Page 112 of If We Were Young

Another shout of laughter. Smiling up at Matthew, I pushed our small dance into a turn so I could see his brother’s laughing.

Ryan bent over double. “Oh my god. Yes! I remember! The day we lost Matthew.”

I stopped dancing to watch them and then turned to Matthew, raising my eyebrow. “They lost you? You’re kind of big to lose?”

Matthew’s face had frozen and I pinched his giant arm to get him to wake up. “Matthew. How did you get lost?”

Ryan heard me and called me over. Laughing, I worked my way out of Matthew’s hold. We weren’t dancing now anyway; we were just standing in the middle of the front room holding each other.

I smiled as I approached. “My husband passed out in a taxi on his stag do and the driver didn’t know where to take him, so he dropped him off at Kingston Police station.” I shook my head at the memory. “I don’t think I’ve ever apologised as much as I did to the officer at the front desk.”

“Oh, Matthew did worse than that.” Liam lounged back, or slumped back, getting into his tale now. “So we’d been on a massive pub crawl all afternoon. Matthew hadn’t wanted a stag do, so we said we’d just do a footie game instead. The three of us and Dad all went to the game. Dad left; we didn’t know then that he was already getting sick.”

I glanced at Matthew, only to find his gaze resting on me, but distant, like he stared through a lens of the past.

“Anyway, about four in the afternoon, we are all mashed up at O’Donnells, the Irish bar. It’s a cracking night there and we think we'll just drink our way through. It’s not a wedding unless the groom is still drunk at the altar. Then.” Liam waved his hands like he was a magician. “Poof. Matthew is gone.” He laughed loudly and Ryan snorted. “We look and we look. Finally, we have to tell Dad. He’s bloody furious we’ve lost our brother. We finally tracked him down. The stupid git had only got on the train to London. Drunk as a skunk. Do you know how we knew?”

“How?” An irrational pulse beat at the base of my neck.

“The guards were all talking about him on the station. He’d vaulted the security barriers to get to the train and hadn’t paid for a ticket.”

“London?” I turned to Matthew. “The night before your wedding?”

His shoulders sloped, his palms resting towards the sky, frozen part shrug.

“You came to London the night before your wedding? That’s a five-hour train journey each way.”

“Dad had to get the next train to find him. He was furious. Matthew had gone to see a girl, the night before his wedding.” Ryan’s skin tinged purple with laughter. “Dad only just got him back to church in time.”

“When was your wedding?” I could only focus on him. Only see the lines of his face, the mouth I’d idolised like a god. The look of sheer defeat written in his gaze.

“The tenth of August.”

“So the ninth of August?” I whispered. It was just me and him now. The rest of the planet had erupted into a burning inferno. I knew that date.

“That’s the night I had my first date with Paul. We went to…”

“The Anglers Arms.” Matthew nodded. “I know. I stood outside and watched you.”

The bottom of my world fell away. Everything that was and is, should have been, could have been, all slipped away until I remained nothing but the rush of my blood and the boom of my heart.

“Why didn’t you come in and say something?”

“You were smiling and laughing. I knew you’d moved on; if there was anything to move on from.”

“But you were angry? You thought you’d seen me kissing someone else. I thought that was why you didn’t talk to me for fifteen years and were so rude last week when we met again?”

“Not angry enough to not want to check.”

“What were you checking, Matthew?” The tightness I’d always known crept back around my chest.

“If…”

“You came the whole way to London and stood outside the pub I was in, while I told another man about the fact you’d broken my heart.”

“I didn’t know it was your first date.”

“Oh my god.” I couldn’t get any breath into my lungs. A shuddering pressure pushed down on me.