Page 7 of The Soulmate

‘Gabe,’ I say, after a moment. ‘I’m not sure if it’s the right time to ask . . . but I saw you through the window right after she jumped. Your hands were . . .’ I untangle my hand from his and hold my arms out, palms facing him. ‘Like this.’

Gabe observes them for a moment, then looks back to the water. The guilt on his face is unmistakable.

‘I tried to grab her,’ he says.

I can’t help it – I gasp. ‘Gabe!’

‘Iknow. . . I know I’m not supposed to, but . . . you see someone leap from a cliff in front of you, you can’t help it.’

(‘Never try to grab them,’ said the police officer who came to our house after the first potential jumper. He’d been very clear about this. ‘If you do, they might grab you and then we have two dead bodies.’ It was the number one rule, he told us.)

‘I nearly had her. She wasright there.’ He closes his eyes.

I wrap my arms around him and squeeze him tight, trying not to think about how easily it could have gone wrong. At the same time, I can’t deny my relief. That’s why he was holding his hands out. It made total sense.

‘I’m sorry, Pip. I’m so sorry.’

I’m not sure if he’s sorry for reaching for her, or for missing. Perhaps both. Either way, I’ve already forgiven him.

‘Come on,’ I say, resigned. ‘Let’s get back before those girls wake up.’

The rain is getting heavy now. Gabe bends to pick up his board. I tiptoe over the rocks and am already on the steps when I turn back, remembering.

‘Oh, you dropped something before.’

Gabe stops. ‘Did I?’

‘It was small and silver.’ I peer back at the rocks, but whatever it was has disappeared deep into its crevices.

Gabe shrugs. ‘Probably a chunk of surfboard wax,’ he says. ‘Forget about it.’

And as we climb the stairs back to the house, I do exactly that. Forget.

6

PIPPA

THEN

Inever get sick of telling people how Gabe and I met. It’s a good story. A bit shocking, a bit unbelievable. It sounds more like a daydream, or a scene out of a rom-com that somehow transposed onto my life.

It was a miserable, rainy Saturday. I’d spent the morning in bed, crying over a guy called Mark who, it has to be said, wasn’t very nice. We’d dated for six months, but he hadn’t met a single friend of mine, nor a member of my family, preferring instead to hang out alone, in his apartment. I told myself it was because he was an introvert, and meeting new people was stressful for him. It wasn’t ideal but it was something we’d work on, I thought. But then, after two of my friends had seen him at the local bar dancing and chatting up women, he’d stopped returning my calls. It was as though, suddenly, he’d forgotten he was an introvert.

On my third day of dedicated crying, Kat frogmarched me out of the house, ostensibly to walk her new dog. Mudguts was a rescue, a mixed breed, white with a brown streak across his tummy. (He’d been called Mudguts at the rescue home, a name he’d become irritatingly attached to, foiling Kat’s attempt at changing it to Droolius Caesar.)

‘Maybe I should try calling him again?’ I mused as I pulled on my coat.

‘You were ghosted, Pip. You’re not meant to call people who have ghosted you.’

‘Whatareyou meant to do if you’re ghosted?’

Kat thought about this. ‘Honestly, I don’t know. Lesbians enjoy talking about our feelings too much to ghost people. But I imagine you’re meant to lose weight, get your hair cut and post pictures of yourself living your best life on Instagram.’

‘But what if he thinksIhave ghostedhim?’

‘The three hundred and sixty-seven messages you’ve left him will assure him that you haven’t,’ Kat said sagely.

I knew Kat was right, but it didn’t make me feel any better. And so I wept quietly as we wandered around the Botanic Gardens.