He looks around unsteadily.
“She’s over there,” says Rachel, as if she’s cajoling one child to go and play with another.
He lurches off and Rachel lets out the breath she was holding in.
“What the hell was that about?” she says, turning to Noah.
He shakes his head. “Your husband can be such a prize tosser when he wants to be.”
“Is this over what happened earlier?” she asks, not knowing which event she’s referring to. Selfishly, she hopes it’s the one in the sea rather than the conversation he’d probably overheard her and Jack having in their bedroom.
“He’s still maintaining that he told me not to go toward the waves.”
“O-kay,” says Rachel carefully, not wanting to stoke this unpredictable situation any further.
“And I know I’ve had a bump to the head, but I clearly heard him telling me to follow him.”
“But it must have been incredibly noisy out there,” says Rachel, trying to stay on neutral ground.
“I know what I heard,” says Noah. “He said, ‘Come on, this way.’”
“But you must have known it looked dangerous,” says Rachel. “If Jack told you to put your head in an oven, you wouldn’t do it, would you?” Rachel attempts to laugh.
“No, but I’d lost sight of Will, and in the absence of him telling me what I should be doing, Jack seemed the next safe bet.”
“But maybe it was just a miscommunication,” says Rachel. “Maybe he didn’t make himself clear and you didn’t hear him correctly. I’m sure he wouldn’t have taken you out there intentionally.”
Noah goes to counter the argument, but seems to think better of it. Instead, he looks at her with soft eyes and smiles. “I hope you’re right,” he says.
In that moment, it’s as if a time machine has picked them both up and dropped them into 2001.
Rachel can see him at the airport, standing under the departures board, begging her to go on the year-long trip they’d planned so meticulously.
“What if this is our only chance?” he’d said.
“But what if I came with you and forever regretted not staying with Jack?” she’d said.
He’d kissed her in answer and for those few minutes she’d wondered how she could even question it.
“I’ll wait for you,” he said, when they eventually came up for air.
“If we’re meant to be, we’ll find a way.”
“I hope you’re right,” he’d said.
By the time she saw him again, she was married with a baby, and she’s spent the past twenty years convinced she’d done the right thing. Except now, with him looking at her as if he’s trying to read her mind, she wonders if she made the wrong decision after all.
She shakes herself down as the unfamiliar, and wholly unwelcome, thoughts wrap themselves around her psyche. She tells herself that this is merely a knee-jerk reaction to seeing Noah unconscious on the beach today. That it’s natural to feel panicked and scared when faced with the prospect of losing the best friend she’s ever had. All those feelings are perfectly understandable. But what she hadn’t bargained for was the acute sense of grief she’d felt on realizing that they might never get their chance.
“Could I get a gin and bitter lemon, please?” says an old woman coming up beside Rachel and breaking the spell she’s been momentarily under.
Rachel smiles warmly and the woman smiles back, her eyes shining. “What a lovely do,” she says.
“Isn’t it?” says Rachel. “If this is just the warm-up, I can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings.”
The woman nods in agreement. “I’m Ali’s grandmother,” she says. “Are you friends of hers?”
“Well, yes, we are,” says Rachel, nodding. “But we’re more from Will’s side.”
“He seems a lovely boy,” says the woman.
“Oh, he is,” says Rachel. “She’s got a good one there.”
“He reminds me of my boy, looks-wise—when he was younger, of course.” She laughs ruefully. “I call him my boy, but he’s almost sixty. How on earth I could possibly have a sixty-year-old son, I don’t know.”
Rachel looks around the room of forty or so people, most of whom are now milling about, or have swapped seats, leaving glaring gaps in the carefully thought-out table plan.
“Is he here?” asks Rachel, looking for who she assumes is Maria’s brother.