Page 69 of The Last Train Home
‘What’s it about?’
I stare at him. ‘You are joking, right?’
He smiles. ‘Maybe. Do you think he dies in the end?’
‘Voldemort? Flipping hope so.’
‘No – Harry.’
‘Harry?’ I splutter. ‘No way. I look at the sheer size of the book I’m reading. ‘He’d better not die. Jesus! I don’t think I could cope with that. Imagine reading these books to your kids over the last few years and you get to the final chapter and Harry dies. You’d have to make something up, wouldn’t you?’
‘You’d lie? To your kids about the ending of a book?’
I nod. ‘I would about this one.’ I deliberate flicking to the end of the book. Harry had better not die.
‘Interesting,’ he says.
‘Why is that interesting?’
‘You’d lie to protect someone.’
‘Depends on the lie.’
He thinks about that for a while.
‘What else have you lied about to protect someone?’ Sean says eventually.
‘I don’t think I’ve lied about anything,’ I say honestly. And then the memory of Tom and me in his kitchen, telling each other how we feel, hits me hard and fast. I realise the sentence I’ve just uttered is itself a lie. I went to see Tom, after Sean asked me not to.
He puts his empty beer bottle down on the table that divides us. ‘Will you read our kids Harry Potter?’
‘Yeah.’ I’m distracted, trying to push Tom out of my head.
‘How many?’
‘How many books?’ I ask.
‘How many kids … I mean, how many kids do you want?’
‘Um … I’m not sure. Two?’ I’ve thought about this over the years. They say you can’t miss what you never had, butI know that growing up a single child, I missed not having a sibling.
‘Two sounds nice. A boy and a girl?’ he questions.
‘I don’t think you get to pick like that,’ I laugh.
‘Little versions of us, scampering around. Rugby at weekends for little man. And a bit of ballet for her – or whatever girls get up to.’
‘Maybe if we have a son,hemight like to do ballet?’ I suggest.
Sean rolls his eyes at me. ‘Maybe.’
I sit back, put Harry Potter down, indulge Sean in this fantasy life.
‘It’s good to be on the same page,’ he says. ‘About life. We are, aren’t we?’
‘I think so.’
‘We want the same things,’ he says. It’s a statement, not a question.
