The One Day You Were My Husband (28)

“For me, too,” he said quietly. “But I also think this is what happens. People meet. They like each other. And it works out.”

I nodded, hoping he was right.

“I’m going to get those two bottles of Pucko out of the fridge again,” Johan said. “It’s time. And then some beers. Do you like beer? I have other drinks too.”

“I love beer. But I’m very happy with Pucko for now.”

We drank the cold Pucko, which really was good, and then opened beers. We sat on his sofa and listened to a piano duet between a child and her father through the thin walls of Johan’s flat. He made me walk him through an appendicectomy, then asked how I dealt with the stress of opening up a human body, especially in emergency conditions.

“It’s one of the only times I feel entirely calm, actually,” I said after a pause. “I wish I could give you a dramatic, Grey’s Anatomy kind of an answer. But it really is my happy place.”

“That’s unimaginable.”

“I get that. But I find it hard to imagine how anyone could be ten meters underwater with a tank on their back and not have a panic attack on the seafloor.”

Johan smiled at me. “Sure you could. If you can stand there and make on-the-spot decisions about a dying human, you’re made of tough stuff.”

I thought about this for a while. “I think I’ve just…I don’t know. Kind of learned to be calm in a storm. Our household often operated in a state of emergency when I was young. My sister says it’s why I’m drawn to trauma medicine.”

I pulled Johan’s dressing gown around me. “But also, my work’s the only thing in my life I’ve been formally trained to do. When I’m doing it, I’m calm. Nothing else is happening in my head.”

“You’re not thinking about what’s for lunch? Or how much you hate your boss?”

“I’m never thinking about what’s for lunch.”

“Really?” He looked genuinely horrified. “Never?”

“I’m sorry.”

Johan leaned in and kissed me. “You get more intriguing every minute,” he said. Then he got up. “I’m going to shower.”

I gave in and sent a message to Dell, telling her where I was. I couldn’t resist any longer. Outside, the sky was darkening for the second time since I’d arrived here and I lit the lamps in Johan’s living room. I took a long look at my face and then started laughing for no reason.

My phone pinged with messages of excited expletives from Dell (eighteen of them). Mum texted, in the middle of Dell’s stream, to say she hadn’t got me a present but that she’d buy me a birthday dinner some time soon. She was busy organizing a sit-in at Whitehall.

Then Maya called. Maya, with her impeccable timing, called to sing “Happy Birthday” and then to tell me she was moving to America with Eagle.

“I just need to do this,” was how she explained it. My baby sister. I was sitting on the edge of Johan’s bed when she told me. “The place Eagle grew up is the most peaceful place on earth, Carrie, and that’s what my body needs right now. I’m stepping out of the rat race for real this time. I have to.”

Johan had come in halfway through the call. He could probably hear what my sister was saying—she was not a woman to talk quietly—but perhaps he could just sense something was happening. Either way, I felt a hand on my shoulder suddenly. A warm hand, rubbing gently.

Maya was too high on her decision, and maybe too anxious about my reaction, to spot that there was something different in me, too. We had a brief conversation about the logistics of her move to Colorado but agreed to talk about it properly in a couple of days, when we were due to meet.

“I know this is a bit of a bomb,” she said before ringing off. “And I’m sorry. But I’m so happy, Carrie—I’m just so happy. This all feels so right.”

It briefly felt uncomfortable, crying in front of Johan, a man I’d spent twenty-eight hours with, but once I started, I couldn’t stop.

I talked about Maya and my family until it felt less painful. And then I stopped, frightened I’d gone too far.

But: “Thank you,” he said, after a long silence. He was staring out of the window, those eyes narrowed. “Thank you for telling me all of that.”

His gaze returned to mine; he ran his hands along my shoulders. Even now, they brought a current. “Your family sound like fucking lunatics,” was what he said, when he spoke again. He was laughing. “I think that’s what you’re trying to tell me here? I mean, I hope so. If not I’ll have spent four months dreaming of you only to fuck it up on day two.”

I was laughing, too. “No, they are lunatics. The real deal. And I’m probably no better.”

“Happy to risk that.” He kissed my right shoulder, lingering on the bony cape of my acromioclavicular joint, and I laughed even harder because to him it was just a sexy shoulder, not an AC joint, and here, in his flat, I could see very clearly that I was indeed a lunatic, a very different type of creature to this beautiful man.

He made food, something very good involving tiny potatoes, and we ate with the balcony door open. The air rolled in, cool and silky; I heard an air ambulance come in to land at work, then a donkey braying in its paddock at the city farm. The sky had formed in shelves of deep charcoal and indigo, dissected by the lights of landing planes.