Second Chance - Jane Green [23]
And years later here was someone on the phone asking for Olivia, and how odd that the voice sounded just like Holly’s.
‘Holly?’ Olivia found herself saying incredulously.
‘It is you!’ Holly said. ‘I wasn’t sure.’
‘Oh Holly,’ Olivia said, as the tears started. ‘Isn’t it just awful? Have you spoken to everyone? Have you been in touch with Saffron? And Paul?’
‘I have,’ Holly said, finding her voice suddenly choking up. ‘I’ve spoken to everyone.’
And speak to everyone she has.
All Holly wanted to do, leading up to the memorial service, was talk about Tom. All anyone talked about was this latest attack. She couldn’t get away from it, and talking about Tom was a way for her to keep him alive. Even though strangers weren’t interested in knowing anything other than here was someone who actually had a personal connection to the tragedy, Holly found herself talking and talking and talking.
Perhaps people were interested in the details, perhaps not. Nobody stopped her from talking, though; everyone wanted to share in Holly’s personal tragedy, wanted to be able to go home and say they had met someone today who had lost someone in the Acela attack, as if they too were connected, had a different, deeper understanding of the pain and grief, the fallout from a tragedy such as this.
Marcus has been fantastic. Supportive when she needed it, giving her the space and time to cry when she needed that too. Since Tom’s death, Marcus’s behaviour has reminded Holly of all that is good about him, and during those few moments when her grief subsides, she has been grateful for that. He was, she thought one day as she looked up at him, her pillar of strength, and immediately she knew that that was why she married him.
Everything about Marcus spells strength. From the set of his jaw to his quiet but firm insistence that his way is the right way. The first time Holly saw Marcus she’d known she had never met anyone like him before in her life.
And it helped that he was the diametric opposite of her father. She’d known he was loyal. She’d known he wasn’t the sort of man who would have an affair, wasn’t the sort of man who would leave his wife and daughter, to disappear into the ether leaving just a faint whiff of false promises. He wouldn’t have an affair with one of her friends, as her last boyfriend, Russ, had ended up doing.
She had been at a friend’s house in Sydney, having a cookout, when she met Marcus. Sitting on the grass in frayed denim shorts and a T-shirt, she was as brown as a berry from the travelling, the smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose so plentiful, they almost created the tan themselves.
There had been tons of people there. Surfers mostly, and neighbours and friends, everyone arriving cheerfully bearing more food, more beer. Marcus had stood out, even then, with his odd formality. He’d looked like a stuffy English lawyer in his Ralph Lauren polo shirt, tucked into chino shorts belted with a plaited brown belt. Holly had watched him uncomfortably sipping his beer, not bothering to make small talk, and she had felt sorry for him. She had felt sorry for him as the only other English person there, as being a man who so clearly did not fit in.
‘I’m Holly,’ she had said, clambering up and going over to him, extending a hand. ‘You must be Marcus,’ for she had heard one of the neighbours had a stuffy English lawyer staying with them, and he couldn’t be anyone else.
His face had lit up. ‘You’re English!’ It had been a statement, not a question, and his gratitude at having been rescued had been sweet and endearing, and Holly had found she didn’t mind spending the evening talking to him. And she hadn’t minded when he phoned the next day to ask her for lunch, and she hadn’t minded a couple of nights later when he kissed her as he was saying goodbye and dropping her off at her house.
He wasn’t her normal type, but perhaps, she’d thought then, that wasn’t such a bad thing. And where had her type got her, anyway? A series of destructive, disappointing relationships in which Holly had always