I replayed the words over and over again before I spoke.
Love. That’s what this was. How had I not realised it yet? I’d been too busy enjoying it to step apart from it and identify it, but now that she’d said it, it made perfect sense.
‘I think I’m falling in love with you too,’ I whispered, and Molly gasped.
‘You did not just say that!’
‘You said it first,’ I protested, confused by her shock.
‘God, Leo! I’ve been known to say it to the clerk at the bakery for giving me a cupcake! I mean it, of course, but I just didn’t expect you to say it back. I figured I’d be hanging on for years and years, hoping you were thinking it, never really being sure…’
I laughed and shook my head at her. ‘Well, this whole night hasn’t been a bust, then.’
We kissed again, slowly, savouring the moment. Love. I kept saying the word over and over again in my head, marvelling at it. This is love. I love her. I am in love with her. I wasn’t sure where it would lead us but she mattered to me, and I mattered to her. It was beautifully simple, and simply profound.
After a while, I broke the kiss to gaze into her eyes.
‘Are you going to have a job to go back to on Monday, Molly?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, and then she shuddered. ‘God, Leo! I don’t even know if Dad will forgive me. We embarrassed him and Dad is all about saving face.’
‘It will be okay,’ I promised her. ‘We’ll figure it out together, whatever happens.’
19
Molly – August 2015
I am fragile after my breakdown at the terrace. I am clingy with Leo too, and although he doesn’t seem to mind, I’m embarrassed about how reluctant I am to let him out of my sight. We stay at the terrace together for hours, and even when I see him tiring, I ignore his hints about heading back to the facility. Instead, I order a meal to be delivered from Totally Thai and we sit at the new dining table to eat. Leo asks me questions about our life together. They’re innocent things – carefully selected discussion items, I suspect, because he stays entirely away from the issue of his travel or the periods of our marriage we have spent apart.
We talk about the easy moments and I try to frame my answers about things that should feel familiar. I remind him about how he always insists on taking the left side of the bed, and how he was adamant when we met that it was just as easy for me to put the toilet seat down before I used it as it was for him to put it down after he’d finished with it. He laughs when I tell him how I’d go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, forget that he’d been there and fall into the bowl. I thump him for laughing.
He asks me about our best moments together, and I tell him about the quiet ones. Those small moments really are my favourite memories of us. It was Leo doing the dishes in the early days so I wouldn’t complain about the dishwasher, and me being so overwhelmed with love for him that I’d come up behind him and wrap my arms around his waist just to hold him.
It was Leo recording The Bachelor for me when I was stuck at the office one night, even though he hated the show and teased me mercilessly for watching it.
It was the mornings when we woke beside one another and the first communication that we had of the day was just a contented smile.
It was Leo kissing me in public, which he always liked to do – he was just so proud to be with me, and that made me feel proud too.
It was the way he’d stand in front of me and smile, and run his hands down over the back of my hair and then cup my shoulders to gently hold me in place, as if he wanted to show his affection for me from head to toe.
That was who we were before we broke. And just like the previous day at Circular Quay, reliving those moments with him is both unbearably painful and a precious gift. I want to keep talking about these light-hearted things all night, and Leo is treating me so tenderly after my tears earlier in the day that I have a feeling he’d let me. I battle an irrational urge to beg him to stay with me. I don’t ask, but I want to.
Eventually I broach the subject of his return to the clinic and he calls for the van.
‘Please let me go with you,’ I say for the fourth or fifth time when the van arrives at the gate, and Leo smiles sadly at me and shakes his head.
‘Molly, you are absolutely exhausted. You are going to take yourself up to bed and get a proper night’s sleep. Promise me.’ I am still holding his hand tightly within mine and he brings my wrist to his lips and kisses it gently. ‘Good night, Molly.’