The Pieces of You and Me by Rachel Burton

Author:Rachel Burton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780008284527
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2019-01-17T16:00:00+00:00

… After I told you that I couldn’t come to America with you, I think I expected you to stay in Cambridge. I thought you would do the right thing. I thought you would stay with me and Mum, that we would get through this together just as we always had.

But you didn’t change your mind. You understood why I couldn’t come with you but by then you were determined to go, to get out of Cambridge, to try to run away from your pain. I tried to tell you it didn’t work like that, but you didn’t listen. Or if you did listen, you weren’t willing to stand up to your family and refuse to go to Harvard.

Instead you thought we could make it work long distance. You wanted to get married, just as we’d planned, to make that commitment to each other. You couldn’t see that for me everything changed when my father died, that nothing was ever going to be the same again. Besides, now I knew that Camilla was going to Harvard too. How were we ever going to work out? You swore you hadn’t known, but all I could see, if we got married, was an expensive trans-Atlantic divorce a year down the line.

‘Let’s see where we are next summer,’ I said. I wasn’t sure I meant that though. I think part of me had already decided what to do.

You started to shut down on me after that. For those last few weeks before you left you spent more time with John than you did with me. I still had my flat-share in London that summer. Mum insisted I stay and try to get on with my life, to do the post-graduate journalism course I’d got onto. She said it was what my dad would have wanted. She was already talking about selling the house. You went to Arsenal matches with John without telling me that you were in London while I drank too much coffee in the Turkish coffee shop at the bottom of Kentish Town Road and went to art exhibitions with Dan when I wasn’t looking after Mum.

The night before you left you phoned me. My flatmate, Rich, answered the phone.

‘Do you want me to tell him you’re out?’ he asked. We’d lived together for two years and he knew what was going on even though I hardly spoke about it. I almost said yes. For a moment I thought it would be easier that way, but I knew deep down we had to say goodbye. We owed each other that much.

‘Your mum said you would be here,’ you said.

You asked me to meet you at Heathrow. You were standing by the departure gate waiting for me when I arrived, looking around anxiously. You were early and I was late – the story of our lives.

When you saw me, you smiled that smile that was just for me and my heart broke into a million pieces. I’d made a decision on the tube on my way there.

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