Page 61 of The Family Across the Street

Did you really want to hurt me? Had you really stopped loving me? What could I have done better? How could I have helped you? What did you need that I didn’t give you? Were you ever happy? Who did you want to be? What did you want to do with your life?

The notebook’s pages are filling up but she will never be able to ask Patrick everything she so wants to ask him.

When she cries over her lost son, she tries to do it so the children and John don’t see. It’s hard for them to fathom the love she still holds for him after everything he did.

Patrick couldn’t be saved. She was on an operating table herself when he died during surgery. That thought makes her touch her heart and have to cover her eyes with her hands, hoping the image of him alone in an operating room will go away. She never got to say goodbye, to tell him that she loved him no matter what, and if she had been given the choice, she would have thought the same thing she thought about her twins. My life for theirs. My life for his.

John organised everything for the funeral, knowing that there was no one else to do it. It was an act of kindness, of generosity, on his part and it has changed the way she sees her husband. What has happened, the terrible shock of how easily Katherine and the children could have died, has helped them find their way back to each other step by step.

‘I thought you were dead,’ John repeats. ‘I saw you on that sofa and I thought you were gone and I understood that I had let so much petty bullshit stop me from being the husband and father I wanted to be. I prayed when they were operating on you, begged for another chance.’

‘I thought of you just before I closed my eyes,’ she has admitted to him, ‘and I think I was at peace because I knew you would love our children the way they needed to be loved. And I knew that you loved me. Nothing else mattered.’

She feels they have both been gifted a second chance and not everyone gets a second chance.

‘Right, here you go,’ says John, returning to the bedroom, followed by the children, with a haphazard arrangement of the flowers they collected on their walk: purples and yellows, pinks and oranges.

‘Lovely,’ she says.

‘It’s time for you to read to us,’ says George.

Every afternoon she reads for as long as her strength allows. They are reading Harry Potter and the children are enthralled. She hopes that one day they will remember these afternoons of comfort in the big bed as she recovered, rather than what put her there in the first place.

‘I spoke to Logan – he’s doing well and should be home soon,’ says John.

Katherine feels a pang whenever she thinks of Logan. She is overwhelmingly grateful to him, for his instincts and for him being the kind of man who, while worrying about his own sister, still took the time to be concerned for a complete stranger. George writes letters to him, filling up the pages with pictures of superheroes, Captain America featuring more than most. George and John have been to visit him in the hospital and John says their son has decided that Logan’s new baby will be his cousin, even though they are not related. Katherine has a feeling that Logan and Debbie will become part of their lives and she’s happy about that, but whenever she looks at Logan, she wonders how it is that he went a different way. They have spoken on the phone, discussed Patrick and how he came to be who he was, and Logan has shared his own childhood stories. Whoever he was as a younger man he is not that man anymore, and Katherine mourns that Patrick never got a chance to change, to become someone like Logan. A man with a past but able to put it behind him.

Patrick will forever be twenty-three and angry. Her tears are for the child he was and the man he will never be. She cannot hate him for what happened. It’s not possible. He was her son and now he’s gone and she wishes that at least she’d been able to comfort him at the end, to hold him as she had when he was a baby, to wrap him in her arms and keep him safe.

‘Come on, Mum,’ says George, ‘page thirty-two.’

Katherine wipes at her eyes quickly and begins.