Chapter Seventy-Seven

…the ones they avoided talking about.

Elizabeth

10:59 AM

Spittles of rain streaked the glass. Elizabeth's breath fogged against the window of the therapy room and added to the haze of condensation that already misted over the scene of the car park. Outside, Will's steel blue hatchback had pulled into one of the bays at the far end—nearest the track that wound through the slender white pillars of the paper birches—and as the door clunked shut and the sound echoed up into the air, the crows that had been roosting in the bare boughs of the black walnut tree launched themselves into flight with a stream of throaty caw, caw, caws that jarred against the soft scrunch of Will's footsteps.

Elizabeth turned her back on the window, and as she ambled past the armchair where Dr Sherman sat (possibly steeling herself for the session ahead—if she wasn't, she probably ought to be) and towards the leather couch, she peeled off her chunky-knit cardigan. The radiators churned out their unwavering heat, and it left the air dense and fuggy. A slight sweat tingled on her skin. Though, of course, that had nothing at all to do with the jangle of nerves that made her insides feel like red Play-Doh being squeezed through that 'Fun Factory' Jason had loved as a kid. After all, Will had agreed to come back, hadn't he? That had to be a good sign.

She chucked the cardigan over the arm of the couch, and then sank down onto the cushion. It slumped around her. She waited in silence. Licks of steam wreathed up from the mug of coffee that sat atop the glass table, and thinned into the air. It must have been her third or fourth cup of the morning, (the refill at breakfast didn't count), and with her blood caffeine level at around fifty-three per cent, the aroma had turned from a welcome warmth to just plain nauseating. Next to the mug, the last ginger snap sat on a folded up wad of blue-green paper towel. The sugar crystals that encrusted its golden surface glistened beneath the lights.

At the clunk and swoosh of the door, the thump of her heart surged to a canter. Each beat pounded against her bruised ribs. She twisted around and rose up from the seat—more out of instinct than conscious choice—and she smoothed her palms down the length of her jeans, ridding them of their ragged film of sweat.

Will stepped inside. Once again, he wore his khakis, that green-grey jacket that needed either washing or incinerating, and his black and white checked scarf. Once again, he turned and watched Amy out of the corner of one eye as she guided the door shut behind him. Once again, he faced Elizabeth and eyed her as though they were standing on the opposite sides of a chasm. But this time, from the way his presence bristled, Elizabeth got the sense that there would be no hug.

Her fingers fumbled at her sides, and she offered him a tentative smile. "Hey."

"Hey." He nodded in reply. He held her eye for a moment—a blue granite stare—and then his gaze dipped away from hers and it traced the carpet ahead as he strolled towards the couch and unroped his scarf. He dumped the scarf in a snaked coil on top the arm of the couch, and then shucked off his jacket too. He gave Dr Sherman a tense smile and nod by way of greeting.

"So… Thank you for coming back." Elizabeth lowered herself onto the opposite end of the couch. She gripped her knees so as to still her hands.

"I was surprised to hear that you decided to stay." He sank down onto the cushions, raked his fingers through his rain-dewed hair, and leant back into the corner of the couch. He rested one arm along the armrest, the other along the back. "Stevie had a good birthday, by the way."

"Oh good." She fought to keep her smile in place, but it strained. She should have been there with them, rather than smuggling them a note that she must have rewritten ten or eleven times before she decided it was probably best to go with something bland and inoffensive, along with a kiss for each of them. Her gaze lowered to her knees, and she shook her head. The ends of her hair wisped around the angle of her jaw. "I wanted to be there, but I thought a lot about what you said—"

"About your obsession."

She scowled at him. "About my perfectly reasonable worry that one day something might happen to you." Then the scowl eased away, and her gaze drifted until the black walnut tree lurked at the edge of her vision. "…which might have gotten a little out of hand."

She paused for a moment, and then returned to Will and slid one hand across the cushion that stretched between them. The leather was cool and rough beneath the heel of her palm. "You're important to me. Henry and the kids are important to me. And I want to figure this out."

"There's nothing to figure out." His fingers flared atop the back of couch. "Just stop putting me first."

She retreated, and folded her arms across her chest. "It's not that simple, Will."

"Sure it is. Rather than obsessing your way to a breakdown—" He flapped one hand towards her, as though she were the epitome of a nervous wreck. "—try prioritising yourself."

"Said the narcissist."

"That's not narcissism, Lizzie. That's fitting your own oxygen mask first."

He stared at her long into the pause. Blue granite now touched with frost. It felt as though he were daring her to dispute that. She wished she could.

In the background, the patter of the rain against the glass crescendoed to a thrum. The streaks coursed down the window; they weaved in and out of one another, tributaries that coalesced and diverged like a network of blood vessels coloured by the black walnut tree that stood in the centre of the car park beyond.

"Look, if you brought me here just to argue your case as to why you think—"

She turned to him, the movement sharp. "I want to talk about Mom and Dad."

His gaze flitted over her, his lips still parted. With the flash of shock, the frost in his eyes thawed, and it left him as exposed as he had been as a boy of thirteen, before they had both learnt how to shield themselves.

He shrank back further into the corner of the couch, whilst the wall of iced granite rose up once again. "What about Mom and Dad?"

With her hands clasped atop the notebook in her lap, Dr Sherman leant forward in the armchair as though to wedge her presence between Elizabeth and Will. "Elizabeth is struggling to understand why it is that she relates to you in the way that she does—" Her hair swayed against the collar of her charcoal cardigan as she shook her head, and her hands grappled over nothing as though to emphasise the vagueness of the feeling she described. "—this feeling she has that she needs to put you first." She stilled. "So we thought it might be useful—"

Will's gaze narrowed on Elizabeth. "So you thought you'd blame Mom and Dad?"

Elizabeth's eyes bugged. "I'm not blaming Mom and Dad."

"No, just saying that they're the reason why you are the way that you are."

"What?" She drew her chin back, still hugging her chest and pressing on the bruises that billowed across her ribs. "So what happened to them has nothing at all to do with you becoming a doctor? And not just any doctor, but a trauma surgeon who deals with life-threatening injuries, like, oh I don't know, people who've been in a car crash—"

"I want to help people." His tone sharpened, and his look cut through her. "A foreign concept, I'm sure, for someone who spends half her time nuking the planet for a living and the other half ordering drone strikes."

"Okay, that is so not my job."

"And yet you do it anyway. Or maybe that's just your idea of fun."

"And now you're just deflecting because you don't want to talk about Mom and Dad." A white thread straggled across her knee. She plucked it from the denim and let it flutter to the carpet.

"That's what we do." His gaze prickled over her. "I'd say it's served us pretty well so far."

"Has it?" She looked up at him.

The words stretched and thinned into silence.

The thrumming of rain pressed in and thickened the hush between them.

"You're the one who's been going on about me needing to change. All I want is for us to talk about what happened."

"What's there to talk about?"

"Mom and Dad died, Will."

"You think I don't know that?" His brow folded into a frown. "I was there. I saw them."

"And I wasn't, and I didn't." Her voice cracked. "And I would have given anything—anything—to protect you from that." She held her hand to the side of her head. Her fingers clawed as she motioned to the whirring paths of what-ifs that, for thirty-five years, had played out on loop inside. "I've gone through a million different scenarios, a million different times, thought about how if I'd altered just one link in the chain, things could have turned out different." She thrust her hand towards him. "What if I'd decided to come with you and delayed you by a minute? What if I hadn't asked for that extra math assignment a couple of days before so I wouldn't have had an excuse to stay at home? What if I'd put an extra tub of ice cream in the cart when I went to the store with Mom?"

She let the thought hang.

Then her hand fell back to her lap, her fingers collapsed around emptiness, and the chasm in her chest yawned a little wider. It sent out the ripple of an ache that went deeper than her pulse. "We could have all sat together on the porch swing and eaten ice cream from the freezer, and you never would have gone out for milkshakes."

Will stared back at her. The same paths reflected in his eyes—the ones they avoided talking about. It felt too cruel to believe that had so much as one innocuous decision been different, it could have stopped things from aligning in the way that they did.

But that was life: a series of events, seemingly unconnected, the true interaction of which could only be appreciated through hindsight.

He lowered his gaze, and shook his head. His fingers opened and closed in a fist atop the back of the couch. "I don't know what you're looking for—"

"I'm just trying to understand—"

His gaze shot up, as did his voice. "—but talking about Mom and Dad won't help."

"You don't know that."

"This is your issue, Lizzie."

"I just want to talk."

"And I don't." His tone cut her down as sharp as a slap. "Do you honestly think I want to be reminded of that? Do you honestly think I don't think about it enough already? One minute we're driving along perfectly fine, getting the daily sermon on how 'gifted' Lizzie is—" He swept a hand towards her whilst his scowl deepened. "—the next minute the car's hurtling off the road and we're rolling upside down. Dad's dead. Mom's barely alive. And there's nothing I can do except stand by the side of the road and pray to something that doesn't even exist that someone will show up and help."

If his eyes were granite, pain was embedded in each fleck, and beneath the veins of anger, torrents of hurt swarmed.

She swallowed, her throat tight, and she fought to hold his gaze as she slid her hand towards him, as much to comfort him as to tether herself as the chasm walls groaned further and further apart. "Will… I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry." He pushed himself up from the couch so sharply that she recoiled. "Just sort yourself out." He grabbed his jacket and scarf from the armrest, and then marched towards the door.

"Hey, Will." She surged up from her seat too. Her heartbeat thundered to a gallop. "You don't get to tell me you're going to cut me out of your life and then refuse to help."

He wrenched open the door with a grating swoosh, and shot her a glare over his shoulder. "And you don't get to pull a Freud and blame everything on Mom and Dad."

Her eyes widened, and exasperation stained her tone. "I'm not blaming…"

But the door had already swung shut.

She flung a backhanded sweep in its direction. "Oh, that's it. Just walk out. Real mature, Will."

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