Page 90 of Before You Say Goodbye

“Why did you invite me here if you aren’t interested?” he asked her.

She lied. “I was. I am.”

He shook his head and rolled his eyes.

“It isn’t right to treat anyone like they’re disposable, Autumn. Anyone.”

“I know,” Autumn said. “I am sorry.”

She wanted to tell him that her boyfriend had died, but thought it might sound preposterous in the circumstances. She wanted to confess that she was struggling to cope, that darkthoughts danced through her mind and she didn’t know how to stop them. She wanted to ask for help, but he was angry with her and had every right to be. He didn’t even know her. She offered him the money for the drinks that he had given her, but he shook his head and hastily pulled his clothes on, clearly upset. She apologised again, but he ignored her. She let him leave her there, listening to his footsteps as he headed for the door. She felt emptier than she ever had before.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, talking to Bowie. He’d told her never to do that, never to imagine that he might be there to accept an apology for anything she did to try to move on, but she’d still found that it helped her to speak to him. She did it all the time. Autumn heard Toby pull the door open.

“Good luck, man,” he said. She barely knew him, but she knew that he was not the type to call a woman ‘man’. He was talking to someone else. She sat up. By now he’d made his way down the stairs, but he had left her door open. He had let someone into her apartment.

“Walter?” she called. She heard the door click closed behind whoever it was. Walter was a little hard of hearing, but that didn’t reassure Autumn’s pounding heart. She felt low enough to wonder if it might be easier to just let the intruder kill her, but she pulled a bedsheet up and around her in a hopeless attempt to protect her dignity. She had no idea where her dressing gown was, or where that guy had thrown her clothes. She winced as she moved, feeling sore and bruised. Toby had taken her clumsily, and her mind had been so distant from the act that she had barely realised it until now.

She yelled out a warning. “I have a knife in here.”

Marley pushed the bedroom door open with his boot and stared at her.

“Put some fucking clothes on,” he said.

* * *

She dressed slowly, pulling on a pair of jeans and a baggy white T-shirt Bowie had given her. She could hear Marley moving around in the kitchen and she knew he’d found the alcohol in her cereal cupboard.

She braced herself to face him. He held out a mug of red wine and they stared, silently, at each other. She deliberated momentarily, then took it. What could be the harm? Her appointment was in just a few days. She sipped it, watching him going through her cupboards, presumably in search of food. She didn’t have the energy to tell him she hadn’t bothered to buy anything since she’d first got back. She barely ate these days. She had the prominent hip bones and ribcage to prove it.

Marley looked a mess. His hair was shaggy and overgrown, his skin unhealthily dull, and he smelled like he hadn’t been near a shower in weeks. He turned suddenly and leaned back against the kitchen counter, eyeing her over the cracked tumbler he was drinking neat gin from.

“How did they let you on a plane looking like that?” she asked.

“I’ve been back for three days,” he said. “Which you’d know, if you’d bothered to answer my mother’s calls.”

Autumn grimaced. She’d been ignoring Emma’s calls for over a week. Autumn had justified her behaviour to herself. Emma’s voice made her feel even more sorrowful and Autumn couldn’t bear how much she was missing this woman. Whenever they spoke, two things happened: first, Autumn would feel so incredibly desperate to make Emma happy that she would contemplate telling her that she was having a baby, and, secondly, she would start to reason that perhaps it wasn’t so complicated after all. She’d start to wonder exactly why it was that she couldn’t simply tell them that she was having Bowie’s baby, move back to England and have this child. It would make them happy and she’d started to feel as if it might make herhappy too. She was certain that her mental turmoil was, at least in part, due to the reality of the termination she’d arranged. She had no choice, because she had no way of knowing whose baby she was carrying, but she felt like she was decaying from the inside out. If she could guarantee that the baby belonged to Bowie, she was fairly certain she would keep it, but it wasn’t that simple, wouldn’t ever be that simple. The reason for that complication, that confusion she was feeling, was standing in front of her right now, drunkenly sinking glass after glass of any liquor he had managed to find. She wondered what he might do if she were to tell him the truth. Could she depend on him to keep their secret? To submit to acting as uncle to a child he may have fathered, for the rest of their lives? She could not be sure and it wouldn’t be right of her to ask that of him, nor would it be fair on the person growing inside her. She couldn’t see how she could bring a human into the world and tell them their father had passed away, when he could, in fact, be sitting across from them at the family dinner table.

“You’re a shitty person, Autumn.” Marley slurred his words. “My mum is devastated.”

“Why are you here?”

“Couldn’t bear being in that house anymore,” he said. “Ran off. Called them when I landed. Told them where I was.”

“Aren’t they furious with you?”

“Yeah.” He nodded. “But glad that I can check in on you. We thought you were dead, Autumn.”

He sank his gin, glaring at her. “You owe my parents more than this,” he said. “After everything they’ve done for you.”

Emma had once promised Autumn that they would never throw the love they had shown her back in her face, but Marley clearly had no qualms about doing so on their behalf. Especially not in the state that he was in.

“You’re one to talk,” she said. “Don’t you think you owe them more than what you’re putting them through?”

He laughed bitterly, tipping the last of the gin into his glass. Autumn was sure he was close to collapse.

“You’re scaring them,” she said. “And you’re scaring me.”

He swallowed hard and shuddered, swaying unsteadily from side to side. He was tall and imposing, but he looked like a lost and frightened little boy. She was suddenly overcome with a longing to hold him in her arms. She had missed him so much.

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