Clearly, she had more work to do.
“I came to England. Mom and I fought constantly. I wouldn’t get a job. I wouldn’t go to college. After a few months, I met this guy whose band was about to start touring in Germany, and I went with him. And for the next few years, I just drifted around Europe. I was a groupie, basically, though at least I was a monogamous one. I’d only fall in love with one musician at a time. I partied a lot, smoked a little, let men treat me like shit.”
She’d had bad dreams every night, and she’d hardly slept. She’d spent her days wandering through the museums of Florence, Nuremberg, Madrid. Mom had tried several times to get her to come back and live with her, and sometimes she would for a while, but it never worked. She’d been toxic.
Placing her hands over Nev’s, she pressed his fingers into the side of her stomach where dozens of lines interlaced and twined together toward her navel. Number four. “This one’s supposed to be a labyrinth. Because I was so lost, for such a long time.”
She looked at their hands. Looked at her dirty pink ballet flats, delicate shoes never meant to be actually worn anywhere. Looked up for a bus, hoping for an escape before she had to say the rest. The cavalry didn’t come. She pushed Nev’s hands off her and turned around.
Whatever that expression was in his eyes, it wasn’t love. It was something new. Something sick and disappointed she’d conjured up.
“My mom tried to call me to tell me she had cancer, but I didn’t call her back. I hardly ever called her back. By the time I found out about the chemotherapy, she’d already lost her hair. She was dying, and I wasn’t grown up enough to answer the fucking phone. I moved back here and took care of her. I was determined to prove to her I could do one thing right, and I hoped … I think I hoped if I pulled myself together she wouldn’t really die. Like maybe it was just a test, you know?”
He didn’t say anything.
“It wasn’t a test. She died. It was slow and painful and completely unfair, and I was no comfort to her whatsoever. A week after the funeral, I got the tattoos. Then I got a job at a yarn shop, and later at the V and A. I got a life. I pulled my act together. It’s been two years. I’m broke, on the verge of being unemployed, and I just spent the weekend lying to a bunch of strangers because you asked me to.”
She paused, wondering if he deserved to be knifed after all that shit she’d just dumped on him. Probably not. Probably he didn’t deserve any of this. He was a banker. He was City. Just because he’d disappointed her—just because she loved Nev better—didn’t mean she got to punish him for being who he was.
She heard shifting behind her, and Nev’s eyes skated over her shoulder to where the bus had to be approaching.
Cath pulled her shirt over her head and wrestled her arms into the sleeves.
He didn’t deserve it, but she knifed him anyway. “I honestly thought you were the best person I’ve ever met. Which just goes to show you my judgment is as shoddy as ever.”
“Don’t do this,” he said.
“I have to. It’s what I do.”
When the bus pulled up to the curb, she got on it.
Chapter Eighteen
Cath nearly walked in front of a cab. She stepped off the curb after glancing to the left, having forgotten the traffic came from the other direction in this godforsaken country. The unlicensed taxi had to swerve, and the dr
iver leaned on his horn in anger.
She blinked, slow and stupid, and took a step back. Her body felt as if she were controlling it remotely and the signal was poor. Heartbreak had made her a zombie.
Normally, she was good at this. She made her mistakes, and then she drew a line to separate the past from the present and walked away. If she felt pain, it was faint and empathetic, as if it were someone else’s. The pain of Past Cath. The Ghost of Christmas Cath.
Maybe she’d fallen out of practice, or maybe it was because she’d fallen in love this time, but this pain, this Nev pain, was a mangling, keening, unmanageable beast. It lived in her chest and her skin, in all her nerve endings and the space behind her eyes, at the nape of her neck and in the balls of her feet. Everything screaming out, telling her to fix it quick, because she couldn’t possibly be expected to carry on like this.
But she would. The control center in her skull said she’d get better eventually. It promised a broken heart couldn’t kill her. She would get used to it, as hard-core monks must once have gotten used to their hair shirts and their daily flagellations.
All night long, her brain had picked over the corpse of her relationship with Nev. She’d lain awake, thinking about the New Cath Reform Project, about her life and her work and what the future would hold. Her brain had plans. If only it could keep her body from throwing itself in front of moving vehicles.
She put one foot in front of the other and shambled gracelessly into the office, where she found Judith sorting through dozens of pairs of knitted socks and stockings on the table.
“I thought you weren’t coming in today.”
“I wasn’t.” Cath dumped her purse on the floor and surveyed the limp, lifeless hosiery. Judith planned to include a feature on socks in the exhibit, but she’d struggled to come up with a way to make them interesting. The subject of hand-knit socks made the eyes of all but the most devoted knitters glaze right over.
“I thought you were in the countryside with Banker Ken.”
“I was.”
In order to avoid thinking about Nev, Cath put on a pair of gloves and picked up one of a pair of kilt hose. Knit in the traditional cream wool, the stocking was absurdly long and nearly as big around as her waist at the top. It must have been made for a very tall, very brawny Highlander. She wondered if the dolt had known that whoever knit him these socks loved his hairy kilted ass. No woman would make dressy kilt hose for a man she didn’t love. There were tens of thousands of stitches in the damn things.