Sara Foster - Come Back to Me

As she watched, Alex folded himself into his seat, picked up his menu and hid his head behind it, but Julia’s back remained rigid. ‘Could you excuse me for a minute?’ she said, turning to look at Chloe and twisting her mouth into a smile. Her eyes were vacant and glassy, her skin pale. She looked entirely different from the composed woman who’d shaken Chloe’s hand a few moments earlier. She scraped her chair back jerkily, and the ugly noise echoed on the tiles. ‘I just need to go to the bathroom.’

‘Of course.’

They watched her go. Alex remained hidden behind his menu, pulling it as close to his face as he could. His shoulders rose and fell jerkily, as though he were breathing heavily, working on a ragged edge of self-control. Chloe and Mark made small-talk, mostly about work, and Mark regaled her with his frustrating meeting that evening, where his client seemed to be trying to put some kind of metaphorical arm-lock on him before they went to court.

After forty-five minutes they all finally admitted to themselves that Julia wouldn’t be coming back.

Alex navigated the route home on automatic pilot, painfully aware of Chloe watching him. He was grateful that she hadn’t asked any questions other than an ‘Are you okay?’, to which he’d nodded mutely with his eyes averted from hers. But he would need to explain, he knew that. Where the hell would he start?

Once home, they got ready for bed in silence, the ambience of their bedroom just a few hours before now replaced by an atmosphere tight-packed with tension. It felt like the room was holding its breath, ready for Alex to start talking.

He got into bed and felt the mattress give as Chloe got in beside him. He took a deep breath and turned to face her. ‘Chloe… I…’

Their eyes locked for a moment, and then the phone rang.

He thought maybe, just this once, she would leave it. But no – she sighed, turned away and pulled herself out of bed, padding into the hallway where he heard her resigned response, ‘Hello? Mum, are you okay?’

Alex sighed. They could always rely on Margaret to pick the most inopportune moment to call. He knew Chloe had been growing increasingly worried about her mother since her stepfather, Charlie, had died, but that was over a year ago now and the endless phone calls and regular trips up north were beginning to take their toll. If only Chloe’s brother, Anthony, hadn’t fallen out with the family and moved to America. It meant that Chloe was all Margaret had left.

Alex waited for a while, listening to his wife’s soothing murmurs, presumably during those times that his mother-in-law couldn’t help but pause for breath. Eventually he turned off the bedside light.

As he tried fruitlessly to summon sleep, he berated himself for not telling Chloe more from the beginning. There had been plenty of chances, and he had avoided them all with a determination to leave history behind him. But Chloe would have understood… wouldn’t she?

Of course she would; she would have told him there was no need to be ashamed, to blame himself. And that was exactly why he had kept quiet: because he still didn’t entirely believe he deserved to hear those words. Because if he could go back and have his chance again, then of course he would do it all differently.

Except, would he? At the start he had thought so, but now he had Chloe, and that meant everything had changed. He wanted to protect her from the miseries of the past. He had learned to live with it and come to accept that there was nothing he could do any more; never believing there would be a time when the whole nightmare would come full circle to fling itself at him again.

Eventually the bedroom door creaked open, and the mattress jolted as Chloe lay down. She kept her back to him, preventing him from touching her, from scooping her into the welcoming curve of his body, as he did most other nights.

As the hours dissolved, his mind began to race faster, the full realisation of what had happened hammering into him with every quickening beat of his pulse. My god, she was there, in the restaurant; she is alive. He kept replaying their brief hello until it became like listening to vinyl on half-speed, their voices chewed-up baritones. His thoughts churned over and over, more tumbled and chaotic each time, until he gave up on sleep and made his way downstairs. In the kitchen, he poured himself the first drink that came to hand – from a half-finished bottle of merlot – then went through to the lounge. He sat on the sofa in the darkness and slugged the wine back in two mouthfuls, feeling the bite of the liquid weaving its way down his throat.

The more he tried not to remember, the more his mind replayed the same scenes. The white van rounding the corner. The chaos at the roadside as their worlds, cut-glass prisms of possibilities, had shattered in the sunshine. His last view of her: just a shadow behind a window. Until the restaurant, that was.

How the hell was he going to live his life from this point forward, knowing that the woman who had meant the world to him, who he’d thought might be dead, was in fact alive and living somewhere nearby? That tonight, for a brief moment, he had held her hand and then let it go again – just as he had the last time.

Right then, surrounded by transfiguring darkness, he knew he desperately wanted to see her again. He needed to talk to her; to explain; to understand. And he had a thousand questions to ask, not least of all why she was calling herself Julia when that was not her real name.

Kara Abbott: fifteen years old; blonde; beautiful.

Dead.

Mark tried to focus on Kara as he walked towards the lifts, still in shorts and T-shirt from his early-morning squash game, but her blonde hair kept morphing into darker, more exotic locks, and her slightly chubby face kept thinning out to the beautiful, haunted one that seemed to be shadowing his thoughts.

He had been so mortified last night when Julia hadn’t come back. When Alex had turned to greet them, Mark had had the strange sensation of all his optimism fleeing his body with each deflating exhalation of breath. Worse still had been watching Chloe ramble on for half an hour trying to ignore the empty chair next to her. Tiny particles of her pity had floated across the table with every word she’d uttered and he’d breathed it in until he felt he might choke. And Alex, fucking Alex, who had so obviously upset Julia – who so obviously knew Julia, probably intimately – had said nothing. The least the man could have done was provide an explanation. Mark felt the muscles in his back constrict as he thought about it.

When they’d decided to call it a night – after one round of wine and no food, much to the chagrin of the waiter – Chloe had looked like she wanted to offer more crumbs of comfort, but by that time Mark had been so livid that he was having trouble keeping his voice down and staying civil. ‘I’ll get the bill,’ he’d rasped at her. ‘You two just go.’

She’d guided Alex quickly away and Mark had an absurd longing to head for the ladies’ toilets to see if Julia was still hiding in there. But he wasn’t going to be reduced to a laughing stock for any bloody woman.

Yesterday, as they’d walked into the restaurant he’d felt great, the best in a long time. He’d taken stock of his work, his recent promotion, his finances, and his impending date, and felt he was slowly building himself a concrete plinth. Every day he climbed a little higher. One day he would perch on top of it, looking down in contentment at all he had achieved. Now he felt as though he were halfway up that god-awful Jenga game his young nephews loved playing, and with one false move the whole thing could come tumbling down at any moment.