Callum knocked on Ally’s front door with more confidence than he actually felt. The longer he stood there, the more he felt the weight of what had happened pushing down on him. When Maggie answered the door, she ushered him in with a wave of her hand, aware he was coming. She reached up to give him a quick hug, anger and disappointment forgotten now.
“Good luck,” she whispered.
He nodded, squeezing her tightly for a moment before releasing her. She picked up her handbag from next to the hall table and made a hasty exit, closing the front door quietly behind her. Drawing a steadying breath, he walked into the living room. Ally sat on the couch, the remote control in her lap. He glanced at the TV in the corner but it wasn’t on.
“Hey.”
She looked up, and there was a vulnerability in her expression that he had not seen for a very long time. The fa?ade that she usually wore – the bravado, the confidence – had been stripped away. He was partly responsible for that and the realisation sat like a heavy weight on his heart.
“We need to talk,” he said gently.
Reluctantly, she nodded. He made his way over to the armchair opposite her, perching on its edge. She seemed smaller somehow, and so much older than her years. A stranger would have taken one look at her and identified that she was hurting, and he was hardly a stranger.
“I’m not sure where to start,” he said, clasping his hands tightly together and squeezing.
“What happened that night? All of it this time. I want to know everything.”
Memories overwhelmed him, crawling over him and pulling him under again. He could almost feel the chill in the air as it was on that night, bringing with it the sense of panic and fear.
“After the car ended up against the tree, Jack and I climbed out,” he began uncertainly. “You were still unconscious and hanging in your seat and we thought you’d be safer there for the moment. I went to try and find the car that hit us, thinking that maybe they could give us a hand. Jack stayed with you. When I got back, he was sitting on the grass and you were lying on top of him,” he said quietly, a shudder of recognition running through him. “There was a really strong smell of gas in the air and he said he thought the car was gonna go up with you inside it, so he had to get you out of there. That’s it.”
It felt weird, talking about her like this. It was as if she were two different people. One Ally was hanging unconscious in the car, the other one was sitting right in front of him, staring at him with hollow eyes and zero recognition.
“Why didn’t you tell me any of that before?”
“Because I thought you had enough to deal with. It didn’t make sense to lay any of this on you then.”
“You could’ve told me later – you should’ve told me later.”
“It didn’t feel like it was the right thing to do then. I was wrong, and I know that now. I’m sorry.”
Devastation shone out of her.
“What would you have done, if I’d told you this back then?” he tried, throwing a safety rope, trying to ease himself back to her, to close this yawning chasm of distrust that had opened up between them.
Instead, she threw the rope back at him, shrugging half-heartedly. “I don’t know, but at least I would have known the truth.”
She was right. His high-handed attitude of ‘it’s not my place to tell her’ now seemed self-serving at best.
“He thinks it was his fault,” she said flatly. “That’s why he left.”
He nodded, feeling sick to his stomach.
“And you knew this.”
Reason flew out the window. He wished he could have known then the pain he would cause her now, by not telling her. He would have sucked it up and told her the truth then, and maybe she would be stronger for it.
“By the time I realised he wasn’t coming back, it was too late – too much time had passed. I thought that telling you then would just make things worse.”
She hung her head and he was grateful for the reprieve, as cowardly as he knew that was.
“You should be talking to Jack about this, not me. He was there with you the whole time.”
She shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know what to say to him.”
“He was in an impossible situation. He had a split second to make a decision and he made the best one he could. I would’ve done exactly the same thing, and so would you have, if the situation had been reversed.”
His words hung in the air between them and he waited anxiously, his hand flexing nervously around his closed fist.
“I don’t blame him,” she murmured finally, looking up. “But it doesn’t seem to matter either way because he blames himself – he said so that day at the hospital.”
“It’s tearing him apart.”
“I know, and there’s nothing I can do about that.”
Her gaze settled somewhere between the two of them, seeing things he couldn’t.
“You could talk to him, tell him that?”
“What if it doesn’t make any difference? What if he can’t let it go?” She fixed him with a heartbreaking stare. “I can’t lose him again, but if he can’t let it go, I can’t be around him. I don’t want to be like some kind of trigger for this stuff he carries around inside of him.”
Callum stood up and walked over to sit beside her on the couch. He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close. “You need to talk to him.”