Page 15 of Forever is Now

I fell to my knees, and it felt like a chasm had opened inside my chest. A huge, gaping chasm.

Ruari was dead—I was convinced of it. truly.

I could not live without him.

I... I couldn’t.

I stared down at the sea. Still dark and murky, debris floating around it, parts of buildings and furniture just floating. And I wondered, really wondered what it would be like to be inside that water. That darkness. To be hit by an armchair or a TV. To be ensnared in wires or vines or seaweed, to be held down.

I wondered if that was what Ruari had faced. If he’d been scared as the sea drowned him.

And I knew his body was most likely in there. This huge gothic monster that was a mortuary for so many.

I stared at the water—that was where my love was.

Where my life was.

I walked slowly. I couldn’t hear anything but rushing sounds in my ears, like there was already water inside me. Yes—there was. That was what had been weighing me down ever since this all happened.

That’s why I’d felt like I wasn’t really here. Like this was happening to someone else.

Like this couldn’t actually be my life.

Because my life was underwater, and that’s where I was supposed to be. That’s where I was.

I’d defied some law of physics, able to be in both places at once—underwater and on land. That’s why I was so exhausted, because half of me was already in the dark depths. And I needed to reunite the two halves of my body. Then everything would be okay.

I was so confident of this, and as the cold water lapped my feet, as it got higher and higher up my legs, until I was waist-deep, I felt a sense of peace spreading over me.

This was what was supposed to happen.

“Everything will be okay,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like mine—that’s one thing that really struck me at the time. Sort of jolted me out of the state I was in. Only for a few seconds. But I remember it, the sudden awareness of what I was doing, how that hit me.

How the next wave washed it away and I walked deeper into the sea.

I didn’t drown. Obviously. You know that.

Two men pulled me out. My head hadn’t been underwater for long. Seconds, maybe. They were local fishermen, and they’d been watching me.

I was sent to a hospital, but I didn’t really need to go there. I wasn’t drowning. I hadn’t been drowning. I just stared at the neon lights and listened to the shouts and words of everyone around me, most of which I couldn’t understand.

“We need to get you back home,” Mum said to me, on the phone. I’m sure she must’ve said some other things too. I wanted her here, I wanted her sitting tenderly at my bedside as I waited for my blood results to come back—blood tests that I didn’t even need. But Mum’s words are the only ones I recall filling the room.

“I can’t go back.” I shook my head, clinging to the phone. I can’t remember whose phone it was, but someone leant it to me. I’d spoken to Mum before that day. Called her, I think, maybe the evening that the tsunami hit. She knew I was okay. But she knew I hadn’t found Ruari. “I can’t leave him,” I told her.

“Ruari’s...” She didn’t finish her sentence. She didn’t have to.

“I can’t leave him,” I repeated, my voice steely.

“I can’t lose you,” was all she said, some minutes later, and I remember imagining that she was holding my hand, just like she used to when I was four years old.

Finally, I cried.

[Silence for three seconds]

Summer Taylor-Braddon: So, the problem with all this was thatSwept Away, my first novel, was about a couple who get separated by a tsunami. It wasn’t Indonesia, but that didn’t matter. The love interest—the man—died in my book, and now my life was following the script I’d written.

That book was the fourth I wrote but the first to have sold to a publisher, but it hadn’t sold well. It had underperformed and I had no chance of earning out on this one. That means paying back the publisher the amount they’ve already given you in the advance. So, if they gave you £5,000 upfront when you got the deal, then you don’t get royalties until they’ve made that money back. So it was kind of lucky, I guess, that I’d actually signed another deal beforeSwept Awaydid so badly—initially anyway.

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