Page 62 of The Spark

For Billy, who liked to watch the world go by.

My throat clots with emotion. I swallow it down. ‘That’s beautiful. He’d have loved it.’

She smiles. ‘He’d have told us off for being sentimental tosspots, actually, don’t you think? But yeah. Deep down, you’re right – he would.’

I don’t have the monopoly on grief here, I think, suddenly. How long should I go on punishing her for what happened to Jamie?

The thought comes out of nowhere, and it feels foreign and alarming. Did I get everything wrong? Was my anger misdirected? Over the years, it has kept me safe, in lots of ways. Has given me focus when the pain of losing Jamie became too much.

‘It’s so weird,’ she says. ‘That Dad dying was the thing that eventually brought me and Mum together again, after a decade of me acting like a total brat. We’re closer than we’ve ever been now.’

‘Billy would be happy about that.’

‘Yeah. But he’d probably also want to know what took me so long.’ She shakes her head. ‘Anyway. Talk to me, Neve. What was it that you couldn’t say on the phone on Saturday night?’

Talk to me. Just three words, but they flicker to life at the back of my brain, like an old bulb I’d forgotten was there. She used to say it all the time, instead of, All right? or What’s up?

I feel the urge to backtrack, tell her it was nothing. But Lara is the only person on the planet who might be able to help me understand what’s going on with Ash. Because she knew Jamie too, and she loved him. There’s no-one else who can reliably discern whether or not I’m going mad.

‘This is going to sound... a bit out there, okay? You might think I’m nuts.’

She’s probably expecting me to say I still miss Jamie. That Ash reminds me of him a little too much. But she doesn’t yet know how deep it goes. How messy it’s all become.

She slips me a smile. ‘Come on. That ship sailed when you confessed to fancying Attenborough.’

I smile back at her. I once admitted to finding David’s voice soothing, and she’s never let me forget it.

‘I feel as though Ash... might be Jamie.’

She blinks a couple of times, takes a breath, lets it out. ‘No. Sorry. Don’t understand.’

I shake my head. ‘I know that sounds insane. Believe me, I know it. But I think... Jamie might have come back to me. He always said he would.’

Lara touches my hand with her fingertips. She’s wearing a stack of gold bangles that reaches halfway up her forearm. ‘Talk me through it,’ is all she says, very calmly.

So I tell her everything. About Ash’s job and flat, and taste in art and music, about his handwriting and favourite aftershave, and the myriad other weird little similarities between them. I describe all the ways in which he already seems to know me so well. I tell her about the lightning strike, about Ash becoming a completely different person afterwards. I insist it can’t be coincidence, in the hope that she doesn’t try to tell me that’s what it must be.

It’s comforting as it always was to talk to her. Like no time has passed at all. It’s as though we’re back in the bedroom at Edinburgh Road, lying on her bed with our feet propped up against the wall, taking it in turns to offload and trying together to make sense of how the world works.

When I’m finished, she draws a deep breath. ‘And what does Ash think about this?’

‘I haven’t told him yet.’ I shake my head. ‘Honestly, Lar, I feel like I’ve gone back in time. Thinking about Jamie constantly, unable to forget him. I moved on from all that. But now I’m right back there.’

‘That must be tough.’

‘I mean, it is... but at the same time, Jamie was the love of my life. So, in a way...’

She nods, waits patiently, like there’s nothing at all unusual about the things I’m saying.

‘What do you think? I mean, you’ve met Ash, and you... knew Jamie, too.’

I notice her eyes pool briefly with tears before she swallows them away. ‘You know as well as I do there’s only one way to get to the bottom of this. You need to talk to Ash. Tell him everything. You never know, it might make complete sense to him.’

I consider this for a moment, then shake my head. ‘What would you say, if someone said that to you?’

‘Well, that would depend.’

‘On what?’

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