The Last Time I Saw You by Eleanor Moran Read Free Book Online Page B

bubble and show itself against my will. I feel like I’m in that children’s party game, the one I always hated, where they blindfold you and spin you around and around, your friends transformed into unidentifiable enemies who will only stop once you’re too sick and dizzy to do anything but beg for mercy. William shoots a quick, surreptitious glance at his phone when he thinks I’m not looking. Why am I even here? It must be torture for him to have to endure more small talk. “I ought to go back,” I say, expecting him to sag with relief, but instead he looks almost disappointed. I grope for the right words. “I’m so, so sorry. Please know if there’s anything I can do—”
    “There is,” he says, jumping in. “Just sharing your memories of Sally at a time when I didn’t know her will help Madeline and me immeasurably. I know that you were thebest of friends at Leeds—I want her to have the fullest possible sense of who her mother was.”
    Anxiety races up and down inside me like a child playing a scale with the gleeful swipe of a single finger. Why is he asking me, of all people? If he knows what close friends we were, he must also know that I didn’t simply disappear in a puff of smoke. I’ve got that acute sense again that we’re talking about a different person, and yet, if what Lola says is true, he must be wrestling with his own sense of the world spinning dizzyingly fast.
    “I could try . . .” I say, hating myself for my own reluctance. I don’t know how to do this, I want to tell him; I don’t know how to lay my version of Sally next to yours and not taint it. A coldness crosses his face, like he’s snapped up the drawbridge and retreated into the gray depths of the castle. Who can blame him? I must seem to him like nothing more than a grief tourist, taking a day trip into his pain and gawking at it before blithely returning to normal life. “No, please do call me,” I say, reaching out instinctively to touch his arm, to breach the gap between us, but it’s stiff and rigid under my fingers. “I’ll write down my number for you,” I add, embarrassed, yanking my hand away and searching my handbag for a pen.
    “Thank you,” he says, and I look up, struck by the cadence of his voice. It seems to contain a depth of feeling, his thank you, and I hold his gaze for a second, trying to convey to him that my reluctance wasn’t born out of indifference or laziness. It was fear, pure and simple. His phone erupts in his hand, breaking the moment. “I need to take this,” he says, his face suddenly grim, all vulnerability gone.
    “Goodbye,” I mouth, backing away, but I don’t think he even sees me. I can hear him as I round the corner.
    “I can only congratulate you on your impeccable timing,” he says, his voice full of cold, controlled fury. “To ask this of me at any time would be extraordinary, but to ask it today absolutely beggars belief.”

CHAPTER THREE
    Shock is a strange thing; time seems to have developed a mind of its own, galloping ahead and wheeling backward like an angry animal. It’s the day after the funeral and I’m feeling more discombobulated than ever. Now it’s happened, now I’ve had to accept the extraordinary truth that Sally really was confined within that wooden box, was committed to the ground, I’ve lost the option of denial. I feel different: I feel like a person who knows something that the Livvy of last month, or even last week, had no idea about. The outside of my life is a carbon copy—the hot water and lemon I always have first thing, the eight-fifteen exit for the tube—but I’ve been switched off autopilot. The world feels fragile and sharp, its colors and noises assailing me like burning fat spitting up from a pan.
    James has left at his normal time too, six-thirty, early enough to swim halfway across the virtual Channel before his first meeting. He’s left a note propped up against thegranola: Chin up mate , it says, with an x : I slip it