Page 1 of The Fall I Fell

Prologue

Two years ago

The floor of the treehouse never made a good bed. The cold planks, smoothed by years of growing feet, groaned as I stretched against their grain. I blinked into sunlight that blinded me through the gaps in the roof. Yet, somehow, that was the best sleep I had had in weeks. Perhaps it was the exhaustion of yesterday, or maybe all of the nights I’d laid awake crying had finally caught up to me. Still, I stayed there, on those planks, just a little while longer, ignoring the aching of my joints.

For just a moment, I didn’t remember. Wrapped up in the light, the smell of the last dregs of summer air coming in through the window, I clung to those fleeting moments of rest that had been so rare of late. Then, like a change in the wind, it all came flooding back. Granny. Her life’s most precious photos and the letters in that box that lay scattered around me. Jacob’s arms holding me in the dark, and his lips, and the feeling of finally—

I sat up and called his name, though I already knew from the draught about me that I was alone. The night before played in my mind, in fragments at first, of dances, of tears, of quiet embraces, of lips too desperate to wait any longer. Then I remembered it so clearly. I could feel the touch of him on my skin as the exhaustion took us both and I fell asleep in his arms, and he stayed. He had stayed. I looked for any sign of him out of the window. The September morning clung to the warmth of the summer, but the leaves and their dying orange tips told the real story. The farm was yet to stir. Silence fell across the landscape, and Jacob was still nowhere to be seen.

Many times in my life I had questioned whether he was just a dream, but this time I knew that all of it was real, painfully real. He had been here. He had held me, kissed me, loved me. Surely, that meant something. He was no phantom, and it was no dream, so why was it that I was alone?

All the pieces of Granny’s memories that were scattered around the floor quivered against one another in the breeze, hissing in whispered conversation. I gathered them as carefully as I could, saving the stray sheets from being carried away in the wind. No matter how hard I tried to coax the lid back onto the shoe box, it wouldn’t sit flat. The sight of it, fit to burst with photos a plenty, was rather fitting. Granny’s life was far too full to fit into any box.

Then, from the corner of my eye, I spotted it.

A single sheet of paper, crumpled into a ball, tucked in the shadow of the same chest where we used to leave notes for each other when we were children. Its bright white colour glowed in the early light, so different from the yellowed envelopes of Grandad’s old letters.

My stomach dropped at the sight of it, as though I already knew what weight it held. I think I knew from the moment I opened my eyes and found him gone. But still I scrambled to unravel it, because that is the thing about love: in your mind, you know the truth, you know what will come will hurt you, but there’s always that hope that this time it just might be different, that you’ll get your happy ending.

I smoothed the paper out against my knee. Two words in his handwriting – I would know it anywhere, all those cramped joined-up letters with never quite enough space for the apostrophe. Two words, and nothing else.

I’m sorry

Chapter 1

Now

Though it follows all of the same seasons as home, the countryside never changes. It hides beneath a blanket of snow in the winter, scorches under the sun in the summer, and blooms in a rainbow in the spring. But still, there’s something constant about it, as though it stays still as the world around it bends, twists, and breaks.

At least, that’s what I used to think. Every summer for almost ten years, we’d visit Granny and Grandad on their farm to spend our time out in the fields, filling our lungs with enough fresh air to flush out all of the smog of London.

As Mum drives, I see the apple tree that grew the fruit that Callum lost his tooth into when we were eight, and the gaps in the wheat fields that were tracks for races I always lost. We pass by the streams where we caught fish with our little makeshift nets. But the childish wonder of staring out the window and dreaming of what adventures lay ahead hasn’t quite hit me the same this time around.

Callum sits beside me, his headphones stuffed into his ears so he doesn’t have to listen to mum’s podcast on the aux. I tuned it out two hours ago, but now the dull vocal fry of the host discussing ‘how to beat corporate burnout’ is starting to grate on me. Plucking a headphone from Callum, I pop it in my ear and his audiobook on the Tudor dynasty is quickly paused and swapped out for our shared playlist with an eye roll.

‘Ugh, skip this one,’ I mumble about the next four songs.

On the fifth, my brother snaps back. ‘You’re really annoying, you know that.’ He shakes his head. ‘Every one of those songs was one you added.’

They were all songs played at Granny’s funeral, but Callum doesn’t make the connection, and I don’t tell him either. Instead, I stick out my tongue and tell him to skip the next one. He doesn’t protest, nor does he shake me off when I lay my head on his shoulder.

It’s been two years since I’ve been back in this part of the country. Two years since Granny died, two years since Jacob Thorogood broke my heart, and two years since my life felt truly whole.

The landscape hasn’t changed, no. But everything is different.

Callum tried to convince me to come back with him last summer. He’s better at dealing with things than me. He’s a ‘grab the bull by the horns’ kind of guy, but despite being his twin in every other sense of the word, this is where I am his opposite. I didn’t return last year.

This year, I have no choice.

When the car stops, Callum hops out of the car with the same excitement as always. Arriving at the farm always felt like Christmas when Granny was alive, but now I can’t bring myself to follow him.

‘Ava?’ Mum turns to me from the front seat. ‘We’re here …’ She says it as though I was too away with the fairies to notice.

She has a nervous smile on her face, the same one she’s had for the last few weeks as we’ve slowly packed our home into boxes and left a life behind. It’s her ‘brave face’. She wore the same one at Granny’s funeral, as though she believes that letting her smile drop for even a second would make everyone else spontaneously burst into tears.

I don’t reply, only sit stubbornly in the back, my arms folded like a toddler on the verge of a tantrum. Mum sighs. She does that a lot these days.

‘Come on, Ava. You can’t just sit here. We need to start unloading.’ Mum’s patience is wearing thin. She was the same back at home, packing boxes as though it was nothing, growing more annoyed as I stared at my empty cardboard, trying not to cry.