Because She Loves Me

OTHER TITLES BY THE AUTHOR

The Magpies

Kissing Games

What You Wish For

W
ITH
L
OUISE
V
OSS:

Forward Slash

Killing Cupid

Catch Your Death

All Fall Down

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Text copyright © 2014 Mark Edwards

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

www.apub.com

Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of
Amazon.com
, Inc., or its affiliates.

ISBN-13: 9781477824863

ISBN-10: 1477824863

Cover design by bürosüd
^o
München,
www.buerosued.de

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014935332

For Archie and Harry

Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Ninteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-four

Twenty-five

Twenty-six

Twenty-seven

Twenty-eight

Twenty-nine

Thirty

Thirty-one

Thirty-two

Thirty-three

Thirty-four

Thirty-five

Thirty-six

Thirty-seven

Thirty-eight

Thirty-nine

Forty

Forty-one

Forty-two

Epilogue

Letter From the Author

Acknowledgements

About the Author

One

‘
Look up.’

Over the past three months my eyes had been poked, stretched and lasered. They had endured brilliant light and foreign bodies, had air and liquid puffed and squeezed into them. They’d been stared at and discussed and invaded, clamped open and taped shut. They’d endured pretty much everything an eye can endure. So when the nurse asked me to look upwards so she could apply the drops, told me this might sting a little, I – well, I didn’t bat an eyelid. This was nothing.

One summer night, I almost went blind. It was only the skill of a surgeon at Moorfields Eye Hospital, where I sat now, waiting to be seen, that saved my sight. Even then, after the 2 a.m. emergency surgery, they told me it was unlikely the sight in my left eye would return fully. When it did, I saw it as the first sign that my luck was changing.

The second sign – or so I thought, in those breathless, heady first days of our relationship – was meeting Charlie.

I was the youngest person in the waiting room by thirty years and the only person on my own. The white-haired man in the corner was accompanied by his wife, who kept reading out excerpts from her magazine, one of those real-life mags, full of stories about unfaithful spouses, child abuse and kids with cancer. There was a gang of three elderly ladies opposite me, hunched beneath the glaucoma poster, and an Indian man with a young woman who I assumed to be his daughter. Two old men in dark glasses walked past, one of them cracking a joke about the blind leading the blind.

There was no one I could have asked to come with me. I worked as a freelancer so didn’t have any colleagues. My sister Tilly was my only surviving relative, apart from an aunt and uncle in Sussex whom I hadn’t seen for years, and I didn’t have a girlfriend. I suppose I could have asked my best friend, Sasha, to accompany me, but she was busy and would have had to take a day off work. I didn’t like to ask.

I had barely admitted it to myself but I was, if not lonely, at least tired of being alone. In the days and weeks that followed the operation, I had sat around on my sofa trying not to feel sorry for myself and imagining how good it would be to have someone to look after me. If I hadn’t split up with Harriet, if I had a flatmate, if my parents weren’t dead. I despised self-pity but sometimes, during those days when I had to sleep sitting upright and my spatial awareness was so screwed that I couldn’t negotiate my way around my flat, let alone the outside world, I wished I had someone to laugh with when I bumped into the coffee table for the hundredth time.

Now I was better, but it was getting harder to kid myself that I enjoyed being on my own most of the time. I wanted a girlfriend – I wanted companionship and sex and love – and was on the verge of trying internet dating. It was going to be my New Year’s resolution: to find someone.

I picked up a newspaper from the table and leafed through it. Pages 4 and 5, along with the front page, were dedicated to a story I and most of the country had been following with grim interest: the trial of Lucy Newton, a care assistant in a nursing home who had been accused of murdering eighteen residents. The Dark Angel – that’s what the tabloids called her, the second most-prolific British serial killer of modern times, the new Harold Shipman. Attractive, statuesque, icy, probably psychotic: she was a newspaper editor’s dream, and there were dozens of websites on which her supporters and detractors argued viciously about her innocence. But as I was reading about her testimony – she claimed she was being set up by her former neighbour – the drops started to work, my pupils dilating so I couldn’t focus on text or anything within arm’s length.

I wished I’d remembered to bring my headphones. Since my operation I’d spent a lot of time listening to audiobooks, each one consuming days. Instead, I was left to daydream and watch people as they walked past the waiting area.

After half an hour, I was twitching with boredom. There was a coffee machine across the corridor. I rummaged in my pocket, pulling out my phone, keys, several pieces of paper and my eye drops, before finding a pound coin. Standing up, trying to juggle the various objects in my hands – the three old ladies watching me with interest – I dropped the coin.

Stopping and swearing under my breath, I chased it as it rolled across the corridor – and collided with a young woman walking past the waiting area.

‘I’m so sorry. I—’

I stopped dead, the words – whatever nonsense I was going to come out with – stuck in my throat. Even though my eyes were dilated, I could see her clearly; more clearly, in fact, than I had seen anyone in a long time. She was beautiful. Red hair that hung just past her shoulders, cut with a fringe. Huge green eyes. Full, cupid’s-bow lips. A smattering of faint freckles. She was wearing a white blouse and a pencil skirt, and her NHS ID hung around her neck. Maddeningly, I couldn’t focus on the words so couldn’t read her name or job title.

She crouched and produced the pound coin from beneath her shoe and I could make out the outline of a tattoo on her ankle, a vibrant hint of colour hiding beneath her conservative black tights. I guessed she was a few years younger than me, about twenty-six, but she looked more grown up than I did in my scruffy jeans and cardigan.

Her eyes shone with amusement as she handed me the money. ‘I recommend the hot chocolate.’ Her voice had a soft northern lilt.

I stared at her. I can honestly say that if anyone had asked me before this encounter to describe my ideal woman, she would be it. A composite of all the girls and women who had moulded my taste: the girl who sat in front of me at primary school; the divorcee two doors down who used to come out to collect the post in a silky black robe; the lead actress in my favourite TV show; the first girl I kissed. Here she was, the perfect woman, standing before me.

‘The coffee is like cow’s piss,’ she said, her eyes shining with mischief.

I wracked my brain for a clever response while she continued to smile at me. Before I could think of one – to be honest, seasons would have come and gone before I’d come up with a good line – I heard a man say my name.

‘Andrew Sumner?’

Mr Yassir Makkawi, the baby-faced consultant ophthalmologist who had seen me on my visits to Moorfields since my operation, stood outside his room.

The red-haired woman gave me a final smile and walked away down the corridor.

‘Nothing wrong with your eyesight now.’

‘Huh?’

Mr Makkawi raised an eyebrow and I realised I’d been staring at the woman’s receding form. She turned a corner and vanished. I wanted to run after her.

Instead, I went into the consultation room and did as I was asked. I looked at Mr Makkawi’s right ear, then his left. I looked up and down, and at the coral reef of veins that lit up inside my eye.

The consultant examined his notes and nodded with satisfaction.

‘Very good. Everything looks excellent. I’m going to be able to discharge you.’

‘Oh, thank God for that.’

He put his hand on his chest. ‘I’m deeply offended, Andrew.’

‘Well, you know.’

He gave me a lopsided grin. ‘You’ve done very well. I know you may not feel it, but you’re very lucky. Extremely lucky.’

As I left his office, I pumped his hand vigorously. He looked taken aback, as if no one had ever done this before. But I felt so grateful and relieved. I wanted to rush to the gift shop and buy him a present.

I left the hospital with newfound strength. One of the darkest periods of my life was over. I forgot all about the red-haired girl in the corridor. All that mattered was that I was well again.

It’s hard now, after everything that’s happened, not to wonder about what, statistically speaking, should have been. If I hadn’t dropped that coin, if my consultation had ended five minutes later, if I’d popped into Starbucks when I left the hospital instead of going directly to the station.

In this parallel version of my life, everything would be different. I would have gone on a series of internet dates. I would have met a nice girl. It would have all been very pleasant and I wouldn’t be lonely anymore.

In this alternative future, I wouldn’t be sitting here among the smoking wreckage of my life, wondering about what might have been.

Nobody would have got hurt.

Nobody would have died.