Falling for my Ex-Fiancee’s Best friend

It took forever, preparing to bury her father. Demelza had absolutely no idea what to do. She had cried her eyes and heart out the first time that she had heard the news, but now when they were in the final stages of preparation for her father’s burial, she was sober, morose. She was detached.

“Demelza, honey, could you please pass me the remote?” Nathan said.

Demelza was mute. Nathan walked in front of her. “Mel, you alright?”

She jerked away from him as if she had been shot. Nathan tried not to let the pain he felt by her little actions show on his face. Instead, he tried to get closer to her again.

“I was asking if you are alright.” He placed a hand on her thigh. “Are you alright? You don’t look so good.”

Demelza mumbled something he couldn’t hear and then she stood up, saying that she needed to boil water or something. Nathan sighed when she left the living room. He understood that he couldn’t rush her. She was going through a very sensitive, troubling time. Not everyone loses their fathers everyday. Not everybody could handle the grief associated with losing a loved one, especially if that loved one was dear.

At work, Demelza was worse. Her eyes were often glazed over as she worked, still in that daze. She typed like a robot, and Nathan had caught her more than once, staring with no particular aim at her screen. Or rather, through her screen. She looked as though she was seeing something that no one else was seeing.

The hospital had released the body, but the funeral arrangements still needed to be made.

Nathan was on the phone calling the people that would handle the events of the funeral ceremony when Demelza walked in. Nathan hadn’t heard her enter.

“No, black is too nondescript,” Nathan said into his phone. His chair was turned to the window behind him. “Can we not do something with a little more taste? Something that showed that this man mattered?

“I understand what you’re saying, but you need to listen to me. This is the father of my-this man was loved by his wife and daughter. Making everything all black would just be as bad as saying he was a nobody who got what he deserved. Do something about the color. Thank you. I_”Ccontent © exclusive by Nô/vel(D)ra/ma.Org.

“I don’t want my father buried; I want him to be cremated.” A wisp of a voice.

Nathan turned his chair immediately, allowing his eyes to lock with Demelza’s. “What was that, Mel?”

“I said, I want his body to be cremated.”

“I… uh. I can see that. Why do you want his body to be cremated?”

Demelza turned and left Nathan’s office as though she had not said anything at all. As if they had not been having a conversation. Nathan shook his head. There was no way that the man was getting a cremation. But as it turned out, over the next few days, that was all Demelza fought with him about.

She kept asking if he had called the crematory and booked an appointment and wondered if he could go to her place. She made all sorts of rubbish demands to the point that Nathan got tired. Nathan snapped. Demelza broke and shouted that he didn’t love her. And whenever Nathan tried to pacify her, she would break into tears and run away.

Nathan wished that there was something he could do for the grief she was going through. Just the other day, she had broken his favorite coffee mug at the office. There was an argument every other day now. And the worst of it was that Demelza still wasn’t talking to her mother. Harriet, Demelza’s step-mother had taken to cowering and hiding every time Nathan drove Demelza to her family’s house so that she could spend time with them.

Demelza was obsessed with the things her father had left behind: his bed, his clothes, the books… she hoarded everything as if he was a commodity that would soon expire. But that was just really black humor. The man had already expired. He had died and gone and left them-gone and left her, Demelza-alone in the world.

Nothing was the same anymore. Demelza’s crying episodes increased significantly. Now, she was crying every other day, even while she did mundane things and the memory of her father would suddenly bubble up to the surface. She would drop whatever she was doing and let the tears run down her cheeks.

One day after Nathan had driven her to her family’s house, she had gone straight to her father’s room. She had shrieked, and everyone thought that she was being attacked, but Demelza held her father’s clothes in her hand: a shirt and trouser that he had loved wearing while he was alive, and she shook them limply at Nathan and Harriet. On the bed, floor and everywhere else, she had strewn the man’s clothes about until the bedroom looked like a tornado had brewed right at its center.

“He’s leaving.” Demelza declared with wide eyes. “Daddy’s leaving his clothes. I can’t smell him anymore, I can’t_”

Nathan could not bear the pain. He closed the door with Demelza in the room. Harriet was resting against the wall outside, crying silent tears. Mr. Thorpes had been her husband. It must be equally difficult for her to also process his loss as grief.

Nathan hadn’t fully realized that Harriet was also mourning and grieving. Demelza had totally encompassed everybody else’s pain such that it was difficult to imagine that any other person in the world was sad except for her.

Several relatives, friends and well-wishers had called at the family house, expressing their deepest condolences and some others had made it all the way down to the house to commiserate with the family.

Slowly but surely, the day for the funeral approached. More and more people were coming into the house now and Nathan had had to keep Demelza out of the house for some time while Harriet entertained them.

The burial was on a Saturday and it didn’t rain. The sun was shining up in the sky, much too brightly for the grim affair that was the burial. They had proceeded straight from service to the cemetery, even though Nathan was not a very religious man.

The priest officiating had read some lines and asked if anyone else had anything to say about Mr. Thorpes, Demelza’s father. Everybody was dressed in black. Demelza’s eyes were stone-cold and hard; her mother’s face was full of tears.

They began to lower the casket into the ground. Dirt poured down and filled up the space, but nothing would penetrate the lonely space in Demelza’s heart. Nothing would fill it up again. Her father was gone and that was that. Somehow, the finality of seeing her father’s body being laid to rest in the ground sealed it for her.

That night, as Nathan held her, trying to comfort her, she cried like she hadn’t cried before. There had been a small fight before, because when Nathan had driven her back to his house, she had walked straight to the bar and began pouring out rum for herself. She had been about to down the first glass when Nathan, full of anger, slapped the glass out of her hand.

It shattered with a dramatic sound, spraying bits of glass and alcohol everywhere.

Demelza didn’t bother to look at Nathan’s face. She stretched her hand for the cask of rum, but Nathan swiped it from her hand.

“Enough!” He growled. He knew she was grieving, but he was not going to let her, a pregnant woman, pregnant with his baby. Even once thought that those were grounds to permit her drinking.

Demelza had never seen him this angry. She burst into uproarious laughter. Nathan clenched and unclenched his fists, wondering how best to deal with her. He pulled her in for a hug, not knowing what else to do. And into the hug, even as she fought him, her laughter turned into tears and Nathan held her even tighter.

She said, when she had stopped crying, “He needed me. And I wasn’t there.”

“It’s alright,” Nathan murmured into her hair.

She chuckled darkly. Her makeup had long since been smudged. “But it’s not alright. He had needed me, and I was not there, because I was with you-I was always with you.”

She broke free from Nathan’s grasp and looked into his eyes. Nathan looked back into her own eyes. Demelza stepped away.

“My father died because I wasn’t there with him when he needed me, when they all needed me. And I can’t think about that right now. Because it’s just too hurtful. It’s too painful.”

She sniffed and looked straight at Nathan. “I have to go.”

“Where?” Nathan asked, his voice painfully constricted.

“I don’t know yet. I just can’t stay here tonight.”

She picked up her bag and opened the door.

“I need some time, Nathan.”