Page 122 of The Spark

The time disappears too fast. I know Lara doesn’t feel up to more than a few hours. I feel the clock in my stomach tick harder with every passing minute, each time I catch her eye from across the room, and she blows me a kiss. Because I’m not ready to say goodbye. I’m just not. How could I ever be?

Lara invited Mum to sing today, even letting her pick the songs. I try not to cry as Mum, resplendent in dove-grey satin, sings ‘Songbird’, ‘Time After Time’ and ‘Endless Love’. And, incredibly, she gets through it. How? I know I wouldn’t have been able to.

I rarely experience pride when it comes to Mum, an emotion that would be wasted on her anyway. But I feel it roaring at gale force through me now. And not just for today. She’s knocked drinking on the head, apparently, with the help of Ralph and her local AA group. It’s early days – she’s just over a fortnight sober. How the hell she got through Christmas, I’ll never know. But so far, things look promising. I can’t remember a time when she’s gone more than twenty-four hours without a drink in her hand.

As evening arrives and darkness descends, Lara appears by my side and passes me my coat. ‘Shall we?’ She nods towards the door to the garden, and wordlessly, we walk out there together.

We sit down on a bench, facing the faint rumble of the distant sea, half illuminated by the light spilling out from the conservatory.

We don’t say anything for a minute or so, letting our breath mingle and become fog in front of us. The air is rigid with cold, the sky an endless map of galaxies. We are both gazing up at it, because it’s too hard to look at each other.

‘You’re wearing the jumper,’ I say.

‘Well. I used to take it out of the wardrobe from time to time and think, One day, we’ll find each other again.’

I swallow and nod, because it’s all I can do.

‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘And I don’t just mean for today. Thanks for doing life with me. It wouldn’t have been the same without you.’

Her words are a lump hammer to my heart. I shake my head and put my arms around her, still unable to believe I am feeling the rush of her pulse, the warm press of her cheek to mine, for what I know will be the last time. How can she be dying, when she’s right here, sitting by my side?

The tears start to stream. ‘I don’t know how to say goodbye to you.’

‘Then let’s not,’ she whispers. ‘Okay? Let’s just say, see you later.’

I pull away and look into the fathomless blue of her eyes. Though she’s crying too, she’s still smiling. ‘How are you so brave?’ I ask her, through my tears.

‘I’m not,’ she says. ‘I’m just very, very loved.’

In the car on the way home, I open the envelope she passed to me before we left.

Inside is a postcard of a Californian sunrise. On the reverse, she’s simply scribbled, Make the most of every one x

Mum, who’s driving, asks me what it says. But I can’t answer. In fact, I can’t speak at all. I just stare out of the window as the countryside becomes a motion-blur of tears.

Chapter 52.

Six months later

Eight weeks after Lara’s death, I fly to California, to stay with Felix. His place already feels oddly familiar to me, since Lara and I FaceTimed daily after she left Norfolk in December.

She passed away four months later, with Felix by her side, just as she’d wanted. And though I know some people questioned her choice to be on the other side of the world, it’s clear to me as soon as I set eyes on the last view she ever saw – Felix’s lavish green lawn with its fringe of cypress trees and decking overlooking a vast blue wilderness of ocean – that she made the right call. How could it not have been? She spent her final days on earth bathed in sunshine, with the man she loved, and all the care and attention she could ever need. Which was just so perfectly Lara. She did everything her way, right up till the end.

But after her living funeral, the actual funeral hit hard. Because although people tried to smile and be upbeat, and had dressed as she’d requested in bright colours, the day was bleak and sombre in the only way it ever could be at a crematorium, with Lara’s coffin in front of us. But it was a warm spring morning, and the sun shone for the speeches at the wake. And the closure, ultimately, felt comforting. Like the gentle turning of a page. The start of a new chapter.

Felix takes me on a tour of his house, which seems to be full of people – family members, a gardener, a maid, and a couple of guys from his company who are working from one of the many office spaces.

The whole place is, by any measure, spectacular. There are bay views from the windows, and a stunning garden and infinity pool, the house itself a breathtaking fusion of concrete, glass and steel.

Felix tells me he sometimes rents it out to film and TV crews.

‘For what kind of thing?’

‘Well, no horror films,’ he says. ‘Only ever... feel-good stuff.’

I don’t know if he’s joking, but I like the sentiment.

It was always the sunrises here that Lara loved the most. When she was still able, she and Felix would head out onto the deck with a pile of blankets while the world was still dark, and hold hands as the horizon began to roar with colour. It was a daily comfort, she told me – witnessing the beauty of another dawn. She used to say it made her feel braver. That little bit more invincible.

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