Read Online The Moment You Were Gone by Nicci Gerrard - Free Book Online Page A

to be safe. That was their pact. She couldn’t voice her fears. And today she and Connor were letting him go. He was on his own at last. For aminute, her eyes pricked with tears and she blinked them furiously away.
    ‘Stop it!’ Ethan’s eyes snapped open.
    ‘What?’
    ‘You know.’
    Yesterday his girlfriend Rosie, with whom he had spent the past five months travelling round South America, had told him they should separate, not start their university life feeling tied to each other. And today Gaby was taking him to university for the first time. The back seat, laid flat to make space, was piled high with books on modern history and Western philosophy, the frying-pan, a clatter of cutlery, mugs and assorted plates, a coffee-grinder, the fan heater, a tennis racket, a bin bag of sheets and duvet, two suitcases with his clothes, a neat laptop in its black carrying case stuffed between the front and back seats, a desk lamp, a small CD-player with separate speakers lying on top of it and splitting plastic bag of CDs, many of which he’d borrowed from Stefan and never got round to returning, a cardboard box packed with tea-bags and coffee beans, several packets of stem-ginger biscuits, a few tins of tuna, a jar of Marmite and another of honey, a bottle of lime cordial, plastic pots of vitamins, a bag of sugar. A couple of jackets – including the lovely thick grey one they’d given him for his birthday a couple of months ago – and a dark blue towel were laid across the top of the shifting pile. At his feet was his bulging backpack, full of odds and ends (an iPod, a book of twentieth-century poetry, a notebook already half filled with his illegible, spidery writing, an address book, his phone, wallet, the documents he would need when he arrived,an ancient pencil case with a broken zip, playing cards, a portable chess set). And on the back of the car, its thin wheels spinning slowly, was his bicycle.
    ‘Are you nervous?’
    Really, she wanted to ask him if he was all right, but she knew he wouldn’t answer that – you couldn’t draw confidences out of Ethan: he gave them abruptly, unexpectedly. Yesterday he had returned from meeting Rosie with a set expression on his face, as if someone had taken a cloth to it and wiped away any sign of life, told Gaby the news in a curt tone that forbade her to respond, and gone to his room. She had heard the door close firmly and the key turn in the lock. Later that night, she woke and lay there, listening to the piano being played. Just a simple melody over and over again; the notes seemed to hang shining in the close darkness around her. She waited until the music stopped, then rolled out of bed, pulled on a dressing-gown, pushed her feet into slippers and stumbled downstairs into the kitchen. Ethan was there, in jeans but bare-chested. He sat at the table, looking down at his fingers, a leather band round the bony wrist.
    ‘I’ll make us tea, shall I?’ asked Gaby.
    ‘I might have known you’d find me. Cocoa would be more comforting. I couldn’t sleep – I don’t think I’m going to now. You don’t look very awake, you know – are you sure you don’t want to go back to bed?’
    They’d sat together drinking cocoa in the brightly lit kitchen while all the rooms around them lay in creaking darkness, and the starless night pressed against the windows. Ethan had got out his cigarettes and offered oneto Gaby. She took it casually as though it hadn’t been about twenty years since she’d last smoked. Exactly twenty years, in fact – she’d given up when she was pregnant with Ethan. He lit them both with a shared match, took a deep drag on his, and said, with a half-smile, ‘I never thought we’d get
married
or anything. To tell you the truth, I didn’t want to be together any more either. It hadn’t felt right for months. The magic had gone out of it somehow – so of course it’s better like this. It should be a relief. And she did it before I’d plucked up the