Page 45 of A Sorrow of Truths
Chapter 19
Gray
Sleep has been fitful. Non-existent in reality now the cold light of day is present.
It’s seven am, and I’m here on this swing seat on the wrap around veranda, coffee and cigarette in hand, as I stare out over the land I own while the storm batters down on it. I know the feeling well lately. Rain soaks through the air and lands heavily, darkening and moving the soil as if it has a divine right to change the way it behaves. It does. Growth. Development. Progress. An evolutionary and relevant process of rebirth before the timeline comes to its inevitable conclusion and decay sets in.
It’s not something I’ve ever given time to examine in great depth before, but today, as I sit here analysing the merits of her smile and her laugh and the way she’s buried herself inside a mind that was riddled with cynicism and annoyance before her, it’s become worth the consideration of scrutiny.
“Why are you out here? You’re never out here?” Beatrice says, from behind me somewhere.
“It seemed useful.”
“To what?”
I flick the cigarette away, huffing out a breath. “Nothing. Everything.”
She chuckles lightly and comes to sit beside me, the blanket around her tucked in tight. It makes me remember my childhood home, the swing seat there that we used to play on as kids. “Cold,” she says. I grunt in response, not overly interested in words this morning with anyone that isn’t Hannah. “You’re not presumably.”
“No. I’m considering going for a ride.”
“In this weather?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
To feel her next to me again. “Don’t know. I don’t even want to be here.”
“Then why are you?”
“I need to …” My voice dies off at the thought of what I need to do. It’s not just for Hannah. It’s for the thought of more years trying to get answers out of something that has suddenly, and irreversibly, become unimportant in my life. Never really was now I’ve found something that is.
Sighing, I sip at some more coffee and keep staring at the rain thundering around me. I feel like that soil. Tipped up, raked over, and now drowning beneath a torrent of feelings that aren’t equalled because she’s in Manhattan, in my apartment, and I’m here regurgitating the problem I’m struggling to accept the answer to. I thought it would be a simpler task than it appears to be, easier to manage. It isn’t, though. It’s problematic. Difficult to acknowledge as viable. Whether that’s because of the actuality of the decision or the fact that Hannah has woken a sense of complex emotional responses within me is both questionable and debatable.
“Why can’t I wake her up?” mutters from me.
“You’re not God, Gray, no matter how much you’d like to think you are sometimes.”
Another questionable quandary given these past ten years. “And yet I’ve played God with her body without contrition or apology.”
She snorts, amused by something. “Well, you always were a player. Husband or not. Considering Heather’s deceit, and your inflexible nature, I’m not surprised by your actions nor do I blame you for them, but it is time, Gray. There is life out there.”
Silence resumes for a few minutes, as I consider those words. Husband. I was a husband for approximately four months before I caused that crash. She contacted the company, found a way to get a message through to my email, and then asked to meet. I don’t know why, to this day, I never examined the legitimacy of the child’s parentage. Too trusting at the time maybe, or too analytical for the option of lies to even enter my thoughts. Maybe I just wanted to do the right thing regardless of questions, be the right thing and find a sense of happiness in the world around me that had become nothing but parties and money and pretentious functions that I cared little for. A practical low key wedding in the Bahamas later, just us, and vows exchanged, and we were two.
Nearly three.
I finish my coffee and keep listening to the rain, part of me miles away from here with Hannah listening to the dull drone of my heartbeat rather than this downpour. I can’t remember the last time Beatrice and I just sat like this, talking and being family rather than co-workers trying to solve a conundrum. I can’t even remember the last time anything was more relevant than working data and statistics before Hannah. Malachi occasionally, I suppose.
Or what Malachi provided for me.
“I bet you never told her you loved her.”
“Why would I? I never did. You know that.”
She chuckles and stands, taking my coffee cup from me after squeezing my shoulder. “No. I meant Hannah, Gray. Romance? Presuming you do love her.”
“I told her everything. She still left.”