The Road Trip: The heart-warming new novel from the author of The Flatshare and The Switch Beth O'Leary (ready to read books .TXT) 📖

I watch Marcus begin to understand. He turns, slowly, to look at Addie. ‘Etienne? He . . .’

Addie doesn’t look at Marcus. ‘It never occurred to you that he might lie?’ she says. Her voice is reedy and hoarse.

Marcus lets out a noise, half strangled, and sits down hard on the edge of the bath. He presses a hand to his forehead. The silence stretches on; behind us all, the tap drips.

‘You let me think . . . Why did you let me think that?’ Marcus says to Addie.

Deb passes him a fresh wad of toilet roll for his bleeding nose, and I am struck by the absurdity of all this, the four of us crammed into this mouldy bathroom, after all the years we spent circling one another, never close enough.

‘You followed me,’ Addie says to Marcus. ‘Didn’t you?’

Marcus turns his head aside. He’s crying, I notice with a start; I catch Deb watching him with her eyes narrowed in thought. He brushes the tears away like he’s just getting something off his cheek, a raindrop or a speck of dirt.

‘Yes. Sometimes.’

He doesn’t speak for a while, and the tap drips on. I think he’s done, that’s it, but then:

‘It was like a – I can’t explain,’ he says, still staring off to the side. ‘I was drinking way too much, I’d fucked up my life, India was mad at me, Dad wasn’t talking to me – but I had this feeling that if I saved Dylan from screwing up his life . . . It was like, you know, that would save me, that would be a good thing I’d done, then I’d be OK. Dylan had always been there for me. I couldn’t see him – I couldn’t – I couldn’t lose him too.’

Deb shakes her head. ‘I’m not buying this. You had some – some problem with Addie. It can’t have just been this messed up crap about protecting Dylan.’

Marcus looks up at the ceiling. My heart beats hard. I want to pull Addie against me, or just to touch her, smooth her hair back, press a kiss to her cheek.

‘I don’t know,’ Marcus says. ‘It was just a . . .’ He gestured to his stomach. ‘A gut-instinct thing. I felt like I just, I just knew she was bad news for Dylan, and then it sort of grew and she was always there, getting in Dylan’s head, until all he thought about was her, until he was consumed by her, mad about her . . .’

‘Oh my God,’ Deb says. ‘You loved her. You loved Addie.’

Everyone goes still.

It was my therapist who first suggested Marcus might have been in love with Addie; understanding that was the key to forgiving him, for me. I was Marcus’s brother, his soulmate, his oldest friend. How he must have loathed himself for loving Addie; how easy it must have been for him to shift that loathing elsewhere, to hate her instead of hating himself.

But we’ve never spoken about it. Not once.

‘You did, didn’t you?’ Deb goes on, insistent, and Marcus twists away suddenly, spinning so his feet are in the bath, hunching over with his hands to his face.

His shoulders shake. He’s sobbing.

‘Oh my God,’ Deb says. ‘That’s why you were there at the school. That’s why you cared so much if she was sleeping with Etienne. That’s why you were always such a prick about her and Dylan.’

I look at Addie. Her eyes are huge, staring at Marcus’s back as he hunches, trembling, on the edge of the cheap plastic bath, and I look at him too and think, He’s so small. How can he have done so much damage?

‘Marcus?’ Addie says.

He slams a foot down in the bottom of the bath and we all jump at the sudden sound in the silence.

‘Of course I fucking loved her. Of course I did. Fuck me, Dylan, you were dense as a brick back then, you were so stupid not to see it that I hated you sometimes’ – his voice rises, fists bunched, shaking – ‘because you would have made it so easy for me to take her. Always pushing the two of us together. Always so keen for us to get along. And I’m not the good guy, I’m not the guy who steps aside for his best friend. Do you know how hard it was? In the end I just wanted her gone, because it was torture, watching you with her, watching you fuck it up, watching you get it right—’

‘You couldn’t have taken me,’ Addie says quietly. ‘I would never have left Dylan for you, Marcus.’

‘And I wasn’t dense,’ I say, without rancour. ‘I was trusting. I trusted my best friend.’

‘Addie, I didn’t know, I swear,’ Marcus croaks, face still in his hands. ‘The teacher . . . I really thought . . . I went to the school sometimes. Saw you working late, with him. There’s no curtains in that place, and with it all lit up . . .’

Addie is staring down at the bathroom floor. I want to tell her I love her, I love her, I love her, I’m sorry.

‘I had to climb on to the skip to see you in the head teacher’s office,’ he says, voice dropping. ‘I remember seeing his hand on your thigh, then you standing, putting your glass of wine down, him following you. Then you . . .’ He swallows. ‘Then you went out of view.’

I close my eyes for a moment.

‘And I never saw you leave. Then Etienne came out and Dylan arrived and Etienne said . . .’

I cut him off. ‘We all know what Etienne said.’

Addie lets out a little sound, a mew.

‘Why didn’t you say?’ Marcus lifts his head a little, still facing away. His voice is thick. ‘Why didn’t someone say something?’

‘I didn’t want you to know,’ Addie says, wiping her eyes. ‘You . . . you were probably the very last person in the world that I wanted to know. You’d have said