The Girl Upstairs by Georgina Lees

Author:Georgina Lees [Lees, Georgina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780008485412
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

Chapter Twenty-Six

Do you remember how we met? We’d been together for so long the story became a well-choreographed dance when people would ask. You loved to tell it. We were so young, weren’t we? How much we changed as we grew up, but still those same twenty-year-olds, still us.

I remember striding over to you first. I’d had a couple of glasses of wine and I felt confident. It was your boyish looks that attracted me, the smile you flashed me as I stood with my friends on the other side of the sticky club in Brighton. ‘I’m going over,’ I remember saying to my friends. I didn’t know what it would turn into, I didn’t know a drunken night when I invited you back to my hotel room would lead to this.

You tell the story better, of course. It’s more romantic when you say it; you always describe it as a wonderful whirlwind. I guess our whole relationship was. When you asked me to marry you on the beach, we’d only been together for a year but I knew that you were the one I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. It sounds so cheesy when I say it but you made it sound just right. What I’d do for a moment like that again, for a moment of such intimacy with you.

I love that you are romantic and spontaneous and all the things I’m not. I love that you can be serious and funny in one breath. I was so envious of your ability to show your emotions, so easily and with no embarrassment. Whenever we fought, whenever I was sad, or happy, you beat me to solving it each time, knowing the perfect thing to say. You never gave me room. You never gave me room to feel as much as you did.

I resent you for that. I don’t want to, but I do. Now you’re gone and it’s like I’m unable to process my thoughts anymore, because you did that for me. You solved all the problems, but you couldn’t solve that one, could you? Me, silently loathing London, letting it fester, and you watching me take it. Why did you not say anything sooner? Why did you not make one of your big cheesy moves? Why did you not listen?

I’m sorry, I don’t mean to blame you, but now I have all this time to think, desperately trying to let my thoughts form and take shape. You’d be disappointed in me now.

I remember the first meal I made you was homemade arancini. You’d come to meet my parents for the first time and I cooked for everyone. I expected that first meal with my family to be awkward, for my dad to say something silly or Clara to recount her most embarrassing story of me – and they did, but I didn’t care. I just saw the way you looked at me across the table, accepting every part of me. I laugh again, as I remember you patting your belly, saying you couldn’t bear another bite.

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