The Legacy, Caroline Bond [popular books to read txt] 📗

to inherit the problem. And Liv will see the sense in what I’m suggesting. She may even be able to provide some advice. It’s workable. I should be able to stay at home for a while. Then maybe a hospice, at the end, if needs must.’

He had gone mad, and that madness was making him cruel. ‘So I just up and leave you! That’s your solution, is it? I abandon you to die on your own.’

‘I won’t be on my own. I’ll have people who know what they’re doing looking after me.’

‘Oh, well, that’s all right then! Complete strangers. That’s going to work just fine, isn’t it? You’ll hate it. You hate the physio coming, and that’s only twice a week. How do you think you’re going to feel, relying on a parade of different people – for everything? It’s ludicrous to even suggest it.’

‘Don’t, Meg. I have thought this through. It’s what I want.’

He really meant it! ‘Oh, good. I’m glad it’s a solution that works for you.’ Jonathan looked at her impassively, and she had a sudden urge to shake him. ‘It’s ridiculous. Totally wrong-headed.’

He refused to concede that she was right. He just stared at her, eerily calm.

Megan resorted to a different tack. ‘Out of curiosity, Jonathan, where am I supposed to go, in this grand plan of yours?’

‘Back to Darlington, back to your life before me.’ He really seemed to think it was an option.

‘So you have a time-machine now, do you, Jonathan? What are you gonna do? Spin the dial and send me back to the spring of 2013 – five seconds before I walked into that training session. Make sure we never meet? Send me on a new trajectory into some sort of parallel life?’

He absorbed her anger – stoically. ‘No, I know I can’t do that. I truly wish I could. But you can go home.’

Suddenly she was no longer sad, she was furious. ‘Home! This is my home! This is my life. Our life! You have to stop with this crap, Jonathan. Right now! You’re depressed. I get it. It’s bad. I get that. But this… I’m not listening to any more of this!’

Jonathan opened his mouth to say something else, but she cut him off.

‘You can’t control this, Jonathan. I can’t begin to imagine how dreadful that must be. I really can’t. And I can understand you wanting to have some say in how it all … ends, but the one thing you can’t control is other people’s feelings – especially my feelings. And it’s arrogant of you to try. This might be what you think you want – though I doubt even that – but what about what I want? Have you factored what I want into your ridiculous scheme?’ She was vibrating with pent-up emotion. Anger at him, at their situation, at the cruelty of life. She stood up. ‘So no, Jonathan. I won’t think about your plan. I won’t leave. No matter how sad and ill and depressed you get.’ She gulped, trying to control her shaking voice, wanting it to sound as firm as her intentions. ‘No matter how hard this gets, Jonathan, I will never leave you.’

She stood up and walked away from him, paused and turned back. ‘I refuse to listen to any more of this rubbish. We love each other. That’s it. You don’t get to decide the fate of our relationship. I do. And I choose us.’

She had refused to listen to him that day, in this very room, with the same cold air blowing in from the sea, just as she had refused to listen every other time Jonathan tried to bring the subject up. The minute he broached her going back to Darlington – and he did so repeatedly over the next few weeks – she walked away.

It had been relief when he finally gave up.

As she stood by the window, staring at the waves in the bay, Megan wondered whether she had been right to close him down. Perhaps she should have encouraged him to talk through his warped but meticulously thought-through solution to their predicament, let him express and expunge his burden of guilt. Had she added to his distress in the last few months of his life by dismissing out of hand his version of saving her? Had it been her fault that he had confided more in Lisa than he had in her? Had she left him no choice? Very probably. She should at least have listened. Heard him out. Shouldn’t she?

And there had been another consequence of her refusal to listen.

Her deafness had left her ignorant, weakened, ill prepared for what was happening now.

She was cornered. Trapped by the very secret that was supposed to be her salvation.

Was it time to retreat or come out fighting?

She had no idea.

It took Megan a few moments to register that the burring noise she could hear was her phone. Someone actually wanted to talk to her.

‘Hello.’

‘Hello.’

‘Are you all right?’

‘No.’ It was such a relief to be honest.

‘Do you want me to come to the house?’

‘Can you?’

‘Yes. When?’

‘Could you come now?’

‘If you want me to.’

‘I do.’

‘Okay. I will.’

‘Thank you.’

Chapter 43

THEY WERE back together, sitting around the dining-room table, waiting for their mother, none of them looking good. The mood was simultaneously tense and flat. Liv was familiar with the atmosphere. She’d walked into enough family rooms in hospitals to update relatives on the fate of their loved ones to recognise exhausted expectation when she saw it. The difference was that this time she was one of the relatives.

Noah and Chloe started talking about some film they’d both seen. Liv tuned them out.

The cliché would have it that knowledge was power, but to Liv it felt more like pressure. The house in Darlington was a bomb ticking away quietly but insistently beneath their feet, and only she could hear it. Should she detonate it? She didn’t know. She tilted her head left to right, trying to loosen the tightness