Only Love Can Hurt Like This

Prologue
 
On days like this, I love living in Bury St Edmunds, when the spires of the cream stone cathedral seem illuminated against the vivid blue sky and even the black flintstones on the ruined abbey walls gleam under the sunshine as though they’ve been polished.

It’s only early April, but it’s the warmest day of the year so far by a mile and I’m already feeling so much better after getting out of the office. I’ve just come off a phone call with a nightmare client – she and her home renovations are enough to put me off architecture for life: I need this coffee break.

I’m wandering amongst the abbey ruins, looking for a wall low enough to perch on and drink my coffee, when I see my fiancé, Scott, sitting on a bench in the shade of a giant fir tree. Before I can call out a delighted hello and go to join him, I register that he’s with Nadine.

Scott set up his own landscape gardening business when we moved here from London a year ago, and Nadine started working for him soon after that, days before he asked me to marry him in the rose gardens of a local manor house. She’s twenty-nine and is tall and strong with golden skin and an infectious laugh. I liked her the moment I met her and on every occasion since then, so I’m not sure why my intended greeting has lodged in my throat.

My partner and his co-worker are almost two feet apart, but there’s something about their body language that strikes me as odd. Scott is leaning forward, his white T-shirt stretched taut across his broad back and his forearms planted on his thighs. Nadine has her arms and legs crossed, her face tilted towards Scott’s and her typically bouncy, high blonde ponytail seems preternaturally still. The angled position of Scott’s face mirrors Nadine’s, but neither of them is looking at the other. Nor are they speaking. They seem frozen. Tense.

A squirrel runs along the jagged wall to my left. Birds are singing in the surrounding trees. Children laugh in the distant playground. But I stand and stare, unease creeping over me.
They’re sitting apart. They’re not doing anything wrong. And yet...

Something does not feel right.

Then, suddenly, Scott turns and stares straight at Nadine. There’s a strange look on his handsome face, an expression I can’t decipher. My heart is in my throat as she slowly lifts her chin and meets his eyes, two perfect side profiles: his thick, dark eyebrows to her flawless arches; his straight nose to her small upturned one; two sets of full lips, serious and unsmiling.

Seconds tick past and darkness washes over me. To go from feeling light and warm to sick and cold is completely hideous.

They are still staring at each other. And not a word has passed between them.

I jolt as Scott launches himself to his feet and strides off in the direction of town. Nadine watches him until he’s out of sight, then visibly exhales, hunching forward and placing her head in her hands. She stays like that for a minute or so before getting up and slowly following Scott.

I realise I’m shaking.

What was that?

Is my fiancé having an affair? And if not, is he thinking about having one?

Hang on. They only looked at each other. They didn’t do anything wrong. I like Nadine. I trust Scott.

But something does appear to be going on between them.

My mother has always told me to trust my instincts. But it’s hard to trust your instincts when they’re breaking your heart.


1

Three months later

New York was shrouded by cloud cover. I've only ever flown to Indianapolis via Chicago, so I was hoping to see the infamous green void of Central Park bordered by skyscrapers, but by the time the sky finally clears, all it reveals is a patchwork landscape of fields and farms far below.
 
I've been traveling all day and it will be after 5 p.m. by the time I touch down, which is ten o'clock at night back in the UK. I'm shattered, but thankfully Dad is coming to collect me from the airport. I know that my exhaustion is not entirely due to lack of sleep. The last three months have taken their toll on me.

***

Scott was sitting at the kitchen table when I arrived home from work that day back in April, after a horrible afternoon of seesawing between emotions. One minute I’d felt wildly unsettled and the next I’d convinced myself that the look he and Nadine shared meant nothing. But as soon as I saw Scott’s face, I knew that my intuition had served me correctly. There was something going on between them, but it was an emotional connection, rather than a physical affair.

He wanted to talk to me as soon as I walked through the front door, which threw me as I was expecting to have to demand answers, not have them dished up to me on a plate. And when he started to confess his feelings, I still thought he planned to ask for my forgiveness-which I know I would have granted. We were getting married in December and were hoping to try for a baby in the new year. No way was I throwing away our beautiful future just because he'd developed a silly crush.

Maybe I was being naive, but it took me a while to realize that he was leaving me.

I remember the details of our conversation so clearly. I even remember that his fingernails still had an arc of dirt buried deep, close to his skin, and that he smelled earthy, of fresh air and garden soil. He was so familiar to me and yet so like a stranger. I'd never seen him looking so torn and tormented.

"I do love you, Wren," he claimed, tears clumping his brown lashes together in spikes. "In some ways, I wish I'd never met her because I think you and I could have been happy. But lately I've started to wonder if we're really right for each other."

It had taken him meeting Nadine, working with her almost every day, to recognize how well suited they were, how they clicked on another level.

At that point, they hadn't even spoken to each other about how they felt. Nadine had taken some time off to go and stay with her parents and Scott had sensed it was because she wanted to get some distance from him to clear her head. But when she came in to work that day in April and handed in her resignation, he realized he couldn't let her go.

I asked him, tearfully, if he thought she was his soul mate, and when he met my eyes, his expression said it all.

I'd read about it in books, seen it in films: the protagonist who is in a relationship with someone who doesn't understand them. Finding love with someone who well and truly does. Nothing can stand in their way. The entire audience is rooting for them.

I never in a million years thought this would happen to me, that I'd be the one standing in the way of true love.

Agony and complete and utter helplessness engulfed me as the seriousness of our situation finally dawned on me. There was nothing I could do. There was no fight to be won. The love of my life was already lost to me.

Scott and Nadine are together now. I've seen them around town a few times and I'm always on my guard in case I bump into them, but the last straw came the week before last, when I was sitting in my favorite café opposite the Abbey Gate.

Suddenly they were spewed out of the Gate's mouth, hand in hand and smiling, the sun glinting off Nadine's blond hair as Scott guided her across the busy road. When they walked into the café and saw me sitting with my mum, Scott apologized and quickly backtracked, but catching his eye as he passed by my window, seeing his face, grim and drawn, made me feel physically sick.

"This town is far too small for the both of you, darling," Mum said with sympathy as I blinked back tears.

"Why should I be the one to leave?" I asked in a small voice.

"His landscape gardening business is here. He's not going anywhere anytime soon. Get away, Wren, even if only for a couple of weeks," she implored. "Put some distance between you, give your heart time to recover."

She was right. I did need a break from home, from work, from Scott, from walking the same streets that we used to walk together, back when he'd hold my hand and step in front of traffic for me.

So I called my dad that night and asked if I could visit.

***

Dad is hovering behind the rope when I walk out into Arrivals, his navy-and-red-checked shirt tucked into jeans.

At the sight of me, his face breaks into a wide grin, his heavily bristled cheeks seeming even rounder than they did when I last saw him at Christmas. He and his wife, Sheryl, went to Paris on holiday, so Scott and I caught the train over and spent some time with them there. This is my first trip back to America in two years.

"Hey, you!" he chirps.

"Hello, Dad."

I experience a flood of warmth as his arms close around me. I breathe in his familiar scent-soap and laundry detergent-and know that this will be the last time we hug until we're standing in this very airport in two weeks' time, saying goodbye. The realization gives me a pang as I withdraw.

His notoriously scruffy hair, once the same mid-brown shade as mine, is now riddled with gray. Although we both have hazel eyes, that's probably where our resemblance ends.
 
I don't have much in common with my mother, Robin, either, apart from the fact that we're both named after small birds. Mum likes flowing clothes and bright patterns; I like structured skirts and shirts in dark colors. Her features are warm and open while my face is narrower and, well, I once described it as "pinched," but she hotly refuted that, telling me I had fine bone structure, like an aristocrat, which made me laugh.

"How was your flight?" Dad asks buoyantly as he relieves me of my suitcase.

"Pretty good," I reply.

"Tired?"

"A bit."

"You can nap in the car. Our new home is a couple of hours away."

My half sister, Bailey, who's six years my junior, got married earlier this year and settled in her husband's hometown in Southern Indiana. Dad and Sheryl recently relocated to this same small town to be close to them.

There's a lot about this scenario that stings.

My dad is a devoted husband and father. But I don't have a whole lot of experience of him being like that. I do know that he loves me, but he's never really been there for me. He doesn't really know me. How could he when we live almost four thousand miles apart and spend no more than a couple of weeks a year in each other's company?

The July air when we step out of the airport terminal feels like a warm blanket being draped around my shoulders. Before long, we're on a three-lane highway heading away from Indianapolis. We're too far from the city to see its skyscrapers, but I remember them from previous shopping trips. Out here the landscape is mostly flat and far-reaching, peppered with big red barns and grain silos.

"How's Bailey settling into married life?" I ask, trying to ignore a small spike of jealousy.

I've never considered my beautiful half sister to be particularly competitive, so I'm sure she wasn't racing me down the aisle when she decided to tie the knot in Las Vegas, but now that my wedding has been called off, the ring on her finger does seem a little galling.

"She's happy," Dad replies with a shrug, turning down the air-con now that the car has cooled.

"Do you get on with Casey?"

I haven't even met Bailey's new husband yet. Scott and I were invited to the wedding, but with only a week's notice, we didn't feel it was expected of us to go. Bailey has always been impulsive.

"Everyone gets along with Casey," Dad replies. "He's a good guy."

"That's cool."

I don't mean for my voice to sound thin, but Dad shoots me a pained look.

"I was sorry to hear about Scott," he says. "I thought he was a good guy too."

"He was," I reply quietly. "I guess he still is." I swallow down the lump in my throat and add with forced flippancy, "Can't help who you fall in love with, right?"

Dad clears his throat. "Right."

We let that sit between us for a while.

My parents met when they were in their early twenties and traveling around Europe. They fell hopelessly in love, and when Dad's visa ran out, Mum moved to Phoenix, Arizona, to be with him. They were married and expecting me within a year.

It was a straightforward case of too young, too soon. At least, that's how Dad described it to me when, as a resentful teenager, I tried to get to the bottom of why his head was so easily turned by another woman, a professor at the University of Arizona where Dad was working as a groundskeeper.

It's always been a mystery to me how someone like Sheryl could fall for a man like Dad-she's nine years older and a whole lot wiser. I get the attraction part-objectively speaking, my dad was kind of hot: Sheryl used to take her coffee breaks outside in the gardens so she could chat with him.

Harder to understand is how an affair between an academic and a groundskeeper turned into something serious enough that they were willing to devastate his wife and child.

Because when Sheryl fell pregnant with Bailey, Dad chose them over us. Sheryl convinced Dad to move to Indiana to be closer to her family and found a position at the university in Bloomington. My heartbroken mother took me home to the UK, and Bailey got to grow up with my dad as her own.

This trip is not without its emotional complications.

***

I must nod off because it doesn’t feel like we’ve been traveling for two hours when Dad rouses me.

"We're coming into town," he says. "I thought you might like to see it."

I force my stinging, tired eyes to focus on the view outside my window. We're on a long, straight road, whizzing past fast food restaurant chains: Taco Bell, KFC, Hardee's, Wendy's. We pass a car wash and a garage and then the road morphs into a residential street with regular intersections. Some of the homes are two-story with gabled dormers, red-tiled roofs, and basement windows peeking out above neatly mowed lawns. Others are bungalows of white weatherboard with brightly painted shutters in lime green or cornflower blue. We crest a small hill and continue over the other side, where there's more of the same before we reach what Dad says is the "historical downtown."

Ahead is a large square around a central courthouse with a tall clock tower. The building gleams white in the fading sunshine, and as Dad drives around it, multiple Doric columns come into view.

"That's the Hoosier National Forest off in the distance," Dad says as we leave the town center and head through another residential sector where many of the homes have red, white, and blue banners hanging from their front porches. I've missed the Fourth of July celebrations by only a week.

"And Bailey and Casey live along there," Dad adds, nodding out the window.

There's a sign at the edge of the road that reads: Wetherill Farm-Pick Your Own, with an arrow pointing in the direction we're heading.

"Yours?" I ask.

"Yep." He nods proudly.

Beneath the cursive black-with-white-infill lettering are painted illustrations of fruit and vegetables. I make out peach, pear, apple, pumpkin, and watermelon before we drive past.
 
"You do watermelons too?"
 
"Not this year," Dad replies as we cross over a tumbling river on an old iron bridge that's painted rust red. "Only pumpkins for Halloween. The previous owners grew melons, but we figured we'd better give ourselves time to get to grips with the orchards first. Hopefully we won't get into trouble for false advertising," he jokes.

Mum bristled when I told her that Dad and Sheryl had bought a pick-your-own produce farm. She was a fruit picker at a citrus farm when we lived in Phoenix and she works at a garden center now. She's always loved being out in the open and tending to nature, even if the work itself isn't particularly challenging.

She once confided that she felt Dad had rubbed salt into her wounds when he left her not just for another woman, but for a professor. Now Sheryl has swapped academia for what is basically Mum's dream job. It's no surprise she feels sore.

Laid out before us on the other side of the bridge is farmland, vast and sprawling for miles. We drive alongside a field of something green and leafy for a short while before Dad takes a left onto a dirt track.

"Here's home," he says, turning right almost immediately into a long, tree-lined driveway.

There's an identical Wetherill Farm-Pick Your Own sign on the grassy verge and the drive splits, leading to a black wooden barn on the left, beyond which are fields of fruit trees. At the end of the right-hand fork is a two-story farmhouse fashioned out of light gray weatherboard. The left-hand third of it has a gabled front with three big windows. On the right, three smaller, matching gabled dormers protrude from the gray slate roof, beneath which runs a long veranda. The rose beds at the front of the house are bursting with pinky-orange blooms and there are three stone steps leading up to a door painted midnight blue.

This door opens as Dad cuts the engine. I reach for my handle and climb out of the car to greet Sheryl.