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

“Oh, God. Okay. Umm…” she searches for a suggestion.

“I’m just gonna carry on driving around for a bit.”

“Do you want me to come with you? Two pairs of eyes are better than one.”

I check my watch. It’s gone midnight.

“I’ll come with you,” she says decisively, heading for the van.

We drive in silence through the dark streets, peering through our windows for any sign of a boy in black jeans and a grey hoodie. I’ve called Sam, and Sam’s texted their other friends, but there’s been no responses, perhaps because they’re all asleep, perhaps because their parents confiscate their phones at bedtime like I do with Josh. I don’t know what else to do.

Just then my phone rings.

“It’s okay, he’s here. He’s just turned up at our door,” Michael says.

My body slumps back against the seat.

“Okay, I’m coming—”

“No,” he says, quickly, “we made a deal that if I told you where he was then he could stay here the night.”

“A deal? He’s not a in a position to be calling any shots, Michael! I’ve been going out of my friggin’ mind!”

“I know, I know. Look, he’s really wound up and I think if you turn up here he’ll probably just make a run for it again.”

I pull into a side street and park up.

“Can you just put him on the phone?”

“He won’t talk to you. Look, it’s late, just let him stay here tonight. Let everything calm down a bit and I’ll drop him back in the morning.”

Feeling that I have no choice but to agree, I hang up and lean my head on the steering wheel.

I feel Libby place her hand gently on my shoulder, and the relief that Josh is safe is suddenly sabotaged by a whole host of other mixed-up feelings which shouldn’t even be featuring on my radar right now. I wish she wouldn’t touch me.

“Safe and sound?”

I sit back and nod.

“I’m not giving you a very good impression of life as a parent, am I?”

“Well,” she says, trying to be diplomatic, “I can see why you might not want another one.”

I laugh quietly, relief washing through me, although she’s way off the mark. Not wanting another one has nothing to do with the millions of daily stresses and strains that come with parenting, and everything to do with the nightmare of being told my five-year-old son might die of meningitis. I am never, ever risking an experience like that again.

“Take this as a reflection of my parenting skills more than anything. I’m sure you’ll fare much better.”

“I’m sure this wasn’t your fault.”

I tell her about the emails from Hellie. I even read her a few of the more outrageous lines – and by the glow of my phone I see her frown and shake her head, indignant at Hellie’s sense of entitlement after all these years.

“What did you ever see in her?”

I shake my head, sadly, and experience a strange sense of the past repeating itself. This is a question Libby asked me so many times when we were trying to work through what had happened, trying to get our relationship back on track.

“It wasn’t about what I saw in her. We were just two unhappy, drunk kids—”

“But why were you even friends with her in the first place?”

“Because she had another side to her. And because by the time I’d seen what she could be like—”

“So what was this other side to her?”

The way she says it sounds like a challenge. We look at each other, eyes shining in the darkness, and suddenly I feel like we’re teenagers again, back in that place where we were thrashing it out over and over; her pouring out her jealousy and hurt in an endless stream of questions about this girl from my school that she’d never even heard me mention, and me explaining, however many times it took, that it meant nothing, that I thought we were finished, that I was angry and hurt and just got swept along…

“It doesn’t matter,” Libby says, shaking her head as if she’s not sure why she even asked the question, “she just sounds so… I mean, I just wondered how you ever ended up—”

“It’s not something I meant to happen, you know that.”

“I know.”

“It just happened.”

“And if it hadn’t, you wouldn’t have Josh.”

“And that’s why I can’t regret it.”

“I never asked you to regret it.”

I search the shadows of her face. I have no idea what’s happening here. It’s like we’re going through it all again, sixteen years later: the bitterness, the upset, the need to understand where we went wrong.

She turns away and looks out the window at the row of red-brick houses lurking in the darkness. In the thick silence that lies between us, I feel my heart thumping. I don’t see it coming, I don’t even know why I do it. Blame it on the endorphins that have rushed in after an evening of stress and panic.

“The only thing I regret is losing you.”

She stays turned away from me and I wait. I don’t know what for. I bite the side of my tongue, perhaps to stop me saying more, perhaps to punish myself for having said too much.

The silence between us seems to stretch forever.

“It was your decision,” she says eventually, her voice barely more than a whisper. “I said we could have still tried to make it work.”

I stare at the back of her head, straggles of dark hair caught inside the neck of her T-shirt. “I didn’t have a choice,” I say, “once I knew about the baby—”

“It was still a choice.”

“But what was I meant to do?”

She takes her time to answer.

“You could have given us a chance.”

I think of our first meeting at the Canal House, the way she’d scoffed at the idea of us ever having stayed together, the way she dismissed the notion like it was some kind of childish fantasy.

“I wanted to,” I say with more feeling than I intend, as if