‘Quin. I’m sorry, I don’t know what …’
I’d hurt him terribly. I’d even managed to shock myself.
And we’d been doing so well.
We left for the airport, checked in, endured security, had a seventy-minute wait in the lounge and got on the plane, all without exchanging a word.
About two hours into the flight, Quin suddenly uttered, ‘I don’t know why you thought I was proposing.’
‘I don’t either.’ I genuinely hadn’t a clue. But what was clear was that, in that moment, the thought of a long-term commitment to him had been terrifying. So much so, I hadn’t been able to hide it.
‘If it had ever been on the cards,’ he said, ‘not that it was, you have my word that now it never will.’
‘Quin, I’m so sorry for hurting you. I don’t know what –’
‘I need you to stay at your own place tonight.’
‘Quin.’
‘I’ll drop you at mine,’ he said. ‘Your car is there.’
‘Quin –’
‘I don’t want to talk to you.’
I bit my lip and stayed silent. By now I thought I understood where my wild overreaction had originated. Quin and I had had a tense few days. He’d resented the soul-searching I’d been doing about my past, about Luke.
And I’d resented him for resenting it.
Our glamorous weekend had done heroic work trying to conceal the strain, but our mutual grievances had kept breaking the surface.
At Dublin Airport, we got into his jeep and drove, in silence. When we reached his house, he yanked my carry-on from the boot and clattered it to the ground. With an angry beep, he locked his car, then rattled his front door open and slammed it shut behind him – leaving me outside in the cool night.
Feeling sad and foolish, I hung around, hoping he’d return. I watched the lights go on inside his house, then watched them all go out again. When the last one disappeared, I had no choice but to go home, already worried about what tomorrow would bring.
Whatever it was, I sensed it was going to be bad.
73
And sure enough, at 6 a.m., when I jolted awake into heart-pounding anxiety, the truth finally caught up with me and landed intact: Luke had left me because I’d started using drugs again. Abusing. I’d plunged right back into addiction and become totally unreachable.
There was no more uncertainty, no more flip-flopping. The knowledge snapped into place, then clicked, turning on lights, flick, flick, flick, illuminating everything with a grand sweep.
Nothing had changed but everything was different.
The reality was there, hard and clear: as soon as I’d seen there was a chance of getting sleepers from Carlotta, I’d relapsed into addictive thinking, then addictive behaviour. In so deep I hadn’t even known I was in trouble.
No wonder he had left.
Not because he blamed me for Yara. Not because he’d stopped loving me. But because I was, once more, an active addict.
Now that I knew, it was laughably obvious – and yet, the shock was enormous.
What also landed was the understanding that, in a way, I’d always known I’d relapsed. It was as if, when I’d started abusing drugs again, a part of me had sliced itself off from the main track and run on a parallel path. I had worked very hard to ignore that phantom self but now and again, I’d catch a glimpse of it – a glimpse of me – almost keeping pace.
Now that I knew, it was hard to believe how I’d managed to blind myself.
But that was addiction, that was denial. There was nothing special about me. Day in, day out, I saw how hard addicts worked to hide their shame-filled behaviour from themselves. When they finally ran out of road and went careering smack-bang into the truth, it wasn’t that they remembered things they’d conveniently forgotten. They’d always known the facts, but some shift happened which recontextualized them.
I was no different.
I called Nola, who sounded as if she’d been expecting to hear from me. She said, ‘Come over when you finish for the day.’
Then I rang Quin but it went straight to message. I asked him to call me, then went to work – where I had to listen to Bronte describe my own delusions, almost word for word.
‘I thought it was fine to take the tablets,’ Bronte had said. ‘Because a doctor had prescribed them.’
‘But,’ I said, going through the motions as best I could, ‘as soon as you started, the craving for more and stronger would kick in?’
‘It did. I admit it.’
‘You had other options? You knew you had? And you still went for the dangerous one?’