At First Sight by Hannah Sunderland (latest novels to read TXT) 📕

‘Oh my God, Charlie. I’m so sorry.’

He winced and held his hand up. ‘Please, don’t.’ He swallowed and looked up, meeting my eye again, but his gaze was harder this time. ‘When … it happened, that’s all people ever said to me. After a week or two, the pity got unbearable.’

I was still so shocked that I didn’t know what to say. Everything I’d learned over the years about how to talk to someone who was grieving left my head and I felt completely unequipped for the conversation. ‘I’d had a lot of friends, before, but they filtered away pretty damn sharp when I turned out to not be as fun as I used to be. It seems that people givin’ a shit about what you’re goin’ through has an expiry date.’ He stabbed another olive with a little more anger than the last and ate that one too. ‘They all said things like “time heals all wounds” and “she’s in a better place now”. Fecking bullshit, all of it. Time’s done sod all and, I’ll never tell my mother this, but I don’t believe in all that heaven stuff.’

‘I’m sure they just wanted to reassure you, make you feel better,’ I said.

‘Well, it didn’t help.’

He picked up his glass and took a large swig.

‘How did it happen?’ I asked. I realised that I was leaning across the table now, waiting with bated breath for what he would say next.

He winced again. ‘Can’t yet.’

‘Okay, no rush.’

‘But can I ask her name?’

He cleared his throat loudly. ‘Abi.’

‘Abi,’ I repeated.

He sat forward, his elbows leaning against the surface of the table. ‘I don’t want you to think that I’m lookin’ for sympathy or anythin’ like that. I just wanted yer to know what it was that had me feelin’ like shite the day I called yer.’

‘I know that must have been hard. Thank you for telling me,’ I said. ‘How long were you together?’

He frowned as he tried to calculate it, those deep furrows etching themselves into his brow. ‘Married twelve years, together twenty-one, on and off.’

My eyes widened even more. ‘Wow, that’s a long time. You must have been so young when you got together.’

‘Fourteen,’ he told me. ‘She used to joke and say that we only got together because we lived in such a small town and there weren’t any other options. That wasn’t the truth of it though.’ He smiled a sad smile and sipped at his wine again.

I couldn’t imagine loving someone for that long. Seven and a half years had felt like a struggle, but I guess that was because Joel and I weren’t meant to be together. Maybe we’d had that kind of love, once, but it hadn’t been long-lived.

‘When … if you want to talk about it, then I’m happy to listen,’ I said.

His nervous fingers stopped fidgeting around the slender stem of the wine glass. ‘That wouldn’t be weird for yer?’ he asked, with narrowed eyes.

‘Why … why would it be weird for me?’ I asked, but, in truth, there was no way it wouldn’t be weird for me to sit there while he recounted tales of how much he had and still loved another woman.

‘No reason,’ he said, staring meaningfully at me.

‘This is what I do for a living and besides that, I … care about you. If I can help, then of course I’ll listen.’

We ate our food to the tune of a different topic of conversation, but my mind was nothing but a swirling mess of new information. The food went fast and the wine even faster and Charlie got us a second bottle.

‘How do you do that?’ I asked as Luca brought the bill over, the tray beneath it bearing little jelly babies.

‘Do what?’ Charlie asked.

‘Tell me something like you just told me and then just have a normal conversation and eat a meal.’

He thought for a moment and tossed his card onto the receipt. ‘Most of the time I’m okay. The pain is there and it aches, but it’s so constant that I can almost forget about it. But then something happens, and it can be something tiny and insignificant, like an orange scatter cushion that reminds me of Abi’s hair or the smell of bacon that reminds me of Sunday mornings, and the pain flares again.

‘And I hate how the pain feels, but it’s the only thing she left me with and I’ve felt it for so long that I feel almost empty when I don’t feel it. So, sometimes I’ll find myself actively triggering it, like prodding a bad tooth, so that I can feel it again. It’s not always there, but when it is, it’s like the oxygen has been pumped from the room and replaced with burning gas.’

‘Oh.’ I wasn’t really sure what to say after that, because I knew the feeling he was talking about – not to the extent that he did, but I knew it.

Charlie paid, although I offered several times, and we were sent on our way by Luca shouting ‘Ciao’ from the doorway. We walked aimlessly along the road with the half bottle of wine that was left, pushed into my bag.

‘Yer see, the thing with modern zombie films is that they completely miss the point of what the zombie was meant to represent in the first place.’ He’d been talking about zombie films for a while, as if sitting through a marathon of movies on the subject wasn’t torture enough. As it turned out, he was even more passionate on the subject than I’d thought he was.

‘And what was that?’ I asked, my head feeling so very heavy after the barrage of Montepulciano D’abruzzo that I’d just provided it with.

‘Zombies are slow. They walk, they don’t run, because they symbolise death followin’ yer. The idea is that no matter how slowly it’s comin’ for yer, it’s always gonna catch up in the end.’

Was that how he