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23

TWO WEEKS AGO

She sat on the train, feeling such a mixture of relief and grief as it began to pull out of the station that she had to turn her face away from the other passengers, didn’t want them to see her face crumple.

Luckily, the carriage was quite empty – it was late: an extra few trains had been laid on for the summer season, but it appeared uptake was low. It meant she had a little arrangement of four seats to herself, and the only other passengers in her eyeline were a man in a creased suit, scrolling on his phone, and a woman with a book who eyed her occasionally but hadn’t felt prompted to ask if she was OK.

She reminded herself of the facts. She’d said goodbye to Tom, just as she’d planned. She’d put an end to this stage of her grief; an end, she hoped, to the hallucinations. She’d done it alone. Yes, she was emotional, but that was to be expected. And she was going home to Will, a man she loved fiercely and who loved her back.

It was OK. It was OK.

The train entered the tunnel and the announcement came on, first in French then in English – safety warnings, information, the driver then telling them what the weather would be like on arrival.

She tried to still her breathing, distract herself with her phone, to close her eyes and sleep. But all she could see was the silver locket falling, falling and being engulfed by the water. And she’d thought in that moment how much Tom had always hated the water, always preferred to be above it than on it. Had never agreed to take a boat trip with her on the Seine. And she’d thought of that part of him enclosed in the silver heart that would be battered and buffeted by the water, that would be nudged by fish or other river-dwelling creatures. How, if it wasn’t swept too far, the boats he’d always avoided would travel over him every day.

And she’d felt a surge of regret. A feeling that she’d somehow missed, got something wrong.

But it was the bridge, she reminded herself. The bridge where he’d first been aware of his place in the universe, where he’d felt that sense of magic and love and eternity.

She didn’t believe that Tom was in those scooped-up ashes in any case. Didn’t believe, if she was honest, that he was anywhere. But if he was – if there were ghosts, if there was something else waiting for us on the other side, he would be there. Not in the bottom of the Seine but somewhere else, living in a way she couldn’t imagine. Free from pain and part of the universe he’d glimpsed all that time ago.

It was this thought that, finally, enabled her to close her eyes and give in to the heaviness of sleep.