Eight Perfect Hours by Lia Louis

Epilogue

The sun is beginning to go down, painting the train station in a marmalade glow. Rush hour over, and one single bouquet of flowers sits beside me in a bucket. Mine. My asters, from the man I love. I sit on the tiny little round stool in my kiosk. I closed half an hour ago, but I just want to sit here. Take it in, my first day as a business owner; take in my life, as the sun goes down, marking the end of another day.

I take out the gift from Sam and unwrap the paper, and of course, it’s what I expect it to be. But it’s not a photo album. It’s a photo book, bound, like a paperback novel. I take a deep breath, listen to the rumble of a train approaching, the tweeting of birds, bedding down, the chugging of a shop’s shutter going down. I turn the page.

The first photo is Daisy’s feet in pink tatty Converse on green frosty grass. The next is a deep blue sky, a blurred mass. The next, the college, all sandy brick and railings. And then: there we are. Daisy and me. Smiling, tight arms enveloped around each other, a tangle, cheek to cheek. Love. Friendship. The world at our feet. And it isn’t hard to look at it, as I thought it would be. It doesn’t crumple me into tears like I thought it would. It only makes me smile, makes my heart swell, with the love for her. With hers, for me. That I know how it feels to love someone, like I loved her.

Another photo of the sky – the moon this time, pearlescent and glowing. Daisy always loved the moon. Said it made her feel small and insignificant when the world was on her shoulders. Then Lee. Bradley Goody. Aged 18. Blond, blinking, his eyes closed, cheeks bitten by the cold. And beside him, young, tall and skinny Sam, his large arm wrapped around Lee’s shoulders. I stroke a thumb over it. Who’d have known we’d end up like this – that we’d end up here. Me, and the boy in the photograph.

I flick through the pages. I’d forgotten the awful quality of some of these old photos – wrong sort of light, the slip of a flash on, when it should be off, the blur, the orbs of light. Daisy would love the new cameras we have on our iPhones. She’d document her whole life. She’d be an influencer, I bet, because you couldn’t help but watch her. I’d give anything to watch her do an Instagram story, or a post, all poetic in the caption, and all style in black Doc Martens and long flashy skirts and sunglasses against a graffitied wall in the photo.

And then there it is. The picture I was so sure was a snapshot into my future. My forever. Ed and me. Our faces pressed together, young and happy, our fingers entwined, and in the background, the white glowing plate of a full moon and crowds of kids, young and happy too, like us. But my eyes find something, at the same time my heart locks into place. Just on the left, distant and blurred, standing on the outskirts of a crowd but unmistakably, one hundred per cent him — Sam. Sam Attwood. In the background, small, in the distance, but inches away from the image of me.

Sam and me. Me and Sam, in a photograph. The photograph of my forever.

‘Hey, you,’ he says now, popping his head around the door, a delicious smile on his face. ‘You ready?’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I’m ready.’