Page 113 of The Interview
“The nurse left, and by then George had worked out Maca wasn’t with the baby, and she asked me again where he was, but I just couldn’t get my words out. Straight away, she knew. She looked at me and said, ‘Please. Please don’t make it bad,’ and I had to. There was nothing I could do to make it better.
“She’s my little sister. I’d spent my entire life protecting her, and then I had to rip her life apart in the most brutal fucking way, and she was telling Dad to make me stop. She was saying, ‘Daddy, tell him not to make it bad.’ She’d grown up with four men protecting her her entire life—five when Maca came along when she was eleven. One was dead, and there was absolutely nothing the rest of us could do to protect her from her loss or change a single thing about it.”
I try, like I’ve tried so many other times, to recall how I felt. I remember the words, know exactly what he told me, but I have zero recollection of how it made me feel.
“So, I told her,” Marley starts, and then he says the words that punched a hole right through my existence. “‘He has a machine breathing for him, but he’s never gonna wake up.’”
“And you know what was more terrifying?” Ashley asks. “The silence. She didn’t say a word. She didn’t make a sound. Shedidn’t even cry. The door opened to her room, and a nurse came through it with Beau swaddled in a blanket, but you could see his hair.”
That’s when a loud sob escapes me.
Cam pulls me in and kisses the top of my head.
I can’t see Ashley, but I can hear her voice, and I know that she’s crying.
“You could see this mop of dark hair sticking out from this tiny little bundle, and Bern… Bern stood up to go to him, and her legs just gave out. Frank had to catch her, and we, all of us, were sobbing and crying. But George? She just very calmly asked us all to leave.”
“Marley refused to go,” my dad says, his voice thick and gruff. “She didn’t argue, Georgia. I don’t think she had any fight left in her, so she let him stay, and together, they bathed and dressed my grandson.” My dad pauses, and I watch him struggle.
His lips purse as he clenches his jaw in an attempt to stop it from trembling. He’s old school, my dad—a boomer. He wasn’t raised to show his tears, to cry in public, or anywhere, ever.
“Marley stayed to do what his best mate, his band mate, his brother couldn’t be there to do. He stayed because he didn’t want his little sister doing it on her own. And Georgia, my girl, my princess…. Fuck me, I do not know where that daughter of mine gets her strength from.”
I love that it’s Harry who reaches across and gives my dad a one-armed squeeze. They might not be related by blood, but they’re as thick as thieves those two, both loving to golf and clay shoot together.
“We bathed him, we dressed him, and then we took him to meet his dad,” Marley says.
The room falls silent until I decide to speak.
“And that’s it. That’s how I lost my husband, laid bare for the world. The horrific, raw, painful, unedited truth. Now, after allthese years, perhaps the conspiracies might stop. That car wasn’t an organised hit arranged by Cam. It wasn’t a hit, put in place by a disgruntled business partner of my dad’s. It wasn’t Marley in a jealous rage, or a crazy fan trying to kill me. It was an eighty-eight-year-old man called Samual Weinstein. He had a heart attack and died on his kitchen floor in the middle of the night two days after the accident. His wife, Esther, fled to America to be with her family because fans and the press were so fucking awful to her. She reached out to me a few years later. I accepted the apology she made on her husband’s behalf, and she died peacefully in her sleep just a few days later.”
I lick my lips. They taste of salt. I need them to taste of Prosecco.
“When we talked previously, you said you didn’t want to include Sean’s final moments or the funeral. Is that…?”
“I think you’ve got enough, don’t you, Danny boy?” my dad says. “You’ve rinsed all you’re gonna get from my daughter today, so let’s leave it at that, shall we?”
“Thanks, Dad,” I say. “Sean’s final moments are private. His funeral was private. Nothing’s changed. I won’t be sharing those details.”
“Then, I think that’s a wrap for today. Thank you, everyone,” Daniel says.
The room erupts into a round of applause.
“I should be out of your hair after tomorrow,” Daniel tells me as I stand from the sofa. “We’d just like some insight into your year after losing Sean, your grieving process, your mental health, so that we can segue that into the charities the foundation supports and has created.”
Cam is now standing, too, and has a protective hand on the small of my back. It’s a gesture I love.
“You gonna be up for that tomorrow?” he asks.
“You know what? Can we skip a day?” I ask Daniel. “Today was a lot. I’m gonna have a couple of drinks tonight and unwind. I don’t want to feel tomorrow like I did this morning.”
Blur’s “Song 2” suddenly blasts from the built-in speakers, and I know that it’s time for Daniel and his crew to leave, and for my family to let off some steam.
“Of course,” Daniel says. “What we got today, your story, your strength after all that you’ve been through…. Honestly, Georgia, I have no words. Thank you for letting me be a part of this, and I apologise again if I sometimes push too far.”
“Push all you like,” I tell him. “Just know I’ll push back harder, and if I fall, I’ve got this lot to pick me up and back me up.”
“Duly noted,” he says with a smile. “I’ll see you Wednesday.”
