“I’ll sit with Dani,” Miller said.
I didn’t want to sit in the kitchen, the heart of the house, the place where we always sat. It was tarnished, for the moment, with sour words and bad memories. I walked into the living room and slumped into the corner of the sofa. I curled my legs up under me.
Miller poked around the fire, trying to reignite the embers. He threw on some kindling wood and gently blew until flames started to flicker. I watched as he placed some logs on top before he stood and sat beside me.
“I’m not going to ask you what happened, but Christian told me some. I guess he needed to get it all out. I called him out on where he delivered the news, though. I’m not going to apologise for that,” he said.
“I imagine it was coincidence we ended up at the cemetery.”
“All the same, you should have been told here, in the safety of your own home.”
If anyone else had criticised Chris, I would have been bristling, but I wasn’t. I didn’t agree with what Miller had said, but I was thankful that he was thinking of me. I doubted any time would have been a good time to hear that news, and no place would have been more of a comfort than another.
“I made a mess of the grave, didn’t I?” I said quietly.
“I can fix that tomorrow for you.”
“I’d appreciate that. I don’t want to go there. I don’t want Hannah to be there with him, either.”
“I don't think there’s much we can do about that. Maybe in time you’ll feel differently.”
“Time. That word meant something a little while ago. I thought I was finally coming to terms with what had happened to them, and now? All the pain, and more, is back.”
“It’s a different pain though, isn’t it?”
I thought for a moment. “Yes and no. I felt betrayed when he left me, when he died. I was angry with him for a long while. Angry that he’d risked his life by taking that seatbelt off. Now I’m betrayed all over again, and there’s no outlet, if you know what I mean.”
“Explain to me.”
“I can’t confront him. I can’t look into his eyes and see whether he’d tell me the truth. The worst part? I can’t ask him if he loved me, or whether he loved her more.”
Had Trey fallen out of love with me and in love with her?
“You made a baby together, perhaps that tells you something?”
“He made a baby with her!” I snapped, regretting that I had. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to snap at you.”
“Don’t apologise. What I mean is, if he hadn’t loved you, would he have done that?”
“I don’t know. Which one of them was a mistake? Hannah or Alistair?”
The thought that Hannah had been a mistake, an unwanted baby by him because he hadn’t loved me enough, tore through me. I wanted to double over to ease the pain that had formed in my stomach and radiated up into my chest. My heart physically hurt as it shattered inside.
Miller shuffled closer to me. He took my hand from my chest, I hadn’t realised it had been covering my heart, and he held it in his. My instinct was to pull away, it was wrong to hold another man’s hand, but I needed the comfort from him. We weren’t friends, as such, I had hoped we could be, and he had been off with me of late. But right then he was just what I needed: a stranger to listen to me, to not judge, and offer some guidance.
“What do I do, Miller? What did you do?”
“I died inside for a while. I shrivelled up, lost my masculinity because I thought I wasn’t man enough for her. I fucked around, just to show her, or maybe me, that I was desired and that she had it all wrong. I drank, I fought, I smashed things, and then I put them back together again. I spent a long time putting me back together again. And so will you.”
I snorted. “I might pass on the fucking around if that’s okay, although right now, a large glass of whisky would go down well.”
He chuckled and somehow, despite my pain, I smiled at him. It was a bittersweet smile. He rose from the sofa and crossed the room to a small dark oak sideboard that housed an array of old-fashioned, crystal cut decanters. He pulled out the silver stopper from one and sniffed.
“I think this is okay,” he said, pouring a measure into two glasses. “I don’t suppose you have ice,” he added, raising the lid of a white ceramic ice bucket decorated with flowers.
I remembered that ice bucket standing pride of place back when I was a child. It had to be over twenty years old and even then, I think it had come from a charity shop. It certainly looked like something that would have graced a 1970’s living room.
“I’ll fetch some,” I said, starting to uncurl my legs.
“Stay there, I can find the freezer.”
I heard Miller mumble to Lucy before returning with four ice cubes in his hand; the water had started to drip through his fingers. He placed two in each glass and then carried them back to the sofa.
“Whisky, no idea how old it is. We might end up with a stinking headache, and it won’t be a hangover, more that it’s off, but…” He handed me a glass.
The liquid burned not just my lips and mouth, but my throat and all the way down to my stomach. I dreaded to think of the cauldron of acid that was bubbling away, having aged whisky in the mix.
“I want to get drunk. I haven’t gotten drunk in years,” I said, taking another sip.
“You don’t, trust me. Being drunk is not a good place to be when your head is full of shit. The shit turns into a sewer, and on top of it all still being there in the morning, you’ll feel fucking ill.”
“Then maybe just enough to numb the pain and the thoughts,” I said.
“Trouble with that is, the just enough isn’t enough the next time round. The just enough becomes two, three glasses, then half a bottle, a full bottle. Before you know it, you’re so reliant on more and more alcohol, you can’t function.”
“Is that what happened to you?”
“Yes. I lost myself in the devil that is drink for a long while.”
“But you’re drinking now, and you had a pint at the pub the other day.”
“I guess, I’m one of the lucky ones. I didn’t drink because I was addicted to the alcohol, like you; I just wanted the numbness. When that stopped working, I needed a different fix. I can have a drink now, it doesn’t make me want more.”
“What was your different fix?”
“I guess I threw myself into creating things. I brought things to life, changed people’s lives. I just worked, seven days a week. I moved back here and eventually I met someone else.”
I stared at him. He hadn’t mentioned having a partner before.
“You’re…?”
“Not now. Now, it’s just me. And we don’t need to talk about that. Tonight is about you.”
We sat for a moment in silence, with just the crackle and spit of the logs on the fire.
“I feel so lost,” I said, staring at the orange and red flames, listening to a hiss and watching a fleeting streak of blue as sap seeping from the logs caught.
“I know. And right now it won’t make any difference if I tell you that you’re not. You have a supportive family around you. You can’t get lost if you have that, and friends, because we won’t let you.”
“You’re very philosophical, aren’t you?” In fact, he was a pretty deep person overall.
He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know about that. My dad is the philosophical one.”
“Is he still local?” I asked.
“Yes, he lived at the bottom of my garden…” he chuckled as he spoke.
“I guess in a house of some kind,” I said, interrupting him.
“Yes, we built a little bungalow together, a while ago now. It was nice to work alongside him again. We’d fallen out for many years. I didn’t speak to him, or Daniel, after Pam left. Like I said, I felt betrayed by them both for a while.”
“How did your dad betray you?” I understood how he felt about Daniel, but he hadn’t mentioned his dad.
“He supported Daniel’s decision not to tell me. He could have been the mediator, it would have absolved Daniel from whatever crime it is to speak out about a confession, but he didn’t.”