Page 56 of An Enchanted Moment on Ever After Street
‘I was hit by a train.’
I can’t help the intake of breath, partly because I didn’t expect him to tell me, and partly because… Bloodyhell, theimpact of that. My mind goes to a million places about what kind of injuries that would result in. No frigging wonder he makes noises of pain every time he moves. I turn around to look at him. ‘Oh, Darcy, I’m so sorry. Good lord. I’msosorry.’ I don’t know what to do with something so unimaginably painful. ‘How long ago?’
‘Seven years.’
‘You were… badly injured?’
‘Catastrophically so. That’s the word the doctors kept using. I clung onto that, for some reason. Catastrophic injuries. It felt like a good metaphor for what my life had become – catastrophic.’ His laugh comes out as more of a scoff. ‘Months in hospital. Years more of physical rehabilitation. All the ribs on my right side were shattered. Shards of broken rib pierced my right lung and made it collapse. Broken rib pieces slashed pretty much every internal organ. Fractured skull. Smashed jaw. Smashed eye socket. Smashed cheekbone. Broken pelvis. Broken leg. They barely managed to save my hand. Just about everything you can imagine being broken was broken… Sorry, you don’t want to hear my shopping list of injuries. We’d be here all night if I went through them all.’
‘Of course I do. I want to know everything, even the hard parts.’ I take that as my cue to get up and go over to him. He’s got his arms around his knees and is sitting on the kneeling pad now, so I take mine and sit down beside him. ‘You’re still suffering?’
‘No more than I always will. Everything healed eventually. I got mobility back. Broken bones are never the same, and my ribs… well, they had to jigsaw-puzzle them back together with titanium plates, so they ache sometimes, especially when the weather turns cold.’
I reach over and slide my hand over the glove covering his left hand, my wrist brushing against the sleeve of the chunkyknit jumper he’s wearing, unsure if he’s going to shrug me off. ‘Your injuries… they changed the way you look?’
‘I have scarring. My face was so badly cut up that they had to use skin grafts from my hip to heal it. My nose was broken and healed in a different shape. When a jaw is broken, the masseter muscles overcompensate for the other damaged muscles and they grow and bulge, changing the shape of a face. I’m a mess, Marnie. I need you to understand that.’
‘And I need you to understand that it doesn’t make any difference. You survived something that sounds unsurvivable. Whatever scars you have, whatever injuries you’ve recovered from, they’re testament to how lucky you are. People would understand. They’d be proud of you for what you’ve overcome. Your scars are medals of honour for surviving such a horrific accident.’
‘That’s the thing you’re not getting,’ he suddenly snaps at me. ‘Isurvived. Someone else didn’t.’
I tilt my head to the side. ‘What does that mean?’
‘I was on the track because I was trying to get someone else off the track, and… I failed. She died because I wasn’t fast enough, good enough, I didn’t have the right words, the right actions. I wasn’tenough. I thought I had more time, in all senses of the word – metaphorically and literally.’
‘Someone you knew?’
‘My girlfriend.Ex-girlfriend. It was complicated. It was a messed-up toxic relationship, we were on-again off-again, but I always thought we just needed to be in the right place and it would be forever. I loved her, and I failed her.’
‘That’s what you meant about never letting anyone get close to you again,’ I say as that sentence he uttered in the castle gardens suddenly makes sense. ‘You nearly died in trying to save her. No one could have done more.’
His head is bowed but his scarf moves as he disagrees.
I squeeze his hand. ‘What happened?’
‘We were on a break. I got a text saying to meet her at the train station early one morning. I thought she had planned some sort of day out for us, hoping to get back together. Got there and there was no sign of her, waited, and then from way up the line, there were shouts from a passing dogwalker, and I justknew. I’d never run so fast in my life, and she was just sitting there. I sat beside her. Tried to persuade her to give life another chance – to give us another chance. But nothing I said was enough. I could hear the noise behind me. The tracks vibrate when a train is approaching. So I tried physically lifting her, pulling her out of the way, but she fought me, and then…’ He stops, letting me fill in the blank.
He’s crying and he pulls his hand out of mine and takes off his glove, muddy from gardening, and pulls his glasses down to swipe at his eyes.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I repeat, at a loss for anything else to say. Instead of words, I let my hand rub his back and lean over to press a kiss into his shoulder. ‘You can’t blame yourself.’
‘Who else am I supposed to blame?’
It’s one of those questions without an answer. ‘No one. It’s not her fault. No one can help ending up in such a bad place. And it’s not your fault – not her ending up there or how you couldn’t help her, no matter how hard you tried. Hating yourself and resenting yourself for seven long years doesn’t change that.’
I suddenly understand where the ‘deserve’ thing comes from. Darcy feels like he doesn’t deserve to be loved because he blames himself for someone else’s death. ‘You call yourself a beast not just because of the physical scars but the psychological ones too. You might look different but youfeellike a monster… which you’re not, physically or emotionally. Survivor’s guilt… when it sounds like you barely did survive.’
‘I’m still here and she is not. By definition, I survived.’
‘That doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to be happy. You deserve to have friends. Colleagues who care about you. A job that brings you joy. You’re allowed to share that joy with the world rather than skulking around, growling, and pretending your roses aren’t as unique as they are.’
He hasn’t put the glove back on his left hand, and even though it’s his undamaged one, it still feels special when he reaches out and traces across my palm. His fingers touch mine one by one, and after what seems like a lifetime of holding my breath, they slip gently between mine and his hand closes tight around my hand.
I bite my lip to hold back the sob. I don’t know how long it’s been since someone held his hand, but this is the first ever moment of skin-on-skin contact with nothing between us. ‘You ever talked about this before?’
‘No. It was a long time ago. It doesn’t matter now.’
‘It always matters.’
