The woman asks me something in French that I don’t understand, but I pick up the words “partner” and “restaurant.” Then she pauses, and I hear her shoes scuff on the tiles, the locked door creaking ever so slightly as if she’s moved closer to press an ear to it. “Should I fetch someone? Are you okay in there?” She sounds young. Calmly concerned. One of life’s helpers, probably, like Marie. Marie is always the person who stops to help the stumbling street-drunk most would be too wary to approach, talking in calm, warm tones, with no fear, no “this person could have a goddamn knife, and I would very much like to live until at least pension age, thank you” running through her wholly good brain. It’s no wonder, really, is it? No wonder he’s marrying her.
“Hello?” she says again.
“Oh. Oh no, I’m fine,” I reply, my voice tight and high-pitched. “Nothing to worry about. I’m okay. Merci. Merci beaucoup.”
She hesitates. “You are sure?”
“Yes. But thank you. Very much.”
She says something else I don’t catch, then I hear the squeak of a hinge, and the door banging softly under the romantic notes of classical music, which floats from the bathroom’s speaker. I flush and get to my feet slowly, my knees tingling with the blood that trickles back in, the ends of a loose curl at my chin, damp. I can’t believe I was sick. So suddenly. So forcefully. Just like they do on Emmerdale, throwing themselves over to the kitchen sink after shocking news, and staring down into the plughole for a moment afterward. How dramatic, how over the top and unlike real life, I’d think now, if this were a character on a soap. But it seems I’ve just made it almost thirty years without feeling gut-punched enough.
I pull out my phone, unlock it, and find our window in WhatsApp. An instinct my fingers obey before my brain can intervene. A habit. My first port of call, always. Lucas Moreau, last online at 6:57 p.m. Offline. Of course he’s offline. He’s sitting on the other side of the bathroom door, on the fairy-lit, beachside veranda, opposite an empty chair and a half-eaten bowl of garlic mussels, waiting for me. I stare at our last messages, just seven hours ago.
Me:
There is a man sitting next to me on the ferry who is eating squid from a freezer bag. WTF???? HELP ME!
Lucas:
Hahaha, seriously?
Me:
I’m gonna pass out.
Lucas:
I’ll be waiting at the other end with smelling salts. You can do this Emmie Blue! You are made of strong stuff.
* * *
He always says that. It’s Lucas’s answer to so many of my doubts, my worries. When I was seventeen and alone for Christmas and I called him from the landline in my tiny flat, praying he’d pick up just so I could hear someone’s voice, those were the words he’d spoken through the line. When I left Ramsgate and moved two towns over to escape every whisper, every nudge and stare in college corridors. Four years ago, when my ex, Adam, left me as well as the little flat we’d started renting. The last time he’d said it—the squid-in-freezer-bag moment aside—was almost eighteen months ago, when I moved the contents of that little flat I’d tried so hard to hold on to, into one small, roasting-hot-in-all-weathers double room, with a slightly grumpy, reclusive landlady downstairs. “You can get through this,” he’d said from his bed to mine, via FaceTime. “You are made of strong stuff, Emmie Blue. Remember it.” I wonder what he’d say now, if it weren’t him that had caused me to flee to a toilet cubicle, mid–main course. He’d laugh, probably, say, “Christ, Em, how did that come about?” Then, “But listen, the joke’s on him, you know. If he can’t see how brilliant you are…”
I slide my phone back into my bag, wash my hands with plenty of soap that smells like fabric softener, and straighten in front of the stretch of mirrors. You’d never know. I look nothing like I feel—nauseous and shaky. Heartbroken. I appear as preened and as glowing as when I’d left Lucas’s parents’ house two hours ago, bar a smudge of mascara at the corner of my eye that I dab away. Good. He can’t know. Especially not now.
I swing open the bathroom door, stopping for a second to let two smiling, perfumed women pass me to the inside, and walk—slow, steady, and as tall as I can pull myself. Low, chattering voices swarm to mix with the clinking of glasses, the scrapes of cutlery on plates, and the lost notes of too-quiet music. The air is thick as it always is at Le Rivage, with the smell of garlic and lemons and the salt of the sea from outside. This is one of my favorite places. Has always been. Memories are ingrained in the walls here, in the wood of the planks of the decking. So many endless summer days and aimless beach walks over the last thirteen years have ended here. Those “Dream House Drives,” where we’d drive for miles, Lucas fresh out of uni, me, newly permanent at my admin temp job, slowing as we passed huge châteaus and ramshackle four-hundred-year-old cottages, pointing out our future homes, what we’d change, what we’d keep when they were ours. Of course, every single time, almost as tradition, Lucas would get us so lost in Honfleur, he’d have to pull over and ask farmers for directions, and it was here, among the sizzle of the grill in the open kitchen and the calm rumble of the waves, that we’d refuel. With multiple appetizers, bowls of salty, rosemary-sprinkled chips, and sometimes, nothing but beer. We talked about everything on those drives and within these walls. But mainly the future, and all the things that waited for us in the sprawling years ahead. I wonder if we ever imagined this. Not so much Lucas getting married, but… this. Did we ever think this was a possibility? Something finally coming between us and changing the landscape of everything. Of us.
I step through the open glass doors of the outside dining area and see Lucas before he sees me. It’s quieter out here, the gentle silk of the sea, the beautiful, now darkening view. That’s where Lucas’s eyes are, on the violet horizon, his elbow on the table, hand rubbing at his chin. Then he turns and sees me, his face breaking into a huge white smile. Worry. I see it, just a glimmer.
“Hey,” he says. “Are you okay?”
I stand behind my chair, gripping the curved wood of its backrest. I nod at him, plaster on a smile, but I don’t think I can bring myself to sit down at this unfinished meal, across from him. I thought I could, but I can’t. My throat is raw. My mouth tastes of bile. And looking at him, like this, here, in this restaurant, with those slate-gray eyes, those freckles I know the exact constellation of, I might burst into tears. A disaster. Unbeknownst to Lucas, this is what tonight is. An utter disaster. The opposite of everything I planned on the dreamy, packed, squid-y ferry trip over.
“Would you mind if I head back?”
He stands then, like me, a tanned hand smoothing down the front of his white shirt. “No. No, of course I don’t mind. Seriously, Em, are you all right?”
“I just feel really sick. I think I probably need to go to bed, if I’m honest. Sleep it off. Classic bloody migraine!” The chuckle I force sounds part-motorcycle.
“You haven’t had one of those in a while,” he says. “The last time was in London, at the cinema, wasn’t it? Do you have your stuff with you? Your tablets?”