Page 86 of The Soulmate

In the near distance, I hear the crunch of feet on gravel, the soft lilt of laughter. Walkers approaching. Gabe and I take a step back, and Max looks out towards the ocean.

‘And this is where it happened?’ Max says. ‘This is where Amanda fell?’

‘Yes,’ I say.

He is very close to the edge, I realise as the walkers appear on the path behind us. I’m about to tell him to move back when he says, ‘She was my soulmate, too.’

Then he steps off the cliff.

86

AMANDA

AFTER

One thing I’ve learned about happy endings is that they don’t always look the way you’d expect. In some cases, a happy ending involves the couple walking off into the sunset together. In others, a happy ending is when, after years of lying to themselves, a couple goes their separate ways. I like to think that’s what will make Gabe and Pip happiest. I just hope they know it too.

I watched Max’s final interaction with Gabe. I travelled through every emotion with him,feltevery emotion. The bewilderment at Pip’s lie. The anger at what Gabe had done. The sadness of what he was leaving behind. In the end, what I felt most from Max was love. Love for me. Love for Harry. Love for Gabe. Funny how love can remain, despite everything.

Max had confessed to the money-laundering and murder of Arthur Spriggs on the phone to Detective Conroy. He attributed the guilt and stress of this as the main contributor to my death by suicide. He maintained that Gabe had no involvement in any of it. It was the last chance he’d be able to give his nephew, he reasoned, so he had to take it. For Harry.

He’d left the house before the police arrived to arrest him. Now, they’d never get the chance.

So, here we are. Finally, it makes sense, what I’ve been doing here – stuck in this strange space between life and death. I’ve been waiting for him; the love of my life.

And now it’s time to go.

87

PIPPA

One year later

‘Are they twins?’ the woman at the park asks me, as I tandem-push the girls on the swings. She’s been looking at them for a while, trying to figure it out.

Asha beats me to the answer. ‘No,’ she yells from the swing, her little legs pumping hard. ‘Just sisters. Our birthdays are six months apart.’

‘I’m older,’ Freya chimes in from her own swing.

‘I came out of my first mum’s tummy and then she died,’ Asha adds cheerfully. ‘This is my other mummy.’

I smile and shrug at the woman, who is clearly bamboozled by this abundance of information. After a minute, perhaps just for something to say, she says to the girls, ‘Well, you do look alike.’

‘We look like our dad,’ Freya says. ‘Mummy, can we have a snack?’

I didn’t bring snacks. In the past this would have been unheard of, but lately I’ve been much more relaxed about that kind of organisation. I look at my watch. ‘Daddy will be here soon. Maybe he’ll bring some?’

‘There he is!’ Asha shrieks. ‘Daddy!Daddy!’

I glance to my right just as Gabe leaps the low fence into the playground and jogs towards the girls with his arms outstretched. This is how he always greets them after a few days apart – at a running pace. As if he can’t stand one more second away from them. The girls leap off their swings in unison; the feeling is clearly mutual.

He’s even more tanned than the last time I saw him. He must have spent the past few days surfing around the clock. He seems to have come straight from the beach now, as his hair is wet and pushed back and he’s dressed in board shorts and a white T-shirt and sandals. I notice several women ogling him as the girls leap into his arms and he props them on either hip. They wrap their arms around his neck, their legs around his waist.

‘Hey,’ Gabe says to me.

‘Hey,’ I reply.

It’s strange greeting him like this, even a year on. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel sad about it sometimes. There are many things I miss about being married to him – watching him be a dad to our girls most acutely of all. But Icanbreathe without him. This is something that has surprised me.