Chapter 30

30

It’s only when we get outside that I realise I’ve abandoned my shoes inside Derwent Manor. Luckily we’re in the middle of a heat wave and the grassy country lanes are as dry as dust. It is, however, disconcerting now that the sun has set into pitch black. I could step in anything.

Cooper uses his phone torch to light the way.

“Are you okay?” he asks as we pass by the field that is now empty of sheep.

I don’t think I am.

Not because of seeing Gen and Ryan, which would have been bad enough on its own, but because I can now firmly surmise that I have unequivocally failed at this chance Merritt gave me. I lost him. I lost Jonah. He looked at me like I was someone to be afraid of. He didn’t kiss me. He’s never going to kiss me. Which means not only have I lost the potential love of my life but I’m going to die again in three days. And while I never thought my life was particularly special, these past few days have turned everything I thought I knew on its head. Things have been stressful and weird and scary and overwhelming. Yet somehow, I’ve felt more alive than I ever thought possible.

“I’m fine,” I say, although I can feel the tears that seem to come so easily now popping up to say hello. God knows what will happen to Mr. Yoon.

“I’m starting to think that finding this Jonah was about more than informing him of an STD?”

“There never was an STD!” I snap as a soft twig breaks beneath my bare foot. “I’ve never even…I just…I said that in the moment because I didn’t know you. I did think there was something real between Jonah and me…and I needed there to be…I needed him to be…” I trail off. It’s too difficult to explain and especially to someone like Cooper. I sigh heavily. “I’ve just fucked it up, like everything else.”

“I’m sure it’s not so bad.”

“Cooper, I just chased after a man and humiliated the pair of us in front of a room full of people.”

“I’m sure he was flattered by your determination.”

“Oh please.”

Cooper’s voice softens. “Sometimes when people want to go, it’s easier to just let them.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” I say, wiping away another uninvited tear. “And especially not with you. I just want to go home.”

“I understand.”

We continue trundling along the country lane in miserable silence, when suddenly there’s a weird rustling sound from above. Both of us stop walking and look skywards. We are rewarded for our curiosity with a massive splatter of rain bucketing all over us. An abrupt crackle of lightning illuminates the shock on our faces, immediately backed up by a rollicking clap of thunder. Now? It’s going to rain and thunder and lightning fucking now? It’s been the hottest summer since records began, it hasn’t rained in a whole month. But it suddenly decides to when I’m stuck on a country lane, barefooted, crestfallen, embarrassed, and marked by death?

I laugh. I laugh and I cry and I shake my head. “Perfect!” I yell at the sky over the roar of the thunder. “Genuinely. Your timing is fucking sublime!”

“Delphie, come on!” Cooper shouts over to me, his hair already drenched. “Don’t just bloody stand there!”

I look down at my feet, the rain already softening the previously dry ground beneath me. I lift up my foot. There’s a squelch.

“Come on, we’ll get soaked.”

I can’t seem to take my eyes off my feet. I’m going to die in three days anyway. What does it matter if I get soaked? If I drown in this rainfall? Literally nothing matters anymore.

Cooper approaches me. “I’m gonna carry you back to the car, okay?”

I shrug half-heartedly, sort of expecting him to swoop me up into a cradle and carry me like I weigh nothing at all. But no. He does not do that. He scoops me up—yes, without any effort—but he throws me over his shoulder like I’m a sack of potatoes which, frankly after this shit show, I might as well be. My head dangles down his back, and when Cooper runs along the country lane, my head starts to bounce against his butt.

“Cooper! Put me back down!” I yell, because this is just too much humiliation even for me. But the rain and the thunder are so resounding that he doesn’t hear me. I wonder briefly if I will get a bruise, because while Cooper’s bottom is a little rounder than average, it is pure solid muscle. It’s like my head is bopping against a basketball.

I give in, deciding to just dangle, and soon enough we’re back in the car park, where Cooper places me on my feet outside the car. He reaches into his inside pocket for the keys, and then into his other inside pocket. He pulls out the army knife and the architectural plans and a wallet. Then he takes off his tuxedo jacket and dives into his trouser pockets.

“Fuck,” he barks. “My car keys. They must have fallen out when you were looking for my handkerchief. Did you not hear them fall?”

“Of course you’re blaming me,” I shout, rain sweeping my mascara right into my eyeballs. I lift my hands and try to shield my face. “You could have lost them at any time. Just use the army knife thing to unlock the car door. It worked on the gates!”

Cooper glares at me, a wet lock of hair falling into his eye. He swipes it away. “It won’t work on that. This is a special lock. It’s made so that it can’t possibly be picked.”

His jacket is slung over his shoulder and his tuxedo shirt is so wet it has become see-through and plastered onto a torso that looks to be as solid as his bum. I can’t seem to take my eyes away. My mouth feels dry. I feel the rain on my lips and catch some with my tongue. Cooper stares at me for a moment, panting, the rain dripping from his eyelashes.

“The pub,” he says suddenly, pointing at the warm yellow lights of The Bee and Bonnet. Without asking, he scoops me up again, flinging me over his shoulder and running towards the pub, my head once again bouncing against his thoroughly soaked bum. For fuck’s sake.

Cooper flings open the pub door and plops me onto my feet inside.

“Fucking hell,” I cry out dramatically. Only we’re now out of the rain and this pub is very, very quiet. There’s the gentle sound of a radio playing Adele, and only three other customers—a slightly damp grey-haired couple and their grey-haired pug—in the whole place.

The bartender looks down at the puddle we’re making on the stone floor and sighs. He disappears into the back, returning with a slightly damp towel that looks like it might have already been used on the grey-haired couple and their dog. Cooper grabs it and rubs his hair and face before handing it to me. I do the same and then place the towel on the floor to simultaneously wipe my bare feet and soak up our rain puddle. I hand it back to the bartender, who hangs it back on the hook, ready for the next wet customers I assume.

“Do you have rooms available?” Cooper asks the bartender.

“Rooms?” I pull a face. “I can’t stay here. Just call the AA or something. They’ll fix your car. Or let’s get a cab. I really do just want to go home.”

Cooper huffs. “I wouldn’t feel great about asking anyone to drive out to us in these terrible conditions. Would you?” He looks at me like I’ve just suggested he shit in a Jiffy bag and post it to his mum.

He’s right, though. It’s apocalyptic out there. I definitely don’t want anyone driving in that. I shake my head.

“Look,” Cooper says, his eyes softening a smidge. “We’ll wait it out and I’ll call my friend in the morning. He has a spare set of keys to the car.”

What other choice do we have?

I look up at the bartender. “What he said. We need a couple of rooms.”

“That won’t be a problem,” The barman says, indicating the empty pub. “Now what do you two want to drink?”

“Alcohol,” Cooper says bluntly.

“And plenty of it,” I add, burying my wet head in my hands.

---

As pubs go, it’s not the worst one to be stuck in—it’s cosy, the chairs are soft, and the alcohol in Duckett’s Edge is half as expensive as it is in London. Cooper and I have settled ourselves into a corner by a crammed gallery wall filled with oil paintings of women, each one in a different artistic style—an abstract nude, an Impressionist woman in a wild garden, a full-on portrait in a classical Renaissance sort of style. Cooper is drinking whisky neat because of course he is, and I am having vodka martinis, sans olives. The drinks have been made with a very old, very sweet, possibly out-of-date vermouth because—as the barman said—this is not Chiltern bloody Firehouse.

I reach into my bag for some bobby pins and braid my wet hair right back up into its usual style until it’s safe and secure.

A young, extremely pretty woman in denim shorts walks by our table. I wait for Cooper to meet her gaze with that flirty look he’s always dishing out, but he doesn’t. He just plays with a beer mat, brows furrowed.

“Are you okay?” I ask. “Only a very hot woman just walked past and you didn’t notice.”

“I’m not some sort of Casanova, you know.”

I raise an eyebrow. “Tell that to the queue of women outside your flat.”

Cooper shakes his head. “Humans need company.”

“Sure,” I say with an eye roll. “Company.”

He looks at me then, serious. “I assume you’ve never felt lonely then. If you had, you wouldn’t be so judgy about people doing whatever they can to avoid that particular feeling.” He sighs lightly. “Even if it doesn’t work.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, my gaze flicking up to meet his. “I didn’t know.”

He tears a bit of cardboard from the corner of the beer mat. I watch him fiddle with it, feeling ignorant for making such assumptions. Surely I know him better than that now.

“So then…” I start to ask, and then clamp my mouth shut.

“What? Go on?”

“Why not one woman? If you’re lonely, surely sticking with one person—regularly—would be better?”

Cooper puts down his scrap of beer mat. “I don’t date because I’ve never met anyone that made me feel like—”

“Oh fuck,” I yell, my heart suddenly lurching as I remember. “I won’t be there tonight to check on Mr. Yoon.”

“Why do you need to check on Mr. Yoon?”

I shrug. “I check he’s put his cigarettes out at night and turns off his gas, you know.”

“Has he left his cigarettes lit before?”

“Well, no. But his memory is foggy. He’s become pretty forgetful this past year.”

“Mr. Yoon will be fine,” Cooper says, taking a sip of his drink. “He might be getting older, but that man is sharper than the pair of us.”

“How would you know?”

“Because I’ve yet to beat him at a game of poker.”

I frown. “You play cards with Mr. Yoon?”

Cooper nods, flipping his beer mat between his hands. “Three weekday afternoons a week. We have lunch and a game.”

“You make him lunch?”

“I buy him lunch. He would not like my cooking.”

“Wait, are you the one who got him hooked on those fizzy cola bottle sweets?”

Cooper laughs. “I brought them once. He wolfed them down, so I brought them again.”

I exhale. “You can’t keep buying them. They’re not good for him.”

“Delphie, he’s eightysomething. Let him have some joy.”

“I just want him to be okay,” I say. I bite my lip as I think about what the hell is going to happen to him when I’m gone.

“Listen.” I lean closer to Cooper. “Mr. Yoon is waiting for a council assessment. He needs extra care. But the waiting list is long.”

“Oh. I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah. And I was going to take over his care until they sorted it but…if for some reason I’m, you know…”

“What?”

“Like, incapacitated or something, would—”

Cooper leans back, an amused twitch lifting the corner of his mouth. “Why on earth would you be incapacitated, Delphie?”

I tut. “It’s hypothetical, okay? I just want to know that if anything should happen to me, then someone will take care of Mr. Yoon.”

Cooper fixes his gaze onto mine as if he’s trying to get a peek inside my brain. “You really care about him, don’t you?”

I look away and take another large sip of my martini. “I just want him to be, you know, looked after.”

“Okay. In the unlikely event of your incapacitation, I solemnly swear to make sure Mr. Yoon is taken care of. Of course.”

I meet Cooper’s eyes again, relief and vodka warming my limbs. “Really? You will? I mean…You would? In the, uh, unlikely event of my—”

“Mr. Yoon will be fine,” he cuts in. “It’s cool that he has you to look out for him.”

My shoulders unclench, although not as much as I might hope they would, given Cooper’s promise that Mr. Yoon will be looked after without me. The simple fact is that I’ve got three days left on Earth and I’m stuck with my admittedly not-quite-so-despicable neighbour instead of kissing my literal soulmate who has the power to save my life.

But then what would I be doing on my last three days alive if I weren’t in this situation? If I hadn’t been sent on this ridiculous mission by Merritt? I’d probably be at home in the flat I was born in. Staring at my latest sketchbook-and-pencils purchase, inventing any reason to avoid actually using them. I’d be watching true crime documentaries about innocent women being taken in by those they loved—a genre of which there is a depressing amount of content to choose from. I’d be seeing Mr. Yoon, of course. I’d go to work, probably still avoiding talking to Leanne and Jan beyond surface-level work bullshit. But mostly, I’d be on my own. Hiding. And my life would just roll on in a series of “typical days,” just like on Merritt’s DVD. There’d probably not be many more worst moments. But there definitely wouldn’t be any best moments either.

It hits me like a kick to the stomach.

I’ve wasted it.

I’ve wasted my life.

I excuse myself and take my phone to the ladies’ room to call Mum.

There’s no answer.