And so she did, watching Bill as he worked, a sense of peace flooding through her. Life was good. Really good. She felt like she was entering a new phase now and that the darkness was behind her at last. Perhaps she’d never feel the total calm that she craved, but who did? What she was feeling right now was close enough – good enough. And perhaps some of that had come from her mother having left. She took a deep breath in, inhaling the sweet scent of the allotment, tinged with the salty air coming from the sea.
More than anything, she longed to share that moment with Luke – to reach out to him and share how she was feeling and to apologise and explain what had been going on with her mother and inside her own head. She felt he should know and yet, when she reached for her phone, she hesitated. The truth was, she felt as if she’d lost that special connection with Luke. He’d left and he’d probably written her off as some madwoman, and she really couldn’t blame him for that. She’d made his life difficult and decidedly uncomfortable and she wouldn’t be surprised if she never heard from him again.
Chapter 23
That first week home was the hardest for Luke. While he’d been staying at Lorford Castle with Orla, he’d forgotten what it was like to live on his own, but there was no escaping it now and the little home he’d shared with Helen suddenly seemed so big without her in it. He tried to love it – he tidied up, he dusted a few shelves, brought some flowers in from the garden and opened windows to inhale the summer air, but nothing could lift his mood and he felt himself slipping into a depression.
‘You’re living in a twilight time,’ one of his neighbours told him when she met him out in the lane. She was a widow, having lost her husband eight years ago. But that was different, Luke couldn’t help thinking. She was in her eighties. People were expected to die in their eighties – not their thirties. It wasn’t fair that Luke was a widower.
‘It’ll pass, as all things do,’ she’d told him. ‘The only way to get through this is to get through this.’
Her words sort of made sense, but they didn’t bring him any comfort as he crawled into bed alone each night and got up alone each morning. He truly felt as if his sadness would never lift, and it didn’t matter how hard he worked or how much he managed to cram into his waking hours because those moments of heartache would still find him.
The only way to get through this is to get through this.
The words of his neighbour seemed nothing more than a taunt.
Evenings were the worst. He could just about fill his days with his work and household chores, but the long, lonely evenings stretched out emptily and he felt unable to reach out to anybody then, because people had their own lives, didn’t they, with their own families and things to do. And so he was left to wander around the empty rooms of his home, his mind filled with the dark thoughts of depression.
The only time he didn’t think of Helen was when he was thinking of Orla. One evening, after a particularly dusty and dirty day at work, Luke showered, ate a piece of toast because he just couldn’t be bothered to make anything else and sat on the sofa with his phone. He was thinking of Orla again, wondering how she was getting on and hoping she was doing okay, or at least doing better than him, which wouldn’t be hard.
He visited Galleria, quickly finding her Beautifully Broken account and sighing when he saw that she hadn’t updated her feed for several days. The last post, in fact, had been a couple of days before Brandon had shown himself. Luke wondered whether to message her via the site. He so desperately wanted to know how she was. Was her mother still there, he wondered? Was Orla still imprisoned in her bedroom by her fears? And, if she was, who was taking care of One Ear? He had to admit to being disappointed that she hadn’t reached out to him, but perhaps she really hadn’t wanted him there after the trouble with Brandon. It had all stemmed from his uncovering that Wild Man carving, hadn’t it? He really couldn’t blame her if she’d wanted rid of him.
He looked through the last few photos she’d posted, smiling as he recognised some of the china, remembering when one of the pieces had arrived and he’d helped her unpack it. Now, it was there for the whole world to admire.
While he was on the site, he found himself gravitating towards Helen’s account at Trees and Dreams. Of course, it was the same as the last time he’d visited it, with that final photo of the oak tree at the top of the feed. That bloody oak tree. He couldn’t help but hate that tree now. It had been one of the last things Helen had ever seen. She’d seen hundreds, if not thousands, of things during her last day on Earth and all after her last sight of him. The thought nearly drove him crazy. All those moments she’d had away from him, wasting time on trains and in offices and boardrooms. What had they been thinking of? But that was modern life, wasn’t it? One couldn’t exist on love alone. One couldn’t spend every waking hour with the person you loved. It would be totally unrealistic to think that you could.
He switched his phone off, got up from the sofa and flung his plate in the kitchen sink and went to bed. It was half past nine.
Things got easier after those first few days
