22. Twenty-Two

“Alex, wait!”

I catch up with him on the beach, shortly after he storms off from our table, just as I predicted he would.

“Alex!”

I grab hold of the sleeve of his shirt, bracing myself for the reaction I know is coming. When he turns to face me, though, he looks sad rather than angry, and I let his sleeve go, suddenly unsure how to handle this.

“You’re married?” I say at last, my voice coming out in a surprised squeak, and somehow managing to make the question sound like an accusation.

Alex runs an exasperated hand through his hair, and sighs.

“No, I’m not,” he says, turning to look out at the sea, so he doesn’t have to meet my eyes. “But I should be.”

Then he plunges his hands into his pockets and goes striding off towards the shoreline, as if he’s about to go plunging into the sea.

And he called me dramatic?

“Alex!” I yell after him. “Wait!”

I try to run after him, but the heels of my sandals sink instantly into the sand, and I have to stop to pull them off first. Then I go stumbling across the beach like a drunk woman, until I reach the line where the water meets the sand, making it feel cold and wet under my bare feet.

“Alex, would you just stop and talk to me?”

He’s standing at the shoreline, staring out at the horizon, and he doesn’t turn around as I reach him.

“I’m not planning to throw myself in, if that’s what you’re thinking,” he says calmly. “I’m trying to indicate with my body language that I don’t particularly want to talk about this. But you don’t seem to be picking up on my handy visual clues. Which is very you, if you don’t mind me saying.”

“Oh, no, I am picking up on them,” I assure him. “I’m just ignoring them, because that’s very me, too. And because, unfortunately for you, I think you’re going to have to talk about it, whether you want to or not. We can’t just pretend nothing happened back there, can we? That’s a rhetorical question, by the way.”

Alex watches intently as a seagull lands beside us and starts pecking its way across the sand. At this time of night, the beach is quiet, the only sound coming from the waves frothing at our feet, and the distant hum of conversation from the hotel behind us.

“Alex, I was just mistaken for your wife,” I point out when he doesn’t answer me. “Your wife, who you’re presumably supposed to be on honeymoon with, unless the hotel really did make a mistake with the table number, and there’s some totally logical explanation for this? And if there is, don’t you think I deserve to hear it?”

“Not really,” he says, turning to face me. His eyes flash dangerously, but there’s a sadness behind them that tells me to tread carefully.

“I’m sorry you got mistaken for someone else, Summer,” he goes on. “But it doesn’t have anything to do with you. It was a stupid mistake, that’s all. And we just happen to be sharing a table, anyway. Isn’t that what you said? So no, I don’t think I particularly owe you anything; so if you wouldn’t mind leaving me to feel mortified on my own for a bit, that would be great, thanks.”

A lump rises in my throat.

“No,” I say firmly, surprising myself. Alex blinks in confusion, so I guess I surprised him too.

Yay, me.

“No,” I say again. “No, I’m not going to leave you alone. I’m going to stand here beside you until you tell me what’s going on with you. Or until my feet freeze off. Whichever comes first.”

I stare down at the water. A wave washes over my toes, then retreats, pulling the sand out from under me in tiny channels. It’s a sensation I remember from my childhood, and, for some reason, it makes me want to cry.

Nostalgia is a powerful thing…

Alex shifts slightly beside me.

“If you walk away, I’ll just follow you,” I say warningly. “And I’m in the room next door to you, so I’m going to be hard to avoid.”

I have no idea who this new, assertive Summer is, or where she came from, but I think I like her. Let’s just hope Alex does, too.

“You’re really not going to give up on this, are you?” he says.

“Nope. ‘Fraid not.” I try to sound cheerful, but it sounds forced even to me, so I drop the act and go for a more direct approach instead.

“What happened to your fiancée, Alex?” I ask softly. “Did she… she didn’t…?”

The words dry up as a horrible thought occurs to me.

“Oh my God, she’s not… she’s not dead, is she?”

My hand flies up and clamps itself over my mouth in horror, a series of terrible images flooding my brain: Alex’s fiancée, dying just before their wedding day; him, broken-hearted and inconsolable, honeymooning alone, in a bid to preserve her memory; or maybe to scatter her ashes? Because that would be—

“Of course she’s not bloody dead,” he says, rolling his eyes almost out of his head. “Good grief, Summer, what do you take me for? D’you seriously think I’d have gone on a quad bike safari with you this afternoon if I was mourning my beloved dead wife?”

He snorts, sounding almost amused.

“Um, no. No, of course not,” I tell him quickly. “Of course you wouldn’t. And that’s great! That she’s alive, I mean. It’s really, really great that you have a living wife. Or fiancée. Or… whatever she is.”

What is she, though? Because that’s what I really want to know, now we’ve established she’s still with us.

“Is it?” His expression darkens again.

Uh-oh.

“Look, don’t get me wrong,” he says, still staring out at the ocean. “I don’t wish her dead. I’m not that mad at her. I do wish I’d never been engaged to her, though. And I suspect she does, too, actually; it would’ve made the revelation that she was sleeping with my best friend feel like much less of a betrayal.”

There’s a long silence, during which our seagull friend gets tired of pecking around in the shallows and flies off. I watch him go enviously, wondering what on earth I’m supposed to say next. What do you say to something like that, after all?

“I’m sorry,” I manage eventually. “That’s … well, pretty intense. And right before your birthday, too — that must’ve made it even worse.”

Alex looks at me blankly.

“My birthday?”

“Yeah, the other day? I saw the flowers in your … oh.”

My face starts to burn with embarrassment as everything falls into place. The flowers in his room. The champagne on the plane, and on our first night at the hotel. All perfectly appropriate gifts for the newlyweds. Except we weren’t them.

No wonder he was so grouchy about it all.

“Sorry,” I tell him, cringing at the memory of how I made everyone sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to him on the mountain top. “I just assumed. I really shouldn’t have. I really, really shouldn’t have.”

Alex shrugs, as if it doesn’t really matter to him, but the sag of his shoulders tells a different, much sadder story, and I have to resist the urge to put my arms around him and hug him until the sadness goes away.

“I know you said you don’t want to talk about it,” I tell him instead, “but … it might help? Even just a little?”

“You’re desperate to know what happened, you mean?” he says, glancing over at me. He smiles, which takes the sting out of his words, but not the sadness from his eyes.

“No. No, it’s not that,” I reply. “Well, I am just a tiny bit curious, yes. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t. But that’s not why I’m trying to get you to talk to me about it.”

I want to tell him that I’m doing it because I want to help him; because I feel super shitty about how self-absorbed I’ve been to have kept rambling on about myself and my stupid diary while he was dealing with a broken engagement. But his shoulders tense as if he’s trying to make his mind up about something, and then he starts to speak.

“She stood me up at the altar,” he says, turning back to stare at the ocean. “Decided she couldn’t go through with it, because she wanted to be with him. I think that was the worst part; how public the humiliation was. You know?”

“I can imagine,” I say, speaking carefully because although I’m no stranger to public humiliation, for once this is a level of humiliation I don’t know much about. “And I guess this explains why you hate weddings so much. But you shouldn’t feel humiliated. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“I’m not so sure about that, actually,” he says ruefully. “I didn’t do anything half as bad as they did, obviously—” He pauses to roll his eyes — “But I’m not exactly blameless. I should never have been marrying her in the first place. That’s on me.”

“You… you shouldn’t have?”

I have no idea why my heart leaps at this statement, but it does. Which, I remind myself, is totally inappropriate under the circumstances.

“No, I really shouldn’t have.”

He turns abruptly and starts walking back along the beach, and, after a moment, I follow him.

“We’d been together since we were kids,” he says, thrusting his hands into his pockets as he walks. “Well, teenagers.”

“Childhood sweethearts, you mean?” I stop in my tracks. “Wow. That’s so—”

“If you’re going to say ‘romantic’, save it,” Alex says, striding ahead and forcing me to break into a clumsy jog to catch up with him again. “It wasn’t the least bit romantic.”

“I guess not,” I concede, splashing through the shallow water next to him. “The idea of it is, for sure; but I’m starting to think maybe people aren’t actually meant to spend their entire lives with the very first person they meet.”

“That’s the thing, though,” says Alex, stopping so suddenly I almost walk into him. “It’s the idea of it people fall for. It’s not real. We just convinced ourselves it was because it was what everyone expected of us. It was like this perfect love story: we were just too scared to admit it wasn’t actually true.”

His shoulders droop again, and then he’s back to his ‘staring at the horizon’ trick, as if the sinking sun holds all the answers.

“What’s her name? Your fiancée?”

It isn’t important, obviously, but suddenly I want to know. I want to know who she is; this woman who got engaged to Alexander Fox, and cheated on him with his best friend. I want to know who made him like this.

“Rebecca,” he says reluctantly, speaking as if the word tastes bad. “She’s not my fiancée any more, though. She’s not anything to me anymore.”

Rebecca.

I roll the name around in my head. It’s a pretty name: all soft curves and musical vowels: Re-be-ca.

Alex’s fiancée, Rebecca.

Who I have a sudden, and completely irrational, hatred of.

“We didn’t love each other,” he says, so quietly that I have to lean in to hear him. “Not like you’re supposed to. We weren’t in love. Not ever, really. We were just a habit neither of us tried hard enough to break. And I just wish we’d had the courage to admit that before we started sending out invitations and paying a small fortune for flowers. I wish I could go back in time and do the right thing rather than the easy one. Because the ‘easy’ thing has turned out to be the hardest one after all.”

The sun glides serenely towards the horizon, casting a golden glow over the world. We stand there watching it until it hits the tip of the mountains that make up the center of La Gomera, and is swallowed up by the land.

“If you’re not careful, you’re going to start sounding like me,” I say, breaking the silence that descends as the gold in the sky turns to silver. “Talking about wanting to go back in time and act on the opportunities that were right there in front of you.”

“I think everyone wants that, though, don’t they?” says Alex, shrugging again. “We all wonder what we’d have done differently, if we’d had the chance. We all sometimes dream of going back and ‘fixing’ things; making them how they were meant to be. That’s what I admire about you, Summer.”

“Me?”

I glance over my shoulder, just in case there’s some other ‘Summer’ approaching who he could be addressing. But nope: it’s just the two of us, on this almost deserted beach.

“Yeah. Because we all wish we could go back and change things, but you actually tried to do it, didn’t you? Whereas I just let things continue the way they were until it was too late.”

I consider this thoughtfully.

“It might be too late for me to change things too,” I admit, thinking of my talk with Jamie earlier today, and how I’ve yet to start feeling like anything I’ve done this week has even come close to changing my life, like it was supposed to. “So I wouldn’t go trying to model yourself on me just yet, if I were you.”

“That doesn’t sound like the Summer I’ve come to know,” says Alex, nudging me. “Come on; you’re the one who’s supposed to believe in this stuff. Help a guy out here, would you? I’m kind of counting on you.”

“All what stuff?”

“Oh, you know: true love, happy ever-afters. Fairytale endings. The Summer Brookes Guide to Life.”

He smiles sadly, and my heart contracts with the need to make him feel better.

“Of course you can have all of that,” I tell him firmly, even though I’m not totally sure I still believe it myself. “This is just a tiny little setback, that’s all. You’ll still get your happy ending. I’m sure of it. You just need to figure out how to do it, that’s all.”

“Maybe I should write a list? One without Jamie Reynolds on it, though, obviously.”

He grins, trying to pretend he’s making fun of me, as usual. But there’s a crease between his eyebrows that I want to reach up and smooth out with my hands, before wrapping my arms around him and holding him tight.

I don’t actually do it, though. Because although the man standing next to me has somehow shape-shifted into someone other than the person I thought he was — the person he’s been since the moment I met him — he’s still Alex Fox: prickly, difficult, Alex Fox, who is patently not the kind of man you just hug.

No matter how much you might suddenly want to.

“You can put anything you want on your list,” I say lightly, looping my arm through his instead. “I’ll help you, if you like. And I think we should start by getting off this beach before it’s totally dark, don’t you?”