Page 28 of The Edge of Always

‘Go, I’ll call you later.’

‘Bye, love you, sorry for being a lying bitch, bye.’

I sit on my park bench, shell-shocked and dazed, thinking about what Mae said, about not letting it be on Emmett’s terms. When we were young, I was always the lucky one. Like it seemed as if my life was so much easier than Emmett’s. Objectively, it’s true. And youth doesn’t understand the nuance that things can be true and not true at the same time. I didn’t have the same issues as Emmett had with Tanya, but I had problems even if I wanted to pretend that I didn’t.

So maybe Mae is right. When things ended, it was on his terms. It was him who never returned my calls, to the point where I stopped trying. Because of him, I cried myself to sleep every night for a year. Mum blamed him when I dropped out of law school. That wasn’t Emmett, though; I hated law and law hated me.

Emmett didn’t give me a chance to explain why I acted like I did back then, so I never got any closure from the past.

But the painting… Emmett… Paris. Maybe everything that happened in the Time Before can finally be put to rest.

I spend the afternoon wandering around Paris, thinking about how I promised Earl that I’d come here one day. I keep my headphones in place as I take in the sculptures of La Danse Triomphale de Pallas Athénée, the wide avenues of Voie Georges Pompidou.

I pay for a tour of the catacombs and amidst the thousands of skulls I learn that, in the eighteenth century, undertakers would display unidentified dead bodies in shop windows, hoping that someone would claim them. Earl once told me that beauty can’t exist without decay, but it’s even more than that for me. Beauty is decay, because without decay, beauty is stagnant, frozen.

Decay is life, if you think about it. I smile to myself in the catacombs, and for the first time in a long time, my fingers twitch with the urge to sketch. Paris is a wonderful place to be a Deather. Paris is a wonderful place full stop.

Outside, the pavements are dusty after a warm summer, and there’s only the most gentle autumn breeze. Compared to the still death of the catacombs, out here in the world of the living, every café is fit to bursting, every boulevard is full. People hustle past me, and I step over a man sprawled out on the pavement, snoring loudly. I leave him a couple of euros just for good measure. I stop for coffee, which comes in a tiny little cup that I drink in one gulp. When he clears my table, a cute waiter tells me that I’m very pretty.

‘Do you have a boyfriend?’ he asks.

‘Non… merci,’ I say in stilted French. ‘L’addition, s’il vous plaît?’

‘Oui, très bien.’ He smiles and leaves.

As I head back to my hotel to get ready for the evening, I think that I was always going to go and meet Emmett tonight. I’ve never had any sense of self-preservation around him. None at all. Hopefully, this is my chance to explain why I did what I did. To put the past firmly behind me, once and for all.

That’s it.

But as I wearily climb the stairs to my hotel room, I think that Mae was right. I really am a poor liar. And the person I’m lying to here is myself.