Page 23 of The Key to My Heart

Someone a few tables away drops a fork, and it clangs on the ground, like a chime. Our heads turn, as if synchronised.

‘And?’ he asks.

‘And?’

‘Yeah, what happened?’ he asks, a piece of tomato speared on his fork. It drips two drops of dark, gloopy dressing, one and then two, onto his plate, like blood.

‘Oh. W-well.’ He’s just staring at me. He doesn’t look like a man who knows more about it than I do. It isn’t him. Of course it isn’t him. ‘It’s just – the following week, another piece of music was left. And it was our first dance.’

He swallows. ‘Seriously, Nat?’

‘Seriously.’

Maxwell knocks back a mouthful of mocktail, puffing his cheeks up as if swilling mouthwash around his teeth. He swallows and laughs. ‘Someone having you on?’

‘Well, actually, I did think that to be honest, at first.’

‘Anyone would.’

‘Yeah, but then I thought maybe – maybe … it could’ve been …’

Still, he carries on staring at me, munching, his jaw rotating, dicing up another round of beef tomato, and I feel like I want to grab him by the shoulders and make him focus, listen to me, stop bloodyeating.

‘I thought maybe it was something to do with Russ.’

He stops everything then. Chewing, blinking, breathing. A mannequin. He’d do well with Sienna, back at the shop. Plus, she never talks, never offers up an opinion, or a fact he might not know. His type, really. ‘With Russ?’

‘Or you. Or one of your friends, maybe?’

He swallows then, as if it’s a difficult task, and looks at me like he thinks I’m about to drop a hilarious punchline that hasn’t landed yet. ‘Me?’

I laugh awkwardly. ‘Well – the thing is, they were so specific, the songs. I used to play them at the hospital while he was recovering. Do you remember? They had that donated piano and they said music helped people in recovery and, I mean, his favourite song, left on his birthday, Max. Not many people know that. I just think, how can it not be?’

Maxwell’s brow furrows, three deep gouges in the skin, gathering. ‘How can it not be what?’

‘Well.Him.In some way.’

Okay, now Maxwell looks like he might warn me off with a pitchfork. His eyes are wide, his cheeks are tinged with red – the face of a man who’s trapped in a building of which the emergency fire lever has been pulled. And I know now that it isn’t him, and now I feel ashamed. Small. Ridiculous. The way he’s looking at me – it’s like those looks my friends always give me. The looks I hate. The pity.

‘How can it …’ He pauses, leans across the table and drops the volume of his voice, like he’s talking to a tiny scared child. ‘How can it be Russ, Natalie, he’s …’

‘He’s dead, yes,I know,’ and my voice is definitely at least four notches louder than his. ‘Sorry.’ I push my plate across the table.

‘S-sorry?’

‘I just – I don’t like basil.’

‘Oh. I’m sorry, I should’ve waited—’

‘No, no, not at all, I just …’ I don’t know. I feel disappointed. I feel ashamed. Like I’ve eaten a biscuit in Wonderland and shrunk to a tiny little Natalie onthis chair. I’d hoped he’d grin, say, ‘You’ve got me,’ and tell me this beautiful story about how he and Russ orchestrated this in the hospital, making lists, dates and songs. Idealistic, maybe, but it’s what I wanted to happen. And now I just feel stupid. And I’m taking it out on the basil and this frankly disappointing carbless plate of food. ‘I just wondered if Russ had organised something like this – you know, like they do in films and stuff. Like Shauna said—’

‘Shauna?’

‘My friend. Her mum. She received flowers on her birthday for the first five years from her husband, Shauna’s dad, after he died and he’d organised it, with the florist—’

‘It isn’t me,’ he says. ‘And I don’t know if Russ would be up for things like that, to be honest.’ And those words – those words feel like he’s just puked up a grenade and it’s sitting between us on the table. When Edie first told me about her and Russ, what was most painful, was feeling like there was an edge to Russ I didn’t know. A shadow, I was never privy to. This – being told Russ wouldn’t be up for doing something like this for me, when he was more quietly romantic, more thoughtful, than anyone else I know feels like that again. A little twist in the gut. A little ‘you don’t know him like you think you do.’ When I do. I did and I do.

‘No,’ I say simply.

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