Page 9 of These Tears

She’s crouched over another flower. Her camera fires off a series of clicks and she returns to staring at me.

Tugging at my woollen scarf to rid myself of the sensation, I raise my camera and take a picture of her face.

She lifts a hand to shield herself, but the shutter has already snapped. I’ve become very good at catching moments people don’t mean to give me. Dark ones especially.

I’m also trying to avoid the topic, but that’s beside the point.

Thunder grumbles again overhead, closer. I squint towards the battered clouds.

‘Would you mind giving me a little more time to think on it?’ I mumble. ‘My head’s not in a place for wedding photos.’

Definitely not wedding photos.

She’d asked me to work with her, shooting clients, editing portfolios. Marina and her fiancé run a cosy little studio at home in Crawley. And while Oswald helps out at his dad’s dairy farm, he swings by to lend her a hand when she needs one.

I shake the cold from my fingers, imagining it’s the bite of jealousy I’m flinging away.

Ron and I were together for ten years, but I cannot stop wondering whether something shifted when he completed his medical degree and moved back to Colchester.

Up until a few months ago, I’d convinced myself it was the two-hour drive that put the cracks in everything, not something else. Not someone else.

When I finally moved to London, thinking we’d deal with the distance properly, he took a job at a nearby hospital and for a while the doubts quieted. Life just carried on.

Until it collapsed into mud and ash.

‘It’s been a year, Leah,’ Marina reminds me.

That timeframe is already saturated with too many echoes without her needing to add to them.

‘What if I introduce you to someone? Oz has some nice friends.’

I roll my eyes hard enough to feel the sting. ‘If you say the words blind and date in the same sentence, I will scream.’

‘I just worry about you, love!’ she calls, hurrying to catch up as I barrel down the footpath, eyeing my red Ford – cruelly parked too far. ‘You’re a thirty-two-year-old beautiful, smart, talented woman! And you’re acting like you’ve already checked out of the human race!’

‘I’m doing okay,’ I insist, tugging my sleeves over my fists. ‘I need to understand why I ignored what I ignored before I jump head-first into a relationship again.’

The hush that follows isn’t hostile. If anything, it’s a kind of truce, but I can hear the cogs spinning in her head even from here, still plotting my emotional rescue.

Then she halts abruptly and throws out a finger like a weapon. ‘Listen here!’ She’s five foot one but built like a storm when emotion takes her. I take another snapshot of her – finger and all. ‘Your mum and dad are arseholes!’

I blink, lower the camera. My brows go up, but curiously enough – I don’t argue.

‘They should’ve backed you when you left Ronald – not spun it ‘round like you’d done something wrong. Cheating’s out of order. Full stop! No excuses! If he wanted out, he should’ve ended it first before he went and shagged that paediatric nurse!’

The words from his phone lance through me. A hotel address. Her name. His promise that he would end it with me soon. Marina’s voice gives them sound, and my next breath fails halfway in.

Turning on my heel, I make a beeline for the car, boots splashing over mud, but it doesn’t drown out the riot of memories in my head. I’m trying – failing, hoping – to banish the relentless surge pulled from the pit of my mind where I keep all things I don’t want to examine too closely.

Darting after me, Marina huffs and puffs, trying to match stride for stride.

And despite my heart threatening to grab onto the rising panic attack and ride it out to oblivion, I can’t stop thinking that she’s right. Every word cuts clean, each one justified. But none makes the weight in my chest any lighter.

‘I must’ve done something to push him away.’

The thought comes too easily, which is probably the problem.

My parents taught me from a young age that when bad things happen, you search inwards for the reason. And if Sartre’s right and hell is other people, then maybe I’ve built my own and trapped both Ron and me inside it. So of course I’m already doing it with Crane after one meeting. As if every rejection has to mean there’s something fundamentally wrong with me. As perceptive as Crane is, he’d probably locked onto that flaw and recoiled.