Page 98 of One Last Thing
I give a shrug. ‘I don’t know. I think so. But he could never forgive Mathieu or himself for what it did to our family. I don’t think he could have loved him then.’
With a sniff, Nico nods slowly. ‘Why did Henry bring you backherefor this?’
I allow a weak laugh. ‘I’ve been asking myself that question since the moment Alan told me his final wishes. I still don’t know. Maybe he wanted Megan to find out, maybe he just liked the idea of coming back here one more time. I don’t know.’
‘It’s sad that he hid this all his life,’ Nico remarks.
‘I wish things could have been different, but it was his story to tell, Nico, not mine. When you speak to Megan, please emphasise that, although this seems like a big revelationfor her, it doesn’t change the most important things,’ I say, reaching out again to grip his arm. ‘It doesn’t change that he loved his daughter and would have done anything for her. And it doesn’t change that I loved him so very much for exactly who he was.’
Placing his hand over mine, he sighs. ‘I think that’s the saddest thing of all.’
‘That I loved him anyway?’
‘That you got the chance to and Megan didn’t,’ he explains. ‘She did not get the chance to love her father for exactly who he was.’
I carefully slide my hand out from under his, feeling a weight on my heart that grows too heavy to bear. Tears are streaming down my cheeks and I find myself gripping to the arms of the chair as though at any moment I might be dragged into a heap on the floor.
‘I’m going to go get some food for her,’ Nico says eventually, standing up.
‘She’s not scattering the ashes today?’ I croak, looking up at him.
He shakes his head.
‘Nico, my flight is booked for tomorrow morning. I’d like to say goodbye to Megan before I go, but I understand if she doesn’t want to see me.’ Forcing myself to stand up, I retrieve a tissue from my bag, dabbing my cheeks, before lifting my chin in an attempt at retaining some kind of dignity despite my shattered heart and tear-stained skin. ‘Thank you for everything, Nico. I appreciate what you’ve done for us and Henry would, too.’
‘I told Alan that you carried out all of Henry’s wishes,’ he tells me. ‘So, the Collioure house is yours.’
‘Oh, Nico, the house was never mine.’
I reach into my bag and pull out the box of ashes and the letter from Henry that Nico had given me on our first full day here when this obscure but fabulous journey began. I hold them both out to him and he takes them.
‘Here, please, give these to Megan.’ I inhale deeply and manage to smile at him. ‘I’m so glad she found her way back to you. Au revoir, my darling.’
I’ve already turned away and begun to walk back up the stairs when I hear him say goodbye in return. When I get to my room, I find enough strength to pack my bags and set an alarm before I collapse on the sheets, cheeks damp from crying, and fall asleep for what I hope to be the final time in Room Seventeen of Château du Chèvrefeuille.
35
MEGAN
It’s not fair that someone’s secrets come out after they’ve died because you can’t yell at them. Not that my dad was ever a good person to yell at, he was much too dignified. It would be like yelling at an owl: pointless and the only one left feeling stupid is you. But still, if he were here, I’d yell at him anyway. I’d shout at him for lying to me and for making me feel so stupid when I loved him so much and I’d demand to know why he wouldn’t trust me with this information, why he would keep a part of him hidden from me, an important part of him. My head hurts. It throbs from anger and hurt and lack of sleep and the pure torment of missing someone who I’m not sure I ever really knew.
Nico held me the night of the fireworks like he’d never let me go.
That’s one good thing that’s come out of this. I know that I’m making the right decision to do everything in my power to turn this whirlwind romance into a real relationship, if Nico will let me. I think he will. He has seen me at my absolute worst, having guided me back to the chateau that night and steered me into the private rooms that he occupies on the second floor and then witnessed me rant and sob and collapse onto his floor, hugging my knees to my chest, curled up as small as possible in the hope I’d disappear and this pain I was feeling would disappear with me. And thenhe came over and sat down beside me on the floor, pulled me into him and held me. He didn’t say anything, he just held me close and kissed my head and somewhere inside of me a tiny glimmer of hope encouraged me to not give up on myself or this shitty world quite yet because he was in it.
I didn’t get much sleep that night because my brain wouldn’t shut down. There were too many questions and too much anger swirling around in it to allow it to rest. Dad cheated on Mum.Hecheated onher. When she left us, I hated her for so many reasons and when she got in a new relationship real fast and then married the next guy, I decided that it was highly likely she’d had an affair at some point in her married life with Dad. It made sense. Clearly, she didn’t love him because she’d walked out on him. She’d given up without a fight. You don’t do that if you love someone, I figured. So, if the love had already waned by then, then chances are, in the past, a flirtation might have been acted upon. I remember telling my teenage friends she’d probably cheated on my dad and they’d been like, ‘God, that’s so shit, your poor dad, he’s so nice,’ and I’d nodded, my stomach twisting with fury at her.
I’d made up an entire narrative and believed it forfifteenyears.
And she’d let me. He’d let me. They had both let me live a lie. Did they not care about the devastating consequences of doing so? Did they brush them off as a sacrifice they had to make to keep the truth hidden? How could the dad I knew be so willing to let someone else take the blame for what he did? I looked up to him. I wanted to be like him, as good a person as him. He comforted me when I cancelled my wedding, he listened when I talked about the heartbreak, he knew what Dominic had done. The same thing as him. Theactions of a coward, someone so afraid to break away from what they know that they willingly humiliate and betray someone they’re supposed to love, whilst convincing themselves it’s for the greater good that they keep it secret.
I didn’t want to hurt you.
It’s the classic line, isn’t it. That’s why the lie is constructed and the betrayal safeguarded, so that no one gets hurt. What a load of bullshit. The cheating is bad but the lie is worse. It’s the lie that makes you feel like a fool, even when the pain of the cheating fades.
Yes, it was a shock. When Mum told me what happened, I was, admittedly, shocked. I couldn’t put the person I knew together with this new person I was being told about, a person who had the capability of cheating on my mum and never talking about it ever again. He may have spent a lot of time and energy encouraging me to rebuild my relationship with Mum, but he never let on that there was a reason why she left us and that it washimandhisactions.
I was also shocked that he cheated on her with Mathieu. Dad never spoke about his dating life. I tried to get him excited about it, but he was reluctant to dwell on it, as though he’d resigned himself to love one person forever and that person had given up on him. I thought that person was Mum. I thought it was crushingly sad that he probably loved her so much that he’d rather stay friends with her after all she put him through than cut her out of his life and move on. I knew that he’d been on dates, had some flings, but he never told me about any of them. I will never know who he saw, whether it was women or men. He never trusted me with that information. Fuck, that hurts. It’s like a piercing stab over andoverwhen I think that he didn’t trust me to know who he really was and to love him just the same. Didhe think I would have the same opinions as his strict parents and his narrow-minded brothers? Did he think I’d think differently of him? That the truth about his feelings would jar with the person I saw him as? The only thing that jars is that he was able to lie to me for so long.
