The One We Fell in Love With by Paige Toon Page A

Angus, knowing with absolute certainty that I’m on the right
path.
    I doubt Angus would understand my mindset so I’ve begged Josie to tell him I’ve gone shopping if he calls. I hate the thought of him freaking out when I’m sure there’s
nothing for him to worry about. I love him so much – I always have, and never more than I do right now. When I think about what we’ve gone through, how many years we’ve been
together, I can’t imagine ever throwing it away...
    It was Dad’s death that brought Angus and me back together. We lost him suddenly in the spring, six months after I returned from France. I was only nineteen and it came as such a shock.
Dad was fit and healthy – the least likely person to have a heart attack, it seemed. And then Mum woke up one day to find him gone, just like that.
    Angus came to the funeral. We had vowed to stay friends, but he and I hadn’t spoken much in the months since I’d got back. Seeing his beautiful but bloodshot eyes did something to
me. Maybe it was my grief, but everything I’d felt for him came rushing back. I desperately wanted him to hold me, to be close to him again, and when he took me in his arms, I felt safe. He
held me tight while I cried into his shoulder, and I didn’t want to ever let him go again. I think I fell back in love with him then, right there, on that spot – if I’d ever
fallen out of love with him in the first place.
    We were both at different universities in London, so after the funeral, we saw each other regularly and soon it felt as though we’d never been apart. I’d told Angus about Remy, but
we rarely spoke about him or the couple of girls from university that he’d had fleeting relationships with – we were both keen to move forward and that suited me fine. Angus finished
his journalism course a year before I completed my degree, but instead of moving back to Manchester to be close to his mum, which was always his intention, he found an apartment in Kentish Town, an
easy tube ride away from my campus, and we moved in together.
    Mum said I was too young to be living with a boy – even Angus, whom she adored – but her heart wasn’t fully in the argument. I think she was glad that I had someone to love,
someone to help me come to terms with our loss. She missed Dad terribly, and I was still beside myself with grief.
    Living with Angus fortified our relationship, and when Rose finished university and moved to London, too, my bond with her strengthened. She got a job at the Whittington Hospital in Highgate,
where Mum used to work, and the three of us hung out regularly. Angus to her was like the big brother she’d never had, always checking out her boyfriends and making sure she felt safe.
    But Eliza kept her distance, and even to this day I feel a block between us. When I think about the years we spent as teenagers, lying on my bed with our limbs intertwined, reading magazines or
pouring our hearts out over the boys we fancied, my chest hurts. She’s grown up, gone her own way, and I still miss her so much. I miss the little girl that she was, the little girl who once
punched Heidi Maunder in the face because she picked on me.
    But you see, the thing that I couldn’t admit to Josie at dinner yesterday, or to anyone else in the world, is this: I know that Eliza keeps her distance because she’s in love with
Angus.
    And I know that he has feelings for her, too.
    I’ve seen it on their faces and in their demeanour when they’re near to each other, and a few years ago, it struck me like a bolt out of the blue that something had happened between
them when I was on my gap year. The feeling was intuitive, and I sensed that they’d both laid whatever had passed to rest, but it made everything clear.
That
was why Eliza had begun
to detach herself from me. I’d always thought she was bitter about being left behind at the age of eighteen – and maybe she was, a little. But the truth was entirely more complex. I