I Found You - Lisa Jewell

‘Yes! Kirsty! She’s called Kirsty.’
Something passes over Alice’s face then, something cloudlike. ‘Oh,’ she says, ‘wow! That’s
amazing, Frank!’
‘I know,’ he says. ‘I think this might be it. I think everything’s going to start coming back now. Just
like you said it would.’
‘And who was she?’ she asks pensively. ‘Do you remember who she was?’
‘Not quite,’ he says. ‘But I remembered that I loved her. That I loved her very much. And that . . .’
He clutches at his heart again. The ache has come back at the thought of that sweet-faced girl from his
past. ‘And that I miss her. I really miss her.’
Alice stretches her arm across the back of Romaine’s chair and squeezes his shoulder softly. ‘Was
she your wife?’ she says, almost in a whisper.
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I really don’t know.’
‘Funny to think, isn’t it, that you might have a wife?’
He shrugs. It’s not funny, not really. It’s awful. He remembers what Jasmine said last night over
dinner, about how he was being cruel not finding out who he was, that there might be people worrying
about him. And until now he hasn’t been able to imagine what that might really mean. He’s felt nothing
for anyone beyond the people in the room with him. Now, suddenly, he loves someone from before.
He loves Kirsty.
He sees Alice force a smile. She rubs his shoulder and then swiftly brings her hand back on to her
lap.
The waitress arrives with a notepad and Frank turns to her to give his order, but not before noticing
Alice staring blindly into the middle distance, a film of tears across her eyes.
Alice doesn’t seek out Frank’s hand on their way home. The kids would freak out for a start, but
beyond that she doesn’t want to. It’s coming, she realises, the end of this thing; it’s sitting on the
horizon and she doesn’t like the look of it at all. It looks cruel and mean. It looks like her, sitting alone
in her room, cutting up maps to make art for people to give to people they love. It looks like her
watching TV on a crumb-strewn sofa, surrounded by stinky dogs and moody teenagers, and then going
to bed with a greyhound and waking up the next morning with greasy badger hair and not caring and
starting the whole thing all over again. It looks like this beautiful man with his autumn hair and his
gentle eyes and his warm breath and his strong hands walking out of her life and leaving her here, in a
life she was quite happy with before he turned up on the beach five days ago. It looks like the best
thing that could have happened to her at this exact moment in her life being snatched away before
she’s even had a chance to enjoy it.
She’s quiet on the walk home. Sadie limps along at her side. Jasmine has plugged herself back into
her music and is walking ahead, looking moody and vulnerable: a stance purposely affected, Alice
assumes. Kai is holding hands with Romaine and they’re chatting about this and that. Gulls weave and
swoop across the horizon where a giant cruise liner twinkles dully, so far removed from the
smallness and ancientness of Ridinghouse Bay that it looks like something from another planet.
‘Are you OK, Alice?’ asks Frank, looking down at her with soft, concerned eyes.
‘I’m fine,’ she says. ‘Just pensive. You know.’
He nods and looks into the distance; then he turns back and says, ‘She might be dead, you know?
The girl. Kirsty. Maybe she was my girlfriend when I was young. I mean, she looks really young. A