The End is Where We Begin by Maria Goodin (open ebook .txt) 📕

after I told Libby about the pregnancy, I allowed myself to entertain the tiniest glimmer of hope that she might still want to be with me, in whatever form that might take.

“So are you and Hellie going to be… together?” Libby asked, quietly, her hands pushed deep in her coat pockets, staring down at the sparkling surface of the water.

I shook my head, sadly. “No. I mean, I don’t know how it’s all going to work at the moment, but it’s not like that between us. It never will be.”

She nodded, thoughtfully.

We watched silently as a red narrowboat chugged out from underneath the bridge and made its way slowly, peacefully along the canal, causing a couple of ducks to bob gently in its wake.

Libby suddenly turned and looked up at me, squinting against the light. Her skin looked unusually pale, but the tip of her nose was pink. She was wearing the same knitted scarf that she’d worn all winter, the one I’d buried my face in the last time we’d stood here, overcome by relief that she was willing to take me back. Now I ran my eyes over her cheeks, her chin, her hair… all so familiar. And I knew that I’d never touch her again.

“We could stay together,” she said, her eyes imploring, full of hope. “I know it sounds messy, but people’s lives are messy, and it’s not like you meant to get yourself into this situation, and it’s not like normal relationships have ever really been a feature in my life. I mean, you and Hellie won’t be a couple, and who’s to say she won’t get a new boyfriend, so there’s no reason you and I… I mean, look at my parents…”

As she talked fast, anxiously, coming up with all the logical reasons that I’d already been through in my mind about how and why we could still make this work, all the reasons I’d prayed she would come up with on her own, I felt hope swell in my chest once again, just like it had the last time we’d stood on this bridge.

But as I watched her – pretty, clever, full of ambition, her whole life ahead of her – I knew with sudden conviction that my parents were right. I couldn’t do this to her. I was sixteen. She was fifteen. We were just kids. And although my own selfish longing wanted to wrap her in my arms and believe in what she was saying, all of a sudden I didn’t. I didn’t believe any of it anymore. This baby was going to change everything. And it was going to be the biggest challenge of my life. I didn’t know if I had the resources to get myself through this, let alone contend with the complications of Libby being involved. And she deserved so much more than this mess I was in. As hard as it felt now, she’d move on, find another boyfriend, build a life for herself, and one day, maybe, look back and remember me as her first love, but nothing more. I had to face the truth. We’d finally come up against something bigger than both of us.

As she talked, I shook my head, slowly, watching her eyes fill with tears. Her voice trailed off and she reached out to touch me, but I pushed her hand away.

“You know it wouldn’t work,” I told her.

And she did. I could see it in her face. I watched as the hope she was trying to cling on to vanished as quickly as it had materialised. She composed herself, taking a breath, holding her head a little higher, blinking back tears and nodding resolutely. She wasn’t raised to have some boy break her heart.

“I should go,” I whispered, unable to stand this any longer.

Libby clenched her jaw, nodded, forced the tiniest of smiles.

Swallowing the lump in my throat, I strode past her, over the bridge, down the steps and along the towpath without looking back, telling myself not to think, not to feel. It was the only way I was going to get through this.

I remember bursting through the door of my dad’s workshop, a timber building at the end of our garden where he did everything from fixing car parts to carving pieces of furniture.

“Dad, can you come help?” I shouted desperately over the drumming of the rain. Even the short walk from the house had soaked me and I could feel water running off my hair, dribbling down the back of my neck.

My dad was sitting at his worktable, hunched over something that looked like the inside of a radio, his glasses perched on the end of his nose.

“Hmm?”

He didn’t look up.

“The baby won’t stop crying. I’ve tried everything. Nappy, bottle, burping, hushing, singing… Can you just come and make him shut up? It’s doing my head in.”

My dad repositioned the head of the lamp, examined the array of tools on the tabletop, picked up a small screwdriver and went back to work.

“Well, I’m a little busy right now, son,” he muttered.

I pushed my hands through my hair, smelling rancid milk on my forearm from where I’d already tested the temperature of a bottle four times today, starting at two o’clock this morning.

“Dad, I’m serious,” I told him, already halfway out the door, expecting him to get up and follow as usual.

“So am I.”

I frowned at him.

“You have to be joking. You’re not busy. What are you even doing?”

“I’m tinkering.”

“Tinkering isn’t being busy,” I said, impatiently, shooting a glance back towards the house. I’d left the baby on the lounge floor where he couldn’t fall off anything, and it wasn’t like he could do much other than lie in one place, but my anxiety was mounting with every second I was away. And I could still hear his bloody screaming. “Come on, Dad, you’re the only one who can calm him when he gets like this, you know that.”

“And where’s Hellie?” he asked, laying his screwdriver