Page 121 of The Wedding Forecast

‘Letting you down,’ he says, his voice quiet.

What we have now asks nothing of him, really. A relationship has expectations, around fidelity, emotional support, honesty, feelings, factoring the other person into everything, the future. He doesn’t want to give me that.

‘It wouldn’t even solve anything because there’s still no plan to see each other again for any longer than a visit. And everything else,’ I say.

Everything else being kids, and a home, and life together. All the things he doesn’t want.

I can hear him unlocking his door, opening and shutting it, throwing his keys on the table, and then it sounds like he’s pacing.

‘What do you want?’ he asks.

‘I want you to…I don’t know. Fix this for me. For us.’

The words I really want to say aren’t coming out properly. I’m a writer. I wish I could put this in an email, spend a week writing and rewriting and finding the perfect tone and the perfect way to say it all. No, I wish I was a person who didn’t even need to have this conversation. Or a person who was brave enough to say, ‘I love you and I want you to love me the same way’.

‘I want to be with you,’ I say finally, tears burning my eyes.

It’s bad enough I’m the one putting myself out there with this conversation, I can’t also cry down the phone. My lips are trembling and a tear runs from my eye into the pillow, but he can’t see that, and if I control my breathing he won’t know.

‘Anna, Anna I…’ he lets out a jagged breath. His voice is cracking. ‘I don’t have anything to offer you. I want us to be together, I do, but I can’t ask you to come here. I’ve thought about it, I’ve thought about it a million times. I have been on the verge of begging you to come so many times. But I have no certainty. I never know when and where my next job might be. I don’t know if I’m going to stay in New York or move back to LA or end up somewhere else. Right now I’m auditioning for that role in a law show based in Chicago, and after that for a cave-diving movie set in Utah. My life is all over the place. I can’t even offer you one stable place to live. Let alone everything else I know you want. Kids, all of that. I’m not going to be enough for you.’

‘Mac.’ My voice wavers a little.

‘Anna, I’m not going to ask you to come here and give up everything, all your dreams, your friends, your family, the bookshop, for nothing.’

‘You’re not nothing.’

‘But you know what I’m saying is true. You know what you want out of a relationship, what you want out of life, and you know this isn’t it.’

Now I’m angry. Because all this time we were dancing around it, I could still believe we had a chance, but he’s ruined everything with the truth.

‘Then why did you message me, why didn’t you cut things off after I was in New York?’

There’s silence for a moment.

‘I should have,’ he says. ‘We said it, back then, didn’t we? That we should just live in the moment and not speak again.’

‘Is that what you want? To never talk again?’ I ask.

‘Is it what you want?’ he says.

‘I think if we’re not going to be properly together, we should be properly apart. So I think we should stop talking, yes.’

‘Good. Great.’ He sounds like maybe he’s going to cry, or maybe that wavering in his throat is anger. I’ve never heard him angry before.

We don’t talk for a minute, we just sit on the phone in silence, breathing, and then I say, ‘I’m going to go now.’

And he says, ‘Goodbye.’

And that’s that. It’s over.

37

I LIE AWAKE for hours and then finally fall asleep sometime after 4 am. I wake up drooling, swollen-eyed and headache-y, hurrying to get ready for work while pressing an ice-pack against my puffy face. I pick up my phone at least ten times in the space of a few minutes to check if he’s called or messaged. I’m going to be pathetically monitoring for any contact from now until eternity. I should block him. I can’t bring myself to do it, though, not yet. But I will. Because I can’t believe I’m here, again. Heartbroken. Rejected, battling the urge to call him. Regretting putting him in The Scam’s acknowledgments. It’s all so boringly familiar. Except it’s not even proper heartbreak this time. With Joel, at least I got to live it, I got the whole thing, but this is like a tease of the happiness I could have but won’t. This is like watching the best trailer I’ve ever seen for a movie that will never be released.

I am two coffees in when I arrive at the bookshop, and when Bobbi asks if I want another, I say, ‘Yes please’, like my heart isn’t already racing.

‘You okay, Anna?’ she asks as she’s about to walk out and get them, because no amount of ice and fresh air and make-up can make my eyes look like anything but the eyes of a woman who spent a chunk of the night crying over a man.