“I’m sorry,” I say, and leave. I can’t sit there for another moment.
STRENGTH
HELEN
Penrith, United Kingdom （England and Wales）
Day 1,168
Mum!”
Oh Jesus, if Abi and Lola are fighting again, I swear to God. I’ve had a long day fixing lights, climbing up and down ladders, I do not need to mediate a teenage fight.
“If you two are at it again, you’ll be—”
“Hi, Helen,” says Sean, bold as fucking brass, sitting at our kitchen table. Not his kitchen table, our kitchen table. Mine and the girls’。
The world is going a bit fuzzy and I’m about to ask someone to open a window when black dots move in from the sides of the kitchen and then next thing I know, I’m lying on the ground with Sean and Abi peering over me.
I struggle upright, batting Sean’s hands away but gratefully accepting Abi’s kind, strong help. “Abi, go to your room, please. Make sure your sisters don’t come downstairs.” She nods and goes upstairs without a peep.
Until I know what Sean has to say for himself, I don’t want him anywhere near the girls.
“I’m back,” he says, Captain Obvious, as I collapse into a chair and hold my thumping head in my hands.
“I’d gathered.” I would motion for him to sit down but he’s already helped himself to a seat and, oh fantastic, a drink.
“It’s so—”
“Sean, what the fuck?” He blinks a few times like an owl. Did I used to find him attractive? I remember him doing the blink-y thing—it used to drive me nuts. Still does. “You waltz in here, having left to live out the rest of your ‘borrowed time’ as if no one was watching, and now you’re back just like that. What the fuck?”
Part of me is asking Sean this question and the other part of me is asking the universe. What are the chances that my pathetic husband is immune? His friend, who died in his wife’s arms, wheezing out the word “love” with his final breaths, wasn’t immune. Ann-Marie from down the road’s gorgeous wee boy, Tommy, wasn’t immune. But my husband, the deserter, is immune. And he came back.
“We thought you were dead,” I bite out, trying and failing to keep my rage out of my voice.
“I know,” he says. “I’m so sorry, it never. I just thought I would get it and—”
“You disappeared! You switched off your phone as soon as you abandoned us and we never heard anything. Then, three years later, when the sight of a man is as rare as snow in July, who turns up at our door? You! Oh, and you’d better stop balking at the word ‘abandoned’ because it’s what you fucking did.”
He sits in silence and I get a chance to look at him. He looks . . . different and the same. Bit thinner, bit grayer, bit more drawn.
“Explain yourself.”
“I thought I might get a nicer welcome than this,” he mutters.
After looking up and seeing my face, he sighs a world-weary sigh he has no right to. “Our life was so, so claustrophobic, Helen. I was bored, weren’t you bored? Working in the same boring job, doing the same boring thing for dinner every Friday. And then the Plague came and it was like this is it! Now or never! My life is going to end, how do I want to end it? I needed to live the life I always dreamed of with the time I had left.”
If I wasn’t already, now I’m certain this really is Sean. He always had the tact of a rhino. Of course, he hadn’t counted on being immune; he was bored of living as though he was about to die and so wanted to come back to his old life and apparently, that’s me and his children.