Always You and Me

by Dani Atkins

‘Please, Lily. For me. Go and see him. Listen to what he has to say. And then, when you’ve heard it . . . forgive him. And then forgive me.’

There is probably a special place in hell for people who lie to someone who’s dying, and I was already halfway there.

Adam Tennant – my husband, my best friend, and the love of my life – simply stopped being.

I learnt that you can’t outrun grief because it always knows where to find you, but you can keep yourself so busy that it can only squeeze into the gaps of your life, instead of burying you under an avalanche of sadness.

Overnight Josh had gone from one of the most important people in my life to someone I used to know.

‘Some days he does. And some days he doesn’t. His memory is like an old pair of binoculars that look into the past. Sometimes – on a good day – it will be able to focus sharply for a moment or two, but most of the time what he sees is fuzzy at best.’

‘Nobody wants to hear about him. They don’t ask you what he was like, or what were the things he loved. No one wants to know what made him laugh or drove him crazy. They edit him out of every conversation because they believe it’ll be too painful for you to talk about him. But really, the most painful thing of all is never getting to talk about him.’ ‘You can talk to me.’