She sniffled again and wiped at her nose with the back of her sleeve. “I wish it could be that simple.”

But it wouldn’t that simple. Not to her. “It could be. It just….isn’t.”

“It’ll be okay, won’t it? I mean—like you said. We’ll just…tell ourselves it was a game.” And then she shook her head. “I’m sorry, Alex.”

“It isn’t your fault.”

“I’m sorry that I’m not brave enough,” she shrugged, “to let myself love you.”

She silently walked me to the end of the garden, hazy rain dripping down on us like an afterthought, and I felt that I might strangle at the raw pain in my throat. I managed to bid her a quiet goodbye and she looked back at me with an empty expression, drained and deflated. In her eyes there was no sense of farewell, only bitter acceptance of an unreality unwillingly surrendered. Some part of me waited for the moment she would turn around and tell me to hell with everyone else, let’s fucking do it—But she didn’t.

For the rest of the evening, I was falling in slow motion. There was a merciful dullness in my mind, one that I knew would give way to an intense pain I had never met before. A gentle calm before the storm of realization. My head was spinning, whirling, thinking and feeling almost nothing at all. I was numb. Immune to everything but the memory of the look on Connie’s face which coiled around my heart and seeped into my brain, playing over and over all through until everything else had dissolved into nothingness.

I told Claire I felt sick when I got home and she believed me, pouring me out a cup of hot soup and tucking me into bed like she did when I was little. And when she bid me goodnight and left me all alone once more, I allowed myself to cry into the pillow, heavy, muffled sobs—merely the beginning of my anguish. Merely a drop in the ocean of pain I would come to face without her. And the only sounds I heard were the words of a forgotten song by The Cure drifting from the stereo downstairs as Claire hummed along, echoing through my heart, my stomach, my bones.

Chapter 14

August—October 1995

“She doesn’t let us talk about you,” Orla told me one quiet afternoon when work was slow and the shop was empty. “Ever. If anyone mentions you, she has a shagging aneurysm.”

She was sitting on the counter, her long bare legs crossed and swinging back and forth. If Dennis had been there, he would have spent the whole afternoon yelling at the top of his voice about how unprofessional it was to have half-naked girls drinking slushies loitering around the shop, but as it was I had barely seen our manager since June, and Lee, my supervisor, was generally too stoned to care. For all intents and purposes Orla might as well have taken up a job in Blockbusters that summer, much as she didn’t exactly need one. She was there for almost every single one of my shifts in her low-waisted shorts and skimpy crop tops with a cherry slushie in hand. When she grew bored of lounging on the countertop watching me shuffle through video boxes, she took to sorting out the shelves alphabetically first, and then according to genre, and then according to director.