The Things We Need to Say: An emotional, uplifting story of hope from bestselling author Rachel Burton

On Sunday morning when she had been talking to Jamie about it, when Karen Barden was just a woman who worked in the village pub who occasionally flirted with her husband, she had felt foolish. Foolish about how nervous flying alone at the age of thirty-eight made her feel. But she barely notices anything as she drifts through passport control, through security and through the boarding gate. Bigger things have taken over from her fear of flying and now she is high in the air, her ears popping and the man in the seat behind her digging his knees into her back.

She can still feel Will’s hand on her arm trying to prevent her getting into the taxi. It would have been so easy to go with him, to send the cab away and take his hand. To walk back into the house with him, forgive him, start again.

That’s what she wanted after all wasn’t it? To start again. To try again.

But even if Will hadn’t done what he’d done, even if she hadn’t found out about it, she did have to come to Spain. The reasons for leading this yoga retreat were still there. Over the last few years Fran has felt as though she has been losing her way, her essence. She wants this retreat to help her find out who she is again, to help her rebuild herself. She had been excited at the thought of an adventure on her own, despite her nerves. She had been looking forward to some time away. Now she doesn’t know what to feel.

Will had always supported her in everything she had wanted to do. They’d always supported each other. They were Will and Fran; they were a team – together they could weather the highs and the lows. They hadn’t expected so many lows, but she never expected the possibility of facing life as only one half of that team either.

She remembers when she first mentioned teaching yoga. She used to go to a lunchtime yoga class twice a week at the gym near her office. It was the class that Will complained she was always late back from, in the days when she was just his secretary. It was perfect – it stretched her body and relaxed her mind halfway through a stressful day. Her sanity, and the sanity of the rest of her colleagues, depended on it.

One week the regular yoga teacher was away. Fran often found herself disappointed when this happened. It always left her with a strange sense of loss, an echo of how she felt after her mother died. She sees it now, sometimes, in the eyes of her own students when she tells them she won’t be there the next week and another teacher will take the class. She knew she shouldn’t be attached to one teacher and one style of teaching, but she always found it hard to let go.

She’d hated the yoga class that Thursday lunchtime. She’d never hated a yoga class in her life before. She’d found herself, halfway through, uncharacteristically and unapologetically angry. She had done something unthinkably rude, something she’d never done before.

She’d walked out of the class before it had finished.

Fran was the sort of person who stayed in the cinema until the bitter end even when the film was long and boring and she couldn’t stand it. She always finished books, even when she lost interest in the characters on page twenty, and when it came to yoga classes she considered herself the mistress of etiquette. She always turned off her phone, never chatted, always arrived early and never, ever left before the end.

She’d tried to explain to Will what it was she’d hated so much about it, tried to make him understand something that she didn’t really understand herself.

‘I could do better,’ she’d said.

Will smiled. ‘I know you could,’ he’d replied. ‘So why don’t you?’

There were so many reasons why Fran didn’t think she could. She considered herself uncoordinated and ungraceful. She didn’t think she looked like a yoga teacher should look. She swore too much and drank too much red wine and was married to a divorce lawyer.

But Will had never been a fan of excuses. He didn’t put up with them. He liked challenges and pushing yourself harder and always reaching your goal. He liked to be the best, to win.

And most of all Fran knew that he wanted her to be happy and healthy and less stressed. They wanted to start a family and by then they were both beginning to realise it wasn’t going to be as easy as they’d hoped. Fran had gone down to working part time at the law firm she’d moved to after she stopped working for Will, but she knew he wanted her to take some time out. In his mind this was the perfect answer – a less stressful life for Fran while she still got to do something she loved, something she was interested in.

Fran had signed up for yoga teacher training. She was terrified. But she was forced to look inside herself and face that fear. To learn to stand up in front of a class of people and share with them the thing she loved most in the world. Will always knew she could do it and eventually she believed she could as well.

Together they could do anything. Or so she used to think.

As the plane flies over the Pyrenees towards Barcelona – somewhere so full of memories and that cycle of hope that came to nothing – she didn’t know how she was meant to feel. She didn’t know what to do with her sadness; she didn’t know where to put it. There was the sadness for what Will had done, but also the sadness for what had happened before, the dreams they had shared that had been torn apart.

She looked out of the little plane window at the mountains below her and blinked back her tears. Crying always made her feel stupid.

Will (#ulink_900c4ebe-6af4-526f-b561-7e60118f21cc)

He stands up and walks over to the medicine cabinet looking for the painkillers he’d hidden in there last summer, vowing to stop taking them by the handful. He’d meant to start seeing the osteopath again, to start looking after himself, but he’d just never got around to it. Looking after himself had stopped seeming important.

But he can’t cope another second with this headache pounding behind his eyes. He’d lain awake all night in the spare room, his jaw clenched, feeling the headache suck the life out of him. And now Fran has gone and he’s damned if he’s going to put up with this pain. In half an hour the sweet release of codeine will take him.

He finds the pill bottle at the back of the bathroom cabinet and swallows two dry. As an afterthought he takes a third and puts the bottle back, closing the cabinet door and looking at himself in the mirror. He sees his father looking back and closes his eyes. He can’t stand the way he is looking more like his father as he gets older. He can’t stand the way he’s started acting like his father, despite every effort he’s made to be a better man, a kinder man, a better husband.

A better father if he’d been given the chance.

He opens his eyes and looks at himself again. The years of headaches, the years of medication, the years of heartache are taking their toll now. No matter how far he runs, how well he keeps himself in shape, how much cricket he plays, he can’t stop time.

Perhaps it is too late to try again. Perhaps it always has been.

He hadn’t seen Karen again for several weeks after that first time in the shop. The next time he’d bumped into her he’d apologised for being so rude the first time they’d met. They had chatted for a while and Will was glad of the company, glad of the distraction. Karen had made him smile and it had been nice to smile again.

It took him longer than it should have done to realise that she was flirting with him. She was nearly twenty years younger than he was and it massaged his ego to think someone so young could find him attractive.

But the flirting had turned from harmless fun to what seemed, to Will, to be a full-on seduction – and to his shame he’d found himself reciprocating. Sometimes she would ask him to help her out in the house, things her husband would have done for her if he hadn’t left. He would always remind her that he was married, that his wife wasn’t well. Flirting was one thing, consciously going over to the house of the woman who was flirting with him was quite another.

But by October he’d felt as though Fran should be feeling better, that by then things should be changing. He had given up all hope of the life he had planned and the only way he could move on was to let go of the past. He had wanted his wife back and he couldn’t understand why she hadn’t wanted the same thing. He should never have shouted at her, never have tried to force her to do something she wasn’t ready to do.

He had told Fran the truth when he said he hadn’t planned to go to Karen’s when he’d walked out on her that night. He hadn’t known where he was going. He wondered sometimes, if he could do everything all over again would he do things differently?

He had been shaking when he arrived on that night last October, and soaked through from the rain. He hadn’t even stopped to put on a coat. Karen had fetched a towel and poured him a glass of wine and he’d told her about what he’d done, the argument he’d had with Fran, how he’d walked away. They stood in Karen’s kitchen facing each other, leaning against opposite countertops. He’d talked; she’d listened. He’d told her about everything that had happened that summer, everything that had happened over the last seven years, about how he felt his heart would never heal, about how he felt as though his marriage was over.

When he’d finished they both stood in silence. He had stared at her as though he couldn’t believe he’d said so much. But it had felt good to talk; Fran never wanted to talk. It was months later that Will realised, too late as it turned out, that Fran just hadn’t been ready and he hadn’t had the patience to wait for her. He’d betrayed Fran in so many ways that night.

He never thought he’d cheat on his wife, but when Karen walked over to him that evening Will had thought she was going to kiss him and he didn’t think he was going to stop her. Instead she had dropped to her knees in front of him. He was hard before she’d unbuttoned his jeans.

Just before he came he’d caught sight of his reflection in Karen’s kitchen window and remembered the fragment from the Shakespeare play he’d studied for A Level flashing through his head.

Foolish fond old man.

Afterwards, as he’d done up his jeans and swallowed the rest of his wine in one gulp, he hadn’t been able to look at her. She’d turned her back on him to make it easier. She’d finished her own wine as though to take away the taste of him.

‘I have to go,’ he’d said. ‘I shouldn’t be here. I don’t know what I was thinking. I have to get back to my wife.’

As he’d walked home in the rain he told himself that he would end it there. He hadn’t, and he would never forgive himself for that.

He still doesn’t know why he did it, why he went that first night or why he went back. He was desperate for someone to hold him, to tell him that everything would be all right. But he hadn’t realised until it was too late that the only person who could do that was Fran. All Will had ever wanted was Fran. A life he hadn’t planned on was infinitely better than a life without Fran. He should have told her that every day.

Standing now in Fran’s bathroom, in front of the mirror, he slowly starts to pick up the bottles and jars of creams and gels and liquids that Fran keeps on the shelf above the sink. He feels the weight of the blue glass in his hands and is suddenly overcome with the sense of the irreparable nature of the damage he has caused. Anger and frustration rise up in him like fire and without knowing what he is doing he throws the blue glass jar at the mirror, listening with satisfaction to the sound of glass shattering glass. He throws another and another listening to the sound that splinters the claustrophobic silence of the house. He used to be one of the best spin bowlers in Suffolk; every jar hits home.

When he’s done he stands, breathless, listening to the vestiges of the shattering noises echo around the house. When he looks up he catches sight of himself in the broken mirror once more.

Foolish fond old man.

Fran (#ulink_a1b92246-cd27-505e-b0a7-d8b73a18fe1d)

As she sees her suitcase travel towards her on the luggage carousel, Fran steps forward to retrieve it. She barely has the energy to drag it towards her and pull it through customs. Will wasn’t the only one who hadn’t slept the night before. She had lain awake for most of the night, turning everything over in her mind. Part of her wishes she hadn’t found out, wishes that Will had played cricket the day before, that it hadn’t rained, that he hadn’t forgotten to take his phone out with him when he went for a run. But part of her knows it was inevitable that she found out, that she never had a choice.

She is tired and hot and feeling a little nauseous, but she knows she needs to pull herself together. She knows she needs to be at her strongest over the next few days, both for herself and for the people coming on the yoga retreat. She thinks about them as she wheels her suitcase out into the main concourse of Barcelona airport – of Elizabeth and Constance and Katrin and David, regulars at her yoga classes in Cambridge, and of the friends they will be bringing. She already feels a sense of support at the thought of seeing their familiar faces the next day.

She stops to buy a bottle of water using the euros that Will had brought home for her on Friday night. Friday night seems like a lifetime ago, when Will was still the man she could trust with anything, when they still had each other. She thinks again about how they had planned this trip together, covering every eventuality. It was the first thing they had done together since the previous summer. She remembers sitting at Will’s desk as they booked her tickets and sorted out her travel insurance, and thinking how together they could find a new kind of normal, how they could be happy again if they wanted to be. But now she doesn’t know what’s going to happen any more.

She realises she is standing in the middle of the arrivals hall of a busy airport getting in everyone’s way as she drifts off into memories. She has these moments a lot these days, as though she is watching her life from the outside, as though she has become slightly disconnected from the world.

When her mother died she’d felt as though everything had changed. Their bond had been special and when it disappeared Fran felt as though her safety net had been taken away. As though her lifeline back to the mothership had been severed and she had been left drifting in space. But since last summer she feels more like the mothership, sitting motionless and calm while life carries on around her, just outside of her reach.