Chapter 39

39

It’s Sunday. I wake up with an immediate ache in my heart.

My last day on Earth.

Everything that’s happening and everything that might happen floods into my brain: asking questions, second-guessing, wondering about alternatives. I swipe it all away. Today is my last day on Earth before I return to Evermore, according to the rules of a deal I chose to make. I have made my decision. And part of the decision was to be at peace with it because the truth is—there is no alternative. It’s all way too overwhelming to fully contemplate, and I’m scared that if I really, truly think about it, I will crumble. And I have things to do today, so crumbling is not a possibility. I’m holding a party for Mr. Yoon. I can’t imagine a better way to spend this day.

I busy the morning away, writing out various bits and pieces of Mr. Yoon’s routine—his likes and dislikes that I know of and the exact way he likes his coffee—into a notebook I picked up from the stationer’s yesterday. I’ll leave this for Cooper, who will be able to hand it over to the council whenever they arrive for their assessment. Hopefully it won’t be too long now seeing as I’ve sent them around five emails expressing the importance of a speedy visit.

I get dressed into the pale green dress again because it was expensive as hell and because the way the dress made me feel the other day has solidified the notion that I should have been wearing lovely dresses every single day while I had the chance—what the hell was I waiting for? Even if I was just lounging around the house in them, it would have made me feel at least a percentage better. I add some sparkly little drop earrings I found in my mum’s bag of stuff and brush my hair until it shines and falls neatly over my shoulders. Then I go next door to collect the man of the hour.

Mr. Yoon is admiring himself in his bedroom mirror. I look on with approval at the sharp navy shirt and grey trousers he’s picked out for today. I ask if I can comb his hair at the back, to which he agrees. I stand next to him in the mirror and we smile at each other.

“We look good!” I say, posing with my hands on my hips.

He leans his shoulder into mine and gives me a thumbs-up.

“Are you sure this isn’t too much?” I ask. “I’m not, like, an absolute tit for throwing you a party the day after you got out of hospital?”

He grabs his pencil and pad from the table.

I’M DELIGHTED. MY FIRST PARTY IN THIRTY YEARS.

I think back to the photo of him collecting the award for playing the violin. How he reacted when I brought it up. I wonder once more what led him to hide away from the world. From people. What made him leave the things he loved behind? The last week seems to have brought us closer together. If I had more time, I think he might have opened up to me eventually. Perhaps, when I’m gone, he will open up to Cooper. Or one of the new friends I hope he makes at his meet-new-people party.

Mr. Yoon blows the air out through his cheeks.

“Are you nervous?” I ask. “About meeting new people?”

He shakes his head no and rolls his eyes at the question.

“Me neither,” I lie. He chuckles, seeing right through me.

We’re on the way out the door when Mr. Yoon holds his hand up for me to stop. He spins and lopes back into the house. I wonder if he’s changed his mind about doing this, but instead he grabs his crossword puzzle book from the kitchen table.

“Oh, you won’t need that!” I say. “It’s a party. You can’t do crosswords there.”

He clasps it to his chest and meets me back in the doorway. I try to take the crossword book off him because the last thing we need is Mr. Yoon ignoring everyone in favour of his puzzle book, but he clings to the book with a grip so strong it is very clear that I am not to attempt to take it from him again. I hold my hands up. “Fine! Jeez. We can take your crosswords.” It must be a comfort thing. Emotional support puzzle book. I get it. “But I bet when we get there it’ll be so much fun that you forget all about it.”

In response Mr. Yoon opens the puzzle book a millimetre, gives a quick nod and then pats the book twice as he holds it to his chest.

“Whatever gets you through, I guess.”

“Whoa.”

It looks beautiful. It was already a beautiful room with the domed ceiling, the tall circular shelves of books, and the instruments. But Aled has strung the shelves with hundreds of tiny warm twinkle lights and laid out a folded white sheet on top of the grand piano, atop which there are five crystal vases filled with yellow roses. I spot Deli Dan at the far end of the room. He’s pushed together two study desks and is laying out foil trays of sandwiches and cake.

“Everyone loves a fairy light, eh?” Aled says, popping out from behind a double bass, carrying some sort of little machine in his hand.

“It looks incredible!” I say. “Thank you so much! Mr. Yoon, this is Aled. He works at the library.”

“Yes. I run this magnificent ship. It’s cracking to meet you.” Aled shakes Mr. Yoon’s hand, beaming at the possibility of a new friend to add to his collection. “Delphie told me you don’t speak.”

“Rude, Aled!”

Mr. Yoon waves me away, grinning. I can tell that he immediately likes Aled’s forthrightness.

“No offense intended,” Aled says. “It’s just that I was curious if you had ever seen one of these.” Aled holds up the little machine and switches it on so it lights up with a keyboard screen. “It’s a VOCA—a voice output communication aid. We have one here at the library for our nonverbal visitors to use. You’d be surprised how many of them didn’t know it existed. Anyway, Delphie told me you were a recluse these days and—”

“Aled!”

Mr. Yoon shakes with silent laughter, the sight of it a balm. He is clearly on board with Aled’s straight talking.

“And,” Aled says, giving me a pointed glance, “I thought you might not have heard of them either. You basically type in what you want to say, and the machine speaks it for you.”

Aled types in, “Hello hello and a jolly good day to all,” and a man’s voice—which sounds an awful lot like Louis Theroux—speaks the words loudly into the room.

“How cool!” I gasp.

Mr. Yoon reaches out for the machine, inspecting it, a stunned grin on his face.

“You can preload it with other phrases too,” Aled says, handing the device to Mr. Yoon and then swiping onto a new screen that has boxes filled with phrases such as Thank you so much, It’s great to meet you, and, curiously, Get away from me!

Mr. Yoon presses the Thank you so much button and nods, impressed when the Louis Theroux voice pipes up again. He swipes straight onto the previous screen and types out, “This is very good.”

“It’s great!” I say, beaming at the excited flush on Mr. Yoon’s face.

Mr. Yoon types again. “My name is Yoon Jung-won.”

My heart lifts. “Yoon Jung-won!” I hold my hand out to shake his. “It’s good to know you, Yoon Jung-won.”

Mr. Yoon gives my hand a firm squeeze.

“The VOCA has so many useful elements,” Aled says excitedly. “Shall I show you? We have a few minutes until the party officially begins.”

Mr. Yoon swipes onto the next screen, already an expert, and presses the YES button.

Aled escorts him to a velvet two-seater on the other side of the room, where they sit down together, both of their faces animated as Aled chatters away and Mr. Yoon replies on the VOCA.

I grin at the pair of them, already feeling quite sure that they will get along very well. A speaking device. How brilliant.

“Firm friends already, I see.”

I turn around to see Cooper looking perfect in a black T-shirt and grey slim-fitting trousers, resembling a curly-haired Gene Kelly. He’s wearing a large backpack, and I’m about to ask what on earth is in it and why he needed to bring it to a party, when his eyes travel down my body and I’m immediately swept back to the other day, when those same eyes blazed onyx while he watched me come. A shiver runs through me. He must see it, because he does that grin that I used to find so cocky and arrogant and that now makes me want to test how quickly I can remove my clothes and his.

My horn is dampened when it occurs to me that there’s someone close behind Cooper, looking around the music room, an impressed expression on a usually very unimpressed face.

“Mrs. Ernestine!” I trill, side-eyeing Cooper. “Uh, welcome.”

“Mrs. Ernestine has never met Mr. Yoon, can you believe it?” Cooper explains. “She asked what I was doing ‘all dolled up,’ so I thought I’d bring her along for the fun.”

“You’ve never met Mr. Yoon? I thought you’d lived in the building for over five years now?”

“He lives on the floor above, don’t he?” she says, as if this perfectly explains their lack of interaction. “I only ever talk to this one here.” She points to Cooper.

“Well, the more the merrier!”

“Fancy room, ain’t it? Didn’t know this was here, to be honest. Thought it was just a normal library.”

“Me too,” I say, noticing that she’s wearing a fresh pink rose behind her ear. “I only came in here for the first time last week. It looks like such a boring building from the outside. You wouldn’t have a clue.”

“I said I’d help Deli Dan carry in the barrel and the ice for the champagne,” Cooper tells me, backing away.

I throw him a Please don’t leave me alone with Mrs. Ernestine look, which I can tell from his face he totally sees but chooses to ignore, because even though I now fancy him, he still has many despicable qualities, one of which is finding my discomfort amusing.

He strides away with a chuckle. Mrs. Ernestine and I stand there in supreme awkwardness. I glance at the clock on the wall. There are now three hours until I go back to Evermore. I think about what Merritt said about not promising that Mrs. Ernestine won’t murder me.

“I…I like your tattoos,” I say, like an absolute moron, pointing down at Never Again on her knuckles.

She looks down at them and rolls her eyes. “Oh, they’re bloody daft. Got it done in the nick, to make myself look ’ard. Embarrassin’ or what?”

“The nick? Like prison?”

“Of course prison. What else does the nick mean, you thicko?”

“Were you…Did you…What was your crime?”

I just about manage to stop myself from asking if she partook in any murders.

Mrs. Ernestine turns a little pink in the cheeks. “Got caught up with the wrong people. Drugs. Dealing. It was the nineties and I was a fucking idiot.”

“Wow,” I say. “So…what does Never Again mean?”

Mrs. Ernestine looks down at her trainers. “The way my daughter looked at me, getting dragged away by the police. I was ashamed. I promised myself I’d never again have her look at me like that.”

“And did she?”

Mrs. Ernestine’s eyes meet mine. “No. I’ve turned my life around. It’s not big, it’s not flashy, but it’s honest. My daughter is a doctor now. Chloe.” She smiles proudly, and it transforms her usually scowling face into one full of love and experience.

“You can get tattoos removed now,” I say. “You know, if you’re embarrassed by them.”

Mrs. Ernestine shakes her head. “Oh never. I don’t like them, but my past is what makes me, me. And all of it, good and bad, has led me here today. On a summer’s day in August, in this fancy room, about to drink a shitload of free champagne.”

I think about my past and how it has led me here too, talking to my “scary” downstairs neighbour. If I hadn’t choked on that burger, I might have gone my whole life never realising that Mrs. Ernestine was a secret badass. Never meeting Aled or Frida or finding out for myself that sex is basically the most fun you can have on Earth.

“Speaking of which.” Mrs. Ernestine points over to the buffet table, where Deli Dan and Cooper are dunking champagne bottles into a massive barrel full of ice. Beside it there’s another desk filled with plastic flutes and cans of pop for anyone not drinking alcohol. I wouldn’t even have considered that. Deli Dan has done me such a huge favour. If I weren’t so lusty for Cooper, I would have a crush on him for sure.

I laugh as Mrs. Ernestine takes off, grabbing an entire bottle of champagne out of the barrel. She pops it open before wandering away—without a flute—to sit near Aled and Mr. Yoon, who seem to be deep into a conversation about Bach via the VOCA device.

I look around me. While I was talking to Mrs. Ernestine, the room has filled up, not only with the people I’ve invited but more than a few who I haven’t, including two of the women who were behind me in the queue at Deli Dan’s. I spot Cooper’s parents heading over to greet him, Amy immediately fluttering her eyelashes at Deli Dan. Cooper must have invited them to make up the numbers in case other people didn’t show. I grin at him, but he’s too busy nattering away to his mum to spot me. There’s Shelley from the mini-mart and someone who I take to be her sister, also making a beeline for the champagne. I see no sign of their dad, but I don’t have time to worry about it too much because there’s a tap on my shoulder.

“Frida!” I say as she gives me a huge hug. She smells like roses and lemons.

“I’m pleased as punch to be invited,” she tells me. “Aled says we’ll go on a date together, me and you and Aled and R. L. Cooper.” Her face drops for a moment. “Well, I think he meant date. We’re texting so much, but he hasn’t made a romantic move yet.”

“Oh, he’s well into you,” I say.

“You think so?”

“It’s obvious.” We look over to where Aled is showing Mr. Yoon and Mrs. Ernestine a glass case filled with wind instruments. Cooper approaches them with a bottle of champagne, a bunch of flutes, and a huge smile.

“He is so hot,” Frida breathes, her eyes flashing.

“He really is,” I say, eyeing Cooper as he pops the cork on the bottle of fizz.

“Ooh, English sandwiches!” Frida cries, scurrying off towards the buffet table. “I hope there will be eggy mayonnaise.”

I wave at Leanne and Jan, who appear to have brought three other unknowns with them. I’m about to go and introduce them all to Mr. Yoon, when Cooper’s mum, Amy, approaches me. She hands me a glass of champagne.

“Thought you’d like this.”

“You thought right,” I say, taking a sip and enjoying the feel of the bubbles on my tongue. “Thank you. It’s getting busy. I hope Aled doesn’t mind.”

“Which one is Aled?” Amy asks.

“Purple waistcoat, looks like a snooker player slash science teacher.”

“He looks very happy to me.”

She’s right. Frida has joined him, and his face has gone red with delight. Behind him I see Cooper opening up his giant rucksack and pulling out a set of small Bluetooth speakers. He fiddles with his phone, and within a few seconds, the sounds of Charlie Parker’s saxophone blares out. I laugh. Cooper looks around the room until his eyes meet mine, and he gives his mum and me an over-the-top thumbs-up.

“He really loves Charlie Parker,” I snort. “Look at his dumb face!”

“I do love that smile.”

I laugh as I remember how his mum demanded that he smile for her at the family games night. How different his smile is now, reaching his eyes and igniting them.

“It’s a great smile,” I say quietly.

“I’ve never seen him in love before,” Amy says casually, putting a hand on my arm. “It’s fascinating. Like he is lit up from the inside.”

I blink. Cooper’s in love? Hold up. She means…?

“Oh…Cooper and I…It’s totally casual.” I remember the deal I made with him to pretend to be dating, and quickly correct myself. “I mean we’re dating, definitely. But it’s, you know, casual.”

Because it is. Cooper and I are definitely lusty for each other, there’s no denying. And the past couple of days have been an incredible distraction from the overwhelm of what is actually happening—what is actually about to happen. But love? I snort. “Not love.” I chuckle at the prospect.

Amy’s kind eyes meet mine. “You might want to tell him that.”

I shake my head. “But…”

“I know my boy,” she says. “He’s not smiled like that in a long time. Since we lost Em, I didn’t think we’d ever get him back—the bright, easy, comfortable man we all knew and loved. And then you. It’s like magic. Look at him. He’s fallen. All the way. Don’t tell him I told you,” she adds, her tone softening. “He’d be very cross with me, I imagine.”

I follow her gaze. Cooper struts over to us, hamming up playing the air saxophone as he does so. He grins at me, eyes full of warmth, before leaning in and pressing his lips softly against my cheek, his bottom lip catching the edge of my earlobe. My arms goose pimple in reaction. I catch his eye. Is what Amy said true? Does Cooper love me? And if he does, what’s going to happen when I’m gone? Will this destroy him all over again? When I thought that sleeping with Cooper was just a little fun, it didn’t seem so bad that I wouldn’t be around. Why would he care? Especially when he has a line of other much more impressive women literally waiting outside his door. But if there are real feelings…love feelings…

My phone blasts out loudly with “Jump Around,” to which Cooper’s mum says, “Ooh, I do like that song!”

It’s a Merritt message! Fuck. Do I have to go to Evermore right now? Have we been found out by Eric or one of the Higher-Ups? My heart starts to race. I press my empty champagne glass into Cooper’s hands and dart out of the room towards the toilet. I push open the door and check there’s no-one in either of the two cubicles. Sitting myself down on a toilet lid, I open the text.

Great news! Eric was not suspicious of anything at all. He was hanging around because—get this—he fancies the fuck out of me. He’s into me bad. Should have known, but I’ve been so distracted with YOU that my usually perfect romantic intuition is wonky.

And then another…

Jonah is still out there, you know.

I blink at the message as I realise I haven’t thought of Jonah in almost two days.

Whether you want him or not, surely it’s worth one last push before you just…give up? Kissing Jonah will save your life. It seems to me that you’re having too much fun to just leave it all behind…Come on, Delphie. Isn’t this all worth fighting for?

xoxo

The message disappears and I exhale, trying to slow down the furious pounding of my heart.

I open the cubicle door and walk over to the big mirror on the wall. My cheeks are red and my eyes are wide with terror.

I bite my lip and try to reconnect with the me of a few days ago. The one who was sure that not pursuing Jonah was the exact right thing to do. The one who made the choice not to spend her final days chasing after something already proven to be futile. Because it was absolutely, definitely impossible. Right? Jonah was never going to kiss me. Not after the shit show at the gala. It was impossible. I would fight if I thought it was going to work. I’ve been fighting. But I can’t waste these last hours on a wild-goose chase that will almost certainly lead to nothing.

Can I?