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

been back there, that he’d been prepared to jump for a second time, the feelings inside him no less than the first.

He cleared his throat as a few more tears gathered in that thick line of dark lashes around his eyes. ‘I did what Ned said and called Carrick. I told him about what I’d thought about doing. He came straight over and spent a month livin’ in the flat with me on suicide watch. He took the sofa and I had a fold-out IKEA futon on the floor. I forbade him from ever tellin’ my parents about what I’d thought about doin’, on pain of death, and he said that he promised he wouldn’t, if I gave him a year of trying and so I did. Then at the end of that year he asked me to give him one more. He said, take it one hour, one day, one year at a time until breathing get easier. So, I made a sort of routine that helped me keep my promise to Carrick. After the first year I found that, even though it didn’t feel possible at the beginning, I’d survived a whole three hundred and sixty-five and a quarter days without her. So, I agreed to another year and I found that, if it didn’t hurt too much, if it wasn’t unbearable, then I could stick around.’

‘What changed then, between it being bearable and the night you called me?’ I asked.

He leaned forward a little, looking at the drop to the courtyard below. It wasn’t as high as the clock tower, but it still made my stomach lurch.

‘It was something so small that it sounds stupid to say it out loud.’ He swallowed hard and looked my way. ‘I was at work, Aldi, restockin’ the naan breads, when someone I’d worked on a few shows with came over and said hi. We’d been good mates back in the day, even gone out to dinner a few times with Abi and his wife June. He was working on Shrek The Musical and had a gig lined up on Cats after that. He tells me this while I’m standin’ there next to a basket of iced buns that need half-price stickers slappin’ on them. Then he asks me how Abi is and for some reason I tell him that she’s fine and that I’ll call soon and the four of us can go out to dinner like we used to.

‘After work, I went home and something was different. Everythin’ seemed bleak because my career was toes-up and I’d just agreed to a dinner date that could never happen because Abi was dead. I felt like I’d gone back a thousand steps and suddenly, breathing wasn’t so easy again.

‘I guess I felt kind of at peace with it all, the second time around. I’d given Carrick the time he’d asked for, so I put everythin’ in place again. Quit my job, sorted out the cat, bought myself a bottle of whisky, that I’d always wanted to try but never been able to justify the price of, and then went to the clock tower. On the way, I felt my nerve slippin’ so I went to get a cuppa tea and have a sit-down for a minute or two.’ He turned to look at me, his eyes glistening with tears filled with moonlight. ‘Then I met you.’ Finally, his hand fell into mine and my fingers wasted no time in wrapping around his. ‘But, of course, my brain couldn’t let me be happy, could it?’ He scoffed. ‘I started feeling guilty that not even two full years had passed and, there I was, flirting with someone in a café.’

‘Moving on isn’t something you need to feel guilty about,’ I replied. ‘At some point or other, you’re going to have to let yourself be happy again. I know it must be incredibly hard, but you can’t mourn forever.’

He squeezed my hand a little harder and blinked the last of the tears from his eyes.

‘You’re probably right. But it sure does feel like I could.’

The sound of the waves crashed on the cliffs somewhere in the dark below us and a question popped into my mind.

‘What was it?’ I asked. ‘What changed your mind that day we met in the café?’

‘Your happiness,’ he said simply. ‘It burst right outta yer.’

‘I don’t feel like it’s bursting out of me right now.’

‘But it is. Yer can’t help it. Yes, your job is tough sometimes and Joel is an A-grade gobshite, but you still, almost always, have a smile on your face. When you sat next to me in the café, yer made me feel it, some of your happiness, like just bein’ close to yer made me, like, absorb some of it.’ He lifted his hand to my face, his fingers resting on my jaw while his thumb traced the outline of my lips. ‘I hadn’t felt happiness in so long that when I finally did feel it, it shocked me. I felt it, even though it didn’t belong to me, and I thought that, if I’m still capable of feeling it, the next time it happens, perhaps the happiness might be my own.’

Chapter Twenty-Two

I’d woken with a foggy, heavy head the morning after with little memory of where I was. The ferry left at eight and so I’d peeled myself away from the covers and collected up my things.

I’d found Charlie at the breakfast table pushing cornflakes around in the milk with the end of his spoon. I’d greeted him with a forced cheerfulness that I was far from experiencing with my blossoming headache and the general sense of ennui that filled the room. But today was about being there for Charlie, about making it as painless as possible. He’d looked up, but hadn’t met my eye, made a noise deep down in his throat and turned back to his bowl.

Darlow and Orlagh accompanied us down to the docks and waved us off,