She suddenly sat down heavily on the mattress, as though struck off her feet by a revelation.
‘Oh my God. You’ve beenkeepingSam from me all this time. That’s where you’ve been going when you were supposedly meeting your friend “Nick”.’ She air-quoted the name of the man I loved. ‘I don’t believe there evenisa Nick at all. You’ve just made him up, haven’t you?’
The accusation, turning the tables on which one of us was in love with a man who didn’t exist, was so ridiculous I actually laughed out loud. Too late, I realised that was absolutely the worst thing I could have done.
Amelia was shaking her head, putting all the pieces together and coming up with entirely the wrong picture. ‘Every time you met this Nick, you were really seeing Sam, weren’t you, telling him he couldn’t come and see me, that it was bad for my recovery if he came back before I was well again.’ She thumped the mattress in triumph. ‘I always knew that bloody ridiculous story about him being at a silent retreat was a load of bollocks. Sam would never have done something like that.’
I really wanted to tell her that our mother had questioned exactly that, but of course I couldn’t. I shook my head slowly. ‘I can’t talk to you when you’re like this.’
‘What, seeing things clearly for the first time in months, you mean?’
‘Seeing everything wrong. Seeingmewrong. I love you, Amelia. With all my heart and with every sinew of my body, I love you and I would never, ever do anything to hurt you.’
Amazingly, some of my sincerity managed to pierce the miasma of anger and rage.
‘You do love me. I know that. But so does Sam, and you’ve stopped him from coming back to me. And I can’t let you do that anymore.’
A cold feeling of dread swirled through me.
‘What does that mean?’
She hesitated. I held on to that thought for a long time. At least she had hesitated before saying the words that sliced through our relationship like a sabre.
‘I want you to leave. It’s time you went back to your own life in New York and let me get back to mine. When you’ve gone, Sam will come back to me. I know he will.’
26
I stood for a long time in the guest bedroom, still dressed in my wedding outfit, trying to make sense of what had just happened. I’d never rowed with Amelia like that; I’d never been on the receiving end of such anger. I couldn’t see how we’d ever be able to fix our shattered relationship after this, and the thought it might be irretrievably broken made the tears fall even faster down my face.
Amelia wanted me gone, not just out of her home but out of the country, and even though I’d always known I’d have to leave soon, I’d thought it would be when her confusion had cleared and the confabulation about a man who didn’t exist had finally faded away.
But Sam was still here in her thoughts and somehow Amelia had convinced herself that I was the one preventing him from being by her side. The only way left to prove hewasn’treal was for me to leave and wait for her to finally understand that he was never going to come back to her… because he didn’t exist.
But the worst realisation of all was that while Sam lived on as my sister’s phantom partner, Nick could never be mine. Our fledgling relationship and all the hopes that had sprung into life after last night had to be put aside now. I couldn’t, I wouldn’t, build my own happiness on my sister’s broken heart. It would ultimately destroy us both.
I tore off the dress, left it as a pool of tulle on my bedroom floor and reached for my laptop. I’d been mentally composing this email for weeks, with two different replies. It wasn’t until I typed the words accepting the job offer that I realised I’d been intending to turn it down all along. Instead, I signed off by assuring my manager that I’d be back at my desk in Manhattan by the end of the week.
I clearly wasn’t thinking straight, or I’d have checked with the airline to see if I could even find a flight at such short notice. But luck was with me. There was one seat left on a direct flight to JFK in two days. Technology made it all too easy to burn bridges before you had time to change your mind. You simply rattled in your credit card details and with a single click you had altered your own destiny.
The irony wasn’t lost on me that I was flying back across the Atlantic with almost the same degree of urgency with which I’d crossed it several months ago. And yet in the space of that short period, everything had changed. Well, to be fair, most of the important events changing my future had occurred only in the last twenty-four hours.
*
‘I’ve managed to get a flight for the day after tomorrow.’
‘I think that’s for the best,’ Amelia replied tightly.
We hadn’t said much to each other since our row that morning and when we did, the words had sounded stiff and uncomfortably polite, like a conversation between strangers. A chasm of ice had opened between us, and I had absolutely no idea how to bridge it.
The only glimmer of hope was Amelia’s reaction when I suggested moving back into Mum’s for the next two days.
‘You don’t need to do that,’ she shot back. ‘You can stay here until you leave.’
It wasn’t exactly an olive branch, or even a twig, but I took it as an encouraging sign anyway.
*
It was mid-afternoon before I finally heard Nick’s voice. He’d sent several apologetic messages throughout the day, but I hadn’t replied to any of them. I didn’t want to distract him while he was working, but if I was being totally honest, I had needed those extra hours to strengthen my resolve, which I already knew he’d challenge.