The Story Of Our Secrets

  Shari Low

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  More from Shari Low

  About the Author

  About Boldwood Books

  To Myla Ina Taggart.

  Welcome to the world, little one.

  We love you beyond words and can’t wait to watch you grow.

  Prologue

  Colm O’Flynn – August 2016

  This isn’t going to work. My hands are shaking so much I can’t hold the phone still. Change of plan. I rest the phone against the pile of books on my bedside table. The thrillers and crime novels belong to my wife, Shauna, but she brought them in here for me because she hasn’t had time to read for months. My fault. My bloody incredible wife of fifteen years has been working so hard to make up for the income I’ve lost that she crashes into a deep sleep within seconds of crawling under the duvet. Another UCoADH. Unintentional Consequence of A Dying Husband. Especially one who’s self-employed in a fairly new company.

  My business partner and best mate, Dan, is paying me as much as possible every month, but there’s no way one guy can bring in as much as both of us together, no matter how hard he tries. Reduced earnings. An UCoADBP. See what I did there? The last couple of letters are interchangeable, depending on whether the effect is on my role as a husband, a business partner, a dad to our six-year-old girl, Beth…

  Sorry. Had to stop there. Bloody big lump in my throat. An Unintentional Consequence of A Dying Me. Forty years old and I’ve barely shed a tear in my gifted life, and now one wayward thought can have me choking back a tsunami of liquid pain.

  Not that I’ll tell you that, my darling Shauna.

  We did the whole ‘falling apart’ thing a while after we got the prognosis that the end was inevitable. I’m not saying imminent. Hopefully, it’ll be a while yet. We allowed ourselves a weekend of grief, while Beth was having a sleepover with Dan and Lulu, then we dried our eyes on the Sunday night, five minutes before Beth arrived back home, and there’s been nothing but relentless cheeriness ever since.

  Our immediate friends, Dan and Lulu, and Rosie know, but we’ve both agreed not to tell Beth. She’s too young and I don’t want her to worry a day in her life. Besides, I don’t do bad news. I much prefer denial and avoidance. Two of my very favourite things. Shauna is usually more one for straight talking and realism, but she’s come over to my side lately. That’s what a chat with a doctor delivering a death sentence can do for you. Twelve to eighteen months. That’s the average survival rate for this particular bastard of a brain tumour. Not that I’m accepting that. Nope. That’s not happening to me.

  Although, I guess I’m dropping the denial on a temporary basis, just long enough to make this video for Shauna to watch after I’m… well, you know.

  I could save myself trying to balance this bollocksing phone if I just told it all to her face, now, while I’m still here, but I know she won’t listen. She’ll brush it off, say she doesn’t want to talk about it. I know ma darling wife. I knew her inside and out the minute I set eyes on her beautiful face, fifteen years ago in a bar on the riverbank in Richmond upon Thames.

  And that’s why I’m lying here, in a hospital a few miles from our home in Richmond, trying to get my head straight enough to tell her everything I need her to hear, while she’s out putting in another fourteen-hour day at work. I’m being unusually, yet impressively, practical, if I do say so myself.

  Brainwave. I lift a Michael Connelly novel the size of a Hovis loaf from the top of the pile and put it in front of the phone to stop it sliding down. Bingo. The brain might be under siege from this bastard tumour, but it still conjures up the occasional moment of inspiration. That’s how the idea to do this thing with the phone came about.

  Years ago, long before the first headache led to so much more, Shauna persuaded me (I think there was emotional blackmail or bribery involved) to watch one of those romcom movies she likes. I’m not a fan. They always end up marrying the bloke who was their best friend and secretly in love with them all along. Anyway, despite the fact that there was football on the other channel, I gave in. We ended up watching that movie… agh, what’s it called? The one where Gerard Butler has an Irish accent and a brain tumour and he sends letters to his missus, Hilary Swank. PS I Love You. That’s it. Really bad choice, in hindsight. There’s a dose of sick irony, if I ever saw one. Life imitating art here. Anyway, when the movie finished, she binned the half a box of tissues she’d gone through in the sad bits, then we went to bed, made love, and afterwards… please don’t judge me, I swear I was joking… I looked into her gorgeous green eyes, brushed back a lock of her blonde hair and whispered, ‘If that was me in that movie, I’d have finished those letters differently.’

  She grinned that gorgeous, sexy, irresistible smile. ‘Oh yeah? And what would you say, Colm O’Flynn?’

  I put on my best serious face. ‘Something more profound. More spiritual. Something that only you and I would know.’

  She waited as I paused, then went on…

  ‘I was thinking, PS I love that you’re a smashing shag.’

  She skelped me with a pillow, but she laughed until I hushed her with a kiss that lasted until we were ready to love each other again.

  God, I adore her. I haven’t always shown it. I’ve been a pretty shit husband at times, I admit, but I’ve always loved her. I still find it fucking miraculous that she loves me too.

  And that’s why I owe her this.

  I plump up the pillow and wedge it under my head, feeling that familiar tug as the scar across the back of my scalp stretches. I stare at the ceiling for a few minutes, looking for inspiration. None there. Surgery, followed by months of chemo and radiation therapy, has officially wiped out any imagination I ever had, but it hasn’t wiped out my burning need to get this done.

  Okay. Let’s do it. I still haven’t worked out what to say – I’ve just got a list of headlines and I was planning to make the rest of it up as I go along. Not exactly a shocker. That’s pretty much how I’ve lived my life. Dan and I own a management consultancy and when you think about it, I’ve got a cheek advising people on how to organise and manage their business, considering I haven’t organised or managed anything in my own life for… let’s go for honesty and say forever.

  I roll on my side, reach over and press ‘record’ on the iPhone.

  ‘Hey, ma darlin’,’ I say, as always. It’s how I start every day, every call, every conversation. I feel a catch in my throat, and I swallow it back. Not doing the sad thing. No way. There will be enough of that later. This needs to be happy, to be positive, to make her smile.

  I force a grin and some levity into my voice and go on…

  ‘So, I was thinking that we should probably have a chat about some stuff. I know what yer thinking… Wow, my husband is sexy and look at him lying there in bed like some kind of drop-dead gorgeous hunk in an aftershave advert… but try to focus on what I’m saying.’

  When she watches that bit, she’ll shake her head, she’ll roll her eyes and whisper that I’m a fool, but we both know she’ll laugh too. What’s the chances that someone as beautiful and funny and fecking brilliant as Shauna would find my lame line in chat amusing too? It’s up there with all that loaves, fishes and walking on water stuff.

  ‘The thing is, ma darlin’, we both know what’s coming. You’ve been refusing to discuss it and, well, we both know that denial is one of my superpowers. No one wins a coconut for guessing that I don’t want to give a single day of what’s left to talking about what will happen down the road. But we have to, love. I’m planning to tell you what’s on here at the last possible minute, so I know I won’t be around when you watch it. You might wanna go get a coffee and get comfortable because this will take a while and I can’t promise I won’t ramble on or insert inappropriate jokes to break the tension. I can’t have you keeling over with dehydration when I finally find the courage to get to bits that matter.

  ‘Just in case, let me start with the good stuff. Shauna O’Flynn, I’ve adored you every day of my life. Even when I’ve been a daft prick or an insensitive arse. You’re everything. You always were. And if I had the choice of living these fifteen years with you, or fifty years with someone else, I’d choose you in every lifetime. But this isn’t forever, Shauna. We both know that, so I’ve got some stuff to tell you. About the past. About now. But mostly, about after I’m gone. You know I don’t believe in all that “watching over you” stuff – and yep, I’ll feel like a complete eejit if it turns out I get a ringside seat to the future – that’s why I need you to know my hopes for the lives you and Beth will have without me. I need to know that you’ll take care of the people I love. And I
need to ask your forgiveness for…’

  The words get stuck somewhere between my heart and my mouth. I can’t open with that. If I do, she might never watch another minute, and this will all be wasted. I swerve and change tack.

  ‘Actually, I’ll come to that one later, m’darlin’. I’ve got a whole load of other stuff to get through first. Let me start with a few messages that I need you to pass on for me. Okay, here goes…’

  1

  Shauna O’Flynn – May 2021

  Friday night. Nine o’clock. I was pretty sure that I was setting a giddy new level on the saddo scale. I’d been sitting on the floor of the utility room watching my washing go round since the ten-minute pre-wash, through the soapy stuff and at least two rinses. The glass of Prosecco that was on the tile floor beside me began to vibrate and I knew from experience that we were about to switch it up to the heady excitement of the spin cycle. Yes, I’d been here before. More times than I could count or wanted to admit. Tonight didn’t feel any better, or any worse, than the others. Okay, maybe slightly worse.

  I’d been feeding organic chicken goujons and mini-hamburgers (one hundred per cent beef, gluten-free buns) to forty kids at a six-year-old’s birthday party in Chiswick this afternoon, when – some time in between little Araminta smacking little Camilla in the face with a dairy-and-gluten-free cupcake from the dessert tray, and little Theobald throwing an almighty hissy fit because he didn’t get an iPhone 12 in his gargantuan mountain of gifts – I realised today’s date. It’s 25 May 2021. Which makes today exactly twenty years since I was in a bar on the riverbank in Richmond upon Thames, and Colm O’Flynn walked in. Five minutes later and I’d have missed him, and my whole life would have been oh so different.

  I could see still see that night so vividly. I was there with my closest friends back then, Lulu, Rosie and Vincent, celebrating the launch of Vincent’s new catering company. Rosie. Wow. I hadn’t thought about her for ages. She lives in New Zealand now, after going over there a couple of years ago, to meet a farmer she’d hooked up with online. Her occasional emails told me she was loving life and I was happy for her. Our friendship had fractured long before that, when I discovered that despite a twenty-four year age difference, she was in a relationship with my dad in the years before his death in 2016. That would never stop being a shocker. Afterwards though, we’d stuck a patch on the wound and found a way to live with it, but now it was a closed chapter that I chose not to re-open.

  Back in 2001, though, we were oblivious to what else life had in store for us. As we knocked back a few cocktails, we had no idea that one day Vincent and I would merge our companies and become partners, and that we’d have a spectacular fallout that would end with him leaving the country. I could never have predicted what the future held for Lulu. And I had no clue that just as I was about to leave and head home, Lulu’s boyfriend, Dan, would arrive, and his best mate, Colm, the love of my life, would walk in behind him.

  Actually, it was more of a swagger. Colm had this walk that made you smile, a kind of casual, easy-going physicality that was matched by the twinkle in his eye and his easy grin. He was the kind of guy that wore his goodness on the outside and that, combined with a couple of deadly one-liners, a self-deprecating humour and the sexiest Irish burr I’d ever heard, caused something in my head – and my heart – to explode.

  When the bar closed, he walked me across Richmond bridge to my flat on the Twickenham side of the river, and I heard myself asking him in for coffee. This stranger that I felt I’d known forever. We sat on my tired old balcony until the sun came up, watching the flickering lights in the sky of the planes stacking in the airspace above Heathrow. Sometime in those hours, I fell in love. I also sustained a large bruise on my left buttock, thanks to the combination of an enthusiastic smooch and a collapsing balcony chair, but his laughter made the pain – and the chiropractor’s bill – easier to bear.

  My eyes closed as I rested my head on the wall behind me, the throb of the spin cycle blocked out by my focus on bringing the memory of his face to the front of my mind. For a while after he died, there would be days that I’d fall apart because I couldn’t seem to remember what he looked like. How ridiculous was that? The man I was with for fifteen years, the father of my child, the love of my life, and I was devastatingly sure that I couldn’t pick him out in a line-up.

  It’s hard to say when that passed. Now, five years after he left us, I can see him clearly, I can even hear his voice and sometimes, I’m sure I can feel him around me. At least, that’s what I choose to believe. I’m not sure if that makes me miss him more or less. It helps that even though she’s only eleven, Beth already looks so like him. The same green eyes and hair the shade of walnuts. The same smile – wide and quick – and a laugh that is so contagious it makes you forget that you’re knackered, stressed or ready to hunt down the driver who dented your car door in the Tesco’s car park. Although, if you’re the driver of the blue Volvo who left a ruddy great big dent on a van with my company logo, Constant Cravings, on the side, be afraid because I will find you.

  The sudden realisation that the door beside me was opening startled me. Beth was at a sleepover at my mother’s house this weekend, so, as far as I knew, I was alone. This was it. I was about to be murdered in my own home by an intruder and my soapy knickers would languish in the washing machine until someone found my body.

  ‘You know there’s a box on the wall in the living room that shows far more interesting stuff than your clothes going round? It’s called a TV. There’s also a thing called a sofa, which is far more comfortable for a woman of your advancing years. Every minute on that floor is a minute closer to a hip replacement.’

  Not a burglar, but close: a home invader with a pretty decent line in sarcasm.

  Jess O’Flynn, my late husband’s first wife, reached the wall I was leaning against and slid down it, joining me on charcoal tiles.

  Jess held out a bottle of Budweiser, but I shook my head and gestured to the Prosecco on the other side of me. As I did, I realised it was empty and revised my answer, taking the beer. It saved my allegedly crumbling hips from getting up and taking me through to the kitchen for a refill.

  She nudged my shoulder with hers. ‘So… want to tell me why you’re sitting here drinking plonk while staring at your washing machine, or is this some kind of weird fetish thing? “My name is Shauna and I get off on soapy bubbles,”’ she teased, doing a breathy, sexy thing when she was mimicking me. ‘Is your safe word Ariel or Daz?’

  That would usually make me laugh, but not tonight. ‘I really need to take your key off you. I only gave it to you because I was hoping you’d come in and fill my fridge while I was at work.’

  Her auburn, chin-length bob quivered as she shrugged her shoulders. ‘You can tell yourself that, but we both know it’s because I’m a free babysitting service.’

  ‘That’s also true,’ I agreed, deadpan.

  ‘All part of the shared husband’s ex-wife service,’ she quipped, before taking a slug of her beer and nudging me again. ‘Go on, admit I’m the best ex-wife in a co-dependent blended family that you’ve ever had.’

  It took a bit of effort to shrug off my sadness, but I’d had plenty of practice at masking the hollowed-out canyon in the pit of my stomach. And, let’s face it, she was right. Twenty years ago today, I met Colm, which was approximately one month after his divorce from Jess was finalised. During the next decade and a half, Jess and I rubbed along in polite civility, mostly, if I’m honest, for the sake of their twins, Davie and Joe, who were four when we met. Later, after Beth was born, we did a few blended-family Christmases and birthdays, but it was only after Colm got sick that we became friends (despite a couple of revelations about their relationship that I’ve compartmentalised into a big box with a ‘Do Not Open’ sticker on the top). Since we lost him, I think we’ve surprised ourselves by becoming close and now she’s like the sister I never had, the older, cooler one who frequently turns up uninvited, regularly acts like the boss of me but who I can always count on in times of crisis and childminding.