‘I can take you to Abbot Kinney, if you like,’ I said. ‘It’s another street, nearby. More upmarket if this is too crazy for you.’
Reuben loved Abbot Kinney.
‘No, thanks,’ Eddie said. For a moment he looked like he might smile. ‘Since when was I upmarket?’
I shrugged, suddenly embarrassed. ‘I never really got to find out.’
He glanced sideways at me and I saw what might be a pocket of warmth. ‘I think we got a pretty good measure of each other.’
I love you, I thought. I love you, Eddie, and I don’t know what to do.
His muffin arrived. I imagined my life, stretching out ahead of me without Eddie David, and felt light-headed with panic. And then I imagined him, all those years ago, envisaging a life stretching out ahead of him without his sister.
He ate his muffin in silence.
‘My charity,’ I said eventually. ‘My charity was set up for Alex.’
‘I did wonder.’
‘For Alex and for Hannah.’ I picked at a hangnail. ‘Hannah has kids of her own now. I’ve seen pictures. I sent them presents every birthday at first, but in the end she sent a message through Mum asking me to stop. It kills Mum and Dad. They tried everything to bring us back together. They just thought she’d climb down, eventually. Perhaps she would have done if I was still in England . . . I don’t know. She was such a stubborn child. I guess that’s the sort of adult she became, too.’
Eddie looked down the beach. ‘You shouldn’t underestimate the impact that my mother will have had on her. She never stopped hating you. At times it’s the only thing that’s got her through.’
I tried not to imagine Eddie’s mother’s house, the walls holding old anger like nicotine stains. I tried not to imagine my sister there with Carole Wallace; the words they’d use; the tea they’d drink. Although, oddly, there was comfort to be found in that picture, too. In the possibility that my sister’s wholesale rejection of me could perhaps have been helped along by someone else.
‘Do you think that’s partly why?’ I asked, turning back to him. My desperation was palpable. ‘Do you think your mum might have been egging her on, all these years?’
Eddie shrugged. ‘I don’t know your sister very well. But I know my mother. I’d probably have reacted differently to you if I hadn’t been listening to Mum for nineteen years.’
He looked as if he might say something else, but then closed his mouth.
‘I’ve struggled to be anywhere near children since it happened,’ I said. ‘I refused childminding jobs, wouldn’t babysit, went on ward visits with Reuben only when there was no other option.’
I paused. ‘I even refused to have a baby with him. He made me go to therapy, but nothing would change my mind. When I saw a child – any child – I saw your sister. So I steer clear. It’s easier that way.’
Eddie ate the final piece of his muffin and rested his forehead in his hand. He said, ‘I wish you’d used your family name when we met. I wish you’d said, “I’m Sarah Harrington.”’
I yanked the hangnail off, leaving a soft strip of stinging pink. ‘I’m not reverting to Harrington, not even after the divorce. I don’t want to be Sarah Harrington ever again. ’
Eddie was squashing the final crumbs from his plate onto a finger. ‘It would have saved us a lot of heartache.’
I nodded.
‘And your parents were meant to have moved to Leicester. There was a “sold” sign at the end of their track for weeks.’
‘I know. But I moved to LA, and I was the problem. Their buyer fell through and they decided to stay. I think by then it was pretty clear I wasn’t coming back.’
A long silence fell.
‘Could I ask why you call yourself Eddie David?’ I asked, when it became unbearable. ‘Surely your name’s Eddie Wallace?’
‘David’s my middle name. I started using it after the accident. For a while everyone recognized my name and there’d be all this . . . I don’t know . . . kind of suffocating sympathy, I suppose, when people realized who I was. It was easier to be Eddie David. Nobody knew him. Just like nobody knew Sarah Mackey.’
After a while he turned to look at me, but his gaze was pulled away again, like water running back to the sea. ‘I’d give anything to have worked out who you were before it was too late,’ he said. ‘I just – I just can’t believe we never made the connection.’ He scratched his head. ‘You know they let him out after five years?’
I nodded. ‘He moved to Portsmouth, I heard.’
Eddie said nothing.
‘It was my Facebook, wasn’t it?’ I said. ‘You saw a post from Tommy. He called me Harrington.’
‘I saw it about twenty seconds after you left. And for the first minute or so, before the shock set in properly, I just thought, No. Pretend you haven’t seen that. Make it go away, because I can’t not be with her. It’s only been a week, but she’s . . .’ He flushed. ‘She’s everything ,’ he finished off. ‘That’s what I was thinking.’
We sat in silence for a long time. My heart was racing. Eddie’s cheeks were faintly red.
Then he told me about his mother, about her depression, how it had exploded after Alex’s death and deteriorated into a complex mental health cocktail from which she had never really emerged. He told me she had moved to Sapperton when she’d come out of the worst of the breakdown, because she wanted to be ‘closer’ to her dead daughter. Recognizing that she was too vulnerable to survive alone, Eddie had abandoned any hopes of returning to university and moved in with her for a while. He persuaded Frank, the sheep farmer, to rent him a crumbling cow barn on the edge of Siccaridge Wood, which he slowly turned into a workshop and then, once she was able to live on her own, a home of his own.
‘Dad funded it,’ he said. ‘Cash was his solution to everything, after he left us. He couldn’t bring himself to call, once Alex’s funeral was over, or to come and visit, but he was fine sending money. So I decided to be fine about spending it.’
He told me about the day he’d discovered who I was. How the trees outside his barn had seemed to collapse in on him as he reframed me as Sarah Harrington, the girl who’d killed his sister. How he’d cancelled his holiday to Spain. Put his commissions on hold. How he’d gone to check on his mother one day and found her zonked out on medication, and the guilt he had felt as he had watched her sleep.
‘It would be catastrophic if she found out about me and you,’ he said quietly. ‘Although it felt pretty catastrophic even without her knowing. I fell into quite a hole. I didn’t look at Facebook, or emails, or anything. Just kind of cut myself off. Took a lot of walks. Did a lot of thinking and talking to myself.’
He cracked his knuckles. ‘Until my mate Alan turned up to check if I was dead and told me you’d been in touch.’
Then he sighed. ‘I should have replied to you,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t. You were right – that’s no way to treat anyone. I started to write to you, again and again, but I just didn’t trust myself to talk to you.’
I tried not to imagine what he might have said.
‘But I loved your life story. Your messages. I craved them when they didn’t come. I read them over and over.’
I swallowed, trying not to attach meaning to this. ‘Did you ever call me?’ I asked tentatively.
He shook his head.
‘Are you sure? I had . . . I had some dropped calls. And, well, a message, telling me to stay away from you.’
He looked puzzled. ‘Oh. You wrote to me about that, didn’t you? In one of those letters? I’m sorry – I didn’t really pay it much attention. I think I just assumed you’d made it up.’
I winced.
‘Did you hear from them again?’
‘No. But I did think . . . Look, I did wonder if it might be your mother. Is there any way she could have found out about you and me? I saw a woman, on the canal path between my parents’ house and your barn . . . And when I went to Tommy’s sports thing at my old school, I saw someone wearing the same coat. I mean, I can’t be certain it was the same person, but I’m pretty sure it was. She wasn’t doing anything particularly strange, but both times I felt like I was being, well, stared at. And maybe in a hostile way.’