been able to cope with the memories. Sometimes back then he would take his clothes off and slip in with her, sitting behind her, holding her against him as they marvelled at her growing bump. The last time he sat on the edge of this bath Fran had looked so beautiful. They’d been so happy.

He doesn’t know what has drawn him into the bathroom, but as Fran’s taxi had driven out of sight, he’d come back into the house and found himself here. This was her haven, her sanctuary. He supposes he is trying to feel close to her.

He remembers renovating this bathroom for her. He and Jamie had taken a week off work to get it done in time to surprise her on the day they moved in. He’d been amazed that they’d managed it without bursting a water main. He’d just wanted to make her happy. Over the years he’d failed again and again to make her happy, and now he has let her down in the worst possible way.

The house already feels so quiet without her. The clock ticking in the hallway seems louder than usual. She hadn’t answered his question about whether she was going to leave him. He can’t bear the thought of this empty, silent house being his future.

From the moment he first met Fran he was lost. He had never believed in love at first sight until then – he thought it was just something written about in the kind of novels his ex-wife read. But when Fran first walked into his office and the woman from HR introduced her as his secretary, he knew he was in trouble. When Jamie texted him that evening to ask how the first day in the new job had gone those were the very words Will texted back: Bro, I’m in trouble.

He could still remember exactly what she was wearing the first day he met her, the way her hair looked even redder under the office light. The way she stood in front of him looking at him, her green eyes challenging him, appraising every inch of him before sticking out her hand and grinning. She had a firm handshake and her fingers had lingered in his for longer than they needed to. Will knew from that moment he was undone.

He would find himself watching her from his office, listening to the jangle of the silver bracelets on her wrists as she typed. He’d never met anyone like her; she took his breath away.

The first time he met Karen at the end of last summer, by contrast, he had barely noticed her. He was still consumed by grief. Fran was still so unwell, barely holding it together, and spent a lot of time in bed. He was trying to look after her, trying to make her eat, trying and failing to find something, anything, interesting or nourishing in the village shop.

Susan was working behind the counter that day and introduced him to Karen.

‘William and his wife live in the Old Vicarage,’ she said.

‘Wow!’ Karen replied, holding out her hand for Will to shake. To this day he can’t remember if he took it or not. ‘That house is gorgeous, and so huge! Do you have a big family?’

Will froze, staring at her. Why didn’t she know? Why had nobody told her? This bloody village couldn’t shut up about your private business most of the time.

‘Karen has only just moved to the village,’ Susan butted in, clearly flustered. ‘She lives up by the station with her two children. She’s recently divorced.’ Will couldn’t imagine why Susan thought he cared.

‘William’s a divorce lawyer,’ Susan babbled on. Karen gave him a funny look that he couldn’t read.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, finding his voice. ‘My wife’s not well. I have to get back to her.’ Clutching the two tins of soup he was holding, he fled.

It was days later when Susan gently reminded him that he’d never paid for them.

Fran

She has never been on a plane on her own before. Until she met Will, she’d never been on a plane at all. Meeting him had opened up a whole new world to her: a family she’d never had, countries she’d never visited, things she’d never dreamed of doing. Every year they would go en masse to the south of France, or skiing in the Alps – Fran was a hopeless skier, which utterly frustrated Will, who was, of course, brilliant and only ever skied black runs. It was a life Fran had never imagined.

On Sunday morning when she had been talking to Jamie about it, when Karen Barden was just a woman who worked in the village pub who occasionally flirted with her husband, she had felt foolish. Foolish about how nervous flying alone at the age of thirty-eight made her feel. But she barely notices anything as she drifts through passport control, through security and through the boarding gate. Bigger things have taken over from her fear of flying and now she is high in the air, her ears popping and the man in the seat behind her digging his knees into her back.

She can still feel Will’s hand on her arm trying to prevent her getting into the taxi. It would have been so easy to go with him, to send the cab away and take his hand. To walk back into the house with him, forgive him, start again.

That’s what she wanted after all wasn’t it? To start again. To try again.

But even if Will hadn’t done what he’d done, even if she hadn’t found out about it, she did have to come to Spain. The reasons for leading this yoga retreat were still there. Over the last few years Fran has felt as though she has been losing her way, her essence. She wants this retreat to help her find out who she is again, to help her rebuild herself. She had been excited at the thought of an adventure on her own, despite her nerves. She had been looking forward to some time away. Now she doesn’t know what to feel.

Will had always supported her in everything she had wanted to do. They’d always supported each other. They were Will and Fran; they were a team – together they could weather the highs and the lows. They hadn’t expected so many lows, but she never expected the possibility of facing life as only one half of that team either.

She remembers when she first mentioned teaching yoga. She used to go to a lunchtime yoga class twice a week at the gym near her office. It was the class that Will complained she was always late back from, in the days when she was just his secretary. It was perfect – it stretched her body and relaxed her mind halfway through a stressful day. Her sanity, and the sanity of the rest of her colleagues, depended on it.

One week the regular yoga teacher was away. Fran often found herself disappointed when this happened. It always left her with a strange sense of loss, an echo of how she felt after her mother died. She sees it now, sometimes, in the eyes of her own students when she tells them she won’t be there the next week and another teacher will take the class. She knew she shouldn’t be attached to one teacher and one style of teaching, but she always found it hard to let go.

She’d hated the yoga class that Thursday lunchtime. She’d never hated a yoga class in her life before. She’d found herself, halfway through, uncharacteristically and unapologetically angry. She had done something unthinkably rude, something she’d never done before.

She’d walked out of the class before it had finished.

Fran was the sort of person who stayed in the cinema until the bitter end even when the film was long and boring and she couldn’t stand it. She always finished books, even when she lost interest in the characters on page twenty, and when it came to yoga classes she considered herself the mistress of etiquette. She always turned off her phone, never chatted, always arrived early and never, ever left before the end.