“I don’t know. I think we got too close and he got too scared.”

“Really? That sounds more like what you would do.”

“That’s what I said,” I complained. “But he still walked out.”

“Well, then.” Another of Mum’s shrugs. “Fuck him.”

As advice went, it was surprisingly flexible and worked for my dad, because fuck him. But…but this was different. “Normally I’d agree, but Oliver was good for me, and I don’t want to throw that away.”

“Then don’t.”

I blinked a few annoyingly persistent tears from my eyes. “Okay, now you’ve gone from chill to unhelpful.”

“I don’t mean to be. But you had a boyfriend, and he made you happy for a while, and now it is over. And if we let happy things make us unhappy when they stopped, there would be no point having happy things.”

“That is way more enlightened than I am capable of being right now.” There was no point getting angry at my mother, but it was easier than being sad about my ex. “Oliver was pretty much the best part of my life, and I fucked it up, and there’s nothing I can do about it, and that feels fucking terrible.”

She did the ineffectual shoulder pat, which was somehow way less ineffectual when she did it. “I’m sorry you feel terrible, mon caneton. I am not saying that this will not hurt or that it will be easy. But you did not fuck it up. This Oliver clearly has, as the young people say today, the issues.”

“Yeah, and I wanted to help him with them, like he helped me.”

“That is his choice, though. Some people, they do not want to be helped.”

I was about to protest, but then I remembered that I’d spent five years not wanting to be helped. And it had taken nearly losing my job, dating a guy I would never have considered dating, roping all my friends into a two-day flat-cleaning party, and having some dick from a nightclub feel sorry for me in the Guardian for me to realise that I hadn’t been as safe as I thought I was. “So where does that leave me? He’s still…everything I want, and I can’t have him.”

“As Mick used to say, ‘You can’t always get what you want.’ And you know, Luc, Oliver was a nice boy and I’m sure he liked you very much and I was wrong about him being engaged to a duke. But I think maybe he just came along at the right time. He is like”—she waved her hand like the world’s most raddled fairy godmother—“the feather in that elephant movie.”

“Are you trying to tell me that not being a total fuckup was inside me all along?”

“I mean, I used to be a professional songwriter, so I wouldn’t say it in such a boring way but…yes? I don’t think Oliver changed your life, mon cher. I think he helped you to see it differently. He has gone now, but you still have the job you pretend you don’t like, and the friends who have stuck by you through all of your bullshit, and you have me, and Judy, and we love you very much, and will always be here for you until we are both dead.”

I squidged along and she put an arm around me. “Thanks, Mum. That was lovely until the crushing reminder of our mortality.”

“Since your father is not dying anymore, I thought it was a good time to remind you to appreciate me while you can.”

“I love you, Mum.” This was embarrassing but, well, sometimes you had to. “Is it okay if I stay tonight?”

“Of course.”

Half an hour later, I was lying in my childhood bed, staring at a ceiling whose every crack I already knew by heart. It was weird how, in a month, Jon Fleming had gone from being this idea I’d grown up with to a real person to an idea again—and, while that hurt, my life was already healing around him like skin closing over a cut. Oliver, though, was a whole different kettle of misery fish. But Mum had been right, hadn’t she? I couldn’t take everything he’d shown me and given me and shared with me and lose it in the…the shittiness of now. He’d helped me see that my life was better than I’d thought it was—that I was better than I’d thought I was. And I could hold on to that. Even if I couldn’t hold on to him.

Chapter 50

“Okay,” I said to Alex.

He glanced up happily. “Oh, are we doing a joke? What larks. We haven’t done one in ages.”

“Right. What’s a pirate’s favourite letter of the alphabet?”

“Well, I suppose the average eighteenth-century seaman wouldn’t have been literate, so probably most of them wouldn’t have had one.”

“Fair point. But, that aside, if you were thinking of a generic movie pirate, what would his or her favourite letter of the alphabet be?”

He wrinkled his nose. “I can honestly say I’m not certain.”

You sometimes got a guess with this joke. You sometimes didn’t. “You might think it’d be arrrrrr,” I explained in my best pirate voice, “but my first love shall always be the sea.”

There was a long silence.

“Why would you think it would be r?” asked Alex. “I mean, pirate begins with a p. As do plunder, pillage, purloin, privateer, and Port au Prince.”

“Arrrrrrrrrrr. Like a pirate.”

“No, pirate begins with p.”

My phone went. Thank God. I answered on my way back to my office.

“Luc,” cried Bridge, “there’s a crisis.”

What was it this time? Had they accidentally sold a set of film rights for five magic beans? “What’s wrong?”

“It’s Oliver!”

Suddenly I was paying attention. “Is he all right? What’s happened?”

“He’s moving to Durham. He’s there right now. He’s got a job interview tomorrow morning.”

We’d broken up. And I’d come to terms with being broken up—okay that was sort of a lie, but I was certainly moving in a termward direction. Even so, my heart still felt like it was going to vomit. “What? Why?”

“He said he wanted a fresh start. Somewhere far away.”

I was very inclined to panic. But this did not sound like Oliver. “Bridge, are you completely sure? He loves what he does. And, if I had to pick a word to describe him, it wouldn’t be ‘impulsive.’”

“He’s been weird for ages. I know I’m not supposed to talk about you to each other, but this is an emergency.”

“It’s certainly odd,” I agreed. “But I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about it.”