Yes, she was angry at her dad. And yes, she had every right to be. But maybe her mum and Pip’s mum and Jannes all had a point—maybe she was letting that anger make decisions for her when she should be making them for herself. She’d had more of an insight into her dad’s life than she cared for, faking this thing with Jannes, and maybe she hadn’t dealt with her feelings about him in the healthiest possible way. Was she going to carry on like that—avoiding the things that she was afraid of, rather than choosing the things that she wanted? How long had her choices really been just a reaction against a man who had lied to her and broken her heart before it was fully formed?
She pulled a comb through her hair and pulled on a floral jumpsuit and her vintage gold sandals. Slipping earrings into her lobes, she hesitated over the gold and opal ring sitting in the jewellery dish on her dresser. Whether she chose to put it on or not sent a message. In the end, she wore it. It was just keeping the status quo, she rationalised to herself, and being photographed without it would be a hassle until she and Jannes had had a chance to talk and decide whether they were keeping this pretence of an engagement going, and if they weren’t, how they were going to get out of it.
She slipped the ring onto her finger and breathed out a sigh at the reassuring weight of it over her knuckle. She wouldn’t think too much about how attached she was to it already.
Eventually, she would have to. She’d been avoiding thinking about how she was feeling since the day her dad had left her, and maybe that wasn’t the right thing to be doing. At some point, maybe she should look a little deeper, at the wounds that she was carrying around, and whether they were affecting the choices that she made.
She didn’t have to do it with her family there—she wasn’t ready for family therapy yet—but she had been carrying this anger for so long. And it had pushed her to the edge of control, and risked ruining her...whatever it was she and Jannes were...because she couldn’t be in the same room as her father.
She pulled the door closed behind her and walked quickly down the sun-dappled pavements to the corner of Broadway Market, where she and Jannes had been meeting for weekend brunches for years. Where she had met him just a few weeks ago and concocted this plan which had soon spiralled way out of her control.
She spotted Jannes before he saw her, and she watched him approach, watched the subtle glances directed his way from men and women alike. He saw her at last, and attempted a smile that turned into a grimace, and she knew that things were very different from the last time that they’d walked here.
‘Hi,’ she said as he drew close, and one corner of his mouth turned up in a smile that didn’t reach his eyes.
‘Hey,’ he replied, with such a sad tone deep in his voice that she knew she had broken something that couldn’t be fixed. Whatever happened next, things could never go back to how they’d been before she had brought him into that glade and acted out her fear and anger and sadness on him, until he’d had no choice but to push her away.
‘Do you want to eat or walk?’ Jannes asked, and Lara turned towards the park.
‘Walk?’ she said. She couldn’t eat, not the way she felt right now. She’d be sick.
They set out on the path that took a wide circle around the park. It was still quiet this morning, and they didn’t have to worry about being overheard.
‘You’re still wearing the ring,’ Jannes said as an opening gambit and she was relieved beyond measure that she had decided to wear it.
‘I didn’t want to presume...’ she started, picking her words in a way she’d never had to with Jannes before. Something between them had broken, and she didn’t know how to fix it.
They walked on in silence, and she didn’t know where to start trying to reach out to him.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said at last, because it was the most important part of what she had to say. ‘I shouldn’t have walked away from you like that. I knew it would hurt you and I did it anyway and I’m so sorry for that. And I’m sorry for the way that I threw myself at you too. I really messed up, and I want to make it right again.’
‘I want that too,’ Jannes said, his voice full of regret. ‘So much. But I think we’re wrong, trying to go back to how we were before. I don’t think we can do that. Too much has happened. Too much has changed.’
‘But I care about you, Jannes. I really do. Can’t we just keep hold of that?’
* * *
He wasn’t sure if they could. He’d watched Lara walk away from him at the church, and it wasn’t until then that he’d realised that it was his every worst nightmare come true. This was exactly why he’d avoided getting involved with her in the first place. They’d thought that they were so clever, with their rationalisations and their fake dating, and their ‘just going along with it, nothing to do with us’ when Mormor had upped the stakes. And in fact what they’d been doing was walking blindfolded into exactly the situation they had both sworn that they were going to avoid. When she’d hurt him, he’d realised it was exactly what he’d been scared of all along.
‘I think we have to stop this,’ he said as they reached the end of a path.
‘Stop here?’ she asked, her forehead wrinkling in confusion.
‘No,’ he said, turning to face her. ‘Stop this—’ He gestured to himself, to her. ‘I can’t pretend to be with you and want to be with you, and then...not be,’ he said, feeling his stomach swoop as he admitted how he felt about her.
‘You want to be with me?’ Of course that was the part she heard, not the breaking up part. She wouldn’t be Lara if she’d heard anything else.
‘Of course I do,’ he said, reaching for her hand, and then reminding himself. ‘You must know that. You know what I would want if things were different.’
She shook her head, and he knew that she wasn’t going to take being broken up with without a fight—the fact that the whole thing had been fake from the start didn’t make a difference to that.
‘What things?’ Lara asked. ‘All we have to do is decide if we’re doing this—if we want it. There’s nothing stopping us other than being afraid.’
‘Then that’s what’s stopping me,’ Jannes conceded. It didn’t make him feel very masculine, to admit that fear. He’d made a career of pushing his limits, conquering his perception of what he thought he could do. How little sleep he could survive with. How long he could spend at sea. How fast he could keep moving. But this? He didn’t want this challenge. Not when he knew he had no chance of winning. ‘I’m stopping myself because I can’t handle getting hurt the way I know that I will,’ he told her.
She shook her head, taking off her sunglasses so she
could look him properly in the eye. ‘Jannes, I’m not going to hurt you. I know why you think that, after I walked away.’