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The blood draining from his face.
That hearing that song crippled him with pain?
made him want to curl into the fetal position?
Andrew’s eyelid was twitching uncontrollably. He
Andrew followed her, a waft of fetid air hitting him before he’d even crossed the threshold.
In among the pages detailing uneventful holidays and unremarkable school sports days there was a photo of the family, their faces looking pixelated from where the paper had been scrunched up.
Peggy asked, her tone deliberately casual.
There were tears pooling in her eyes and she was taking in deep lungfuls of air.
all designed to cheer him up, without even a hint of patronizing him or doing the sad head tilt.
Andrew felt a lump forming in his throat.
Andrew wasn’t quite sure what the look Peggy was giving him meant,
where Andrew thought he might have said something far too weird,
And that’s when I noticed people avoiding me, deliberately not catching my eye.
that I’d done something wrong and was inconveniencing everybody somehow.
Peggy gave Andrew a look as if wondering whether she should continue.
“Let’s just say kindness wasn’t exactly i...
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and he left us in doubt as to exactly how we’d let him down.
She talked about him like he’d been God’s gift, as if he were a war hero who’d drifted out to sea on a raft never to be heard of again, despite the fact he was shacked up with this woman four streets away.”
People think loss is the same for everyone, but it’s different in every case, you know?”
“Top stuff,”
He had no real idea what was fashionable these days.
Occasionally he thought about replacing some of his particularly old stuff, but then he’d see someone young and apparently trendy wearing a shirt that looked exactly like one he’d hung on to since the early nineties, so what was the point?
with 50 percent accuracy—“beer and good times,”
If he got there too early he’d be forced into making conversation. Too late and he’d feel like an interloper.
Andrew edged around to the foot of the bed.
He was really going to have to say something now before he bottled it. “So
search with the requisite solemnity.
“Well it’s clear to me that the bloke had life absolutely figured out,”
Choked on a marshmallow?
glut
at times Andrew and Peggy regretfully sacrificed respectfulness for pragmatism,
soul...
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maiso...
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complete with a dead rat sporting a grotesque g...
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every room feeling pregnant w...
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she’d been forced to act on her ultimatum,
loos
with puffy red eyes
He even attempted to bake some biscuits, but the end results had resembled something a child might use for snowman’s eyes, so he had abandoned them in favor of shop-bought.
And so began a series of agonizing evenings spent trying to choose songs that perfectly encapsulated Ella’s essence.
He wanted to capture the whole spectrum—upbeat
u...
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The outtakes and the between-song badinage meant as much to him as the most soaring melody.
He’d just have to hope what he’d chosen would have the right sort of alchemy to make it a source of comfort to Peggy
his stomach rumbling angrily,
ensconced
he affected an air of nonchalance to try to hide the nagging voice telling him this might have been a weird thing for him to have done.
“I solemnly swear to listen to it within the next few days, or weeks, or whatever.”
He realized Peggy was looking at him with a twinkle in her eyes.
Andrew blew a dismissive and unintentionally wet raspberry.
