Page 45 - The Midnight Library

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Regret Overload

She’d met Dan while living with Izzy in Tooting. Big smile, short beard.

Visually, a T V vet. Fun, curious. He drank quite a bit, but always seemed
immune to hangovers.
He had studied Art Histor y and put his in-depth knowledge of Rubens
and Tintoretto to incredible use by becoming head of PR for a brand of
protein flapjacks. He did, however, have a dream. And his dream was to run

a pub in the countr yside. A dream he wanted to share with her. With Nora.
And she got carried away with his enthusiasm. Got engaged. But suddenly
she had realised she didn’t want to marr y him.

Deep down, she was scared of becoming her mother. She didn’t want to
replicate her parents’ marriage.
Still staring blankly at e Book of Regrets, she wondered if her parents
had ever been in love or if they had got married because marriage was
something you did at the appropriate time with the nearest available person.

A game where you grabbed the first person you could find when the music
stopped.
She had never wanted to play that game.

Bertrand Russell wrote that ‘ To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear
life are already three-parts dead’. Maybe that was her problem. Maybe she
was just scared of living. But Bertrand Russell had more marriages and
affairs than hot dinners, so perhaps he was no one to give advice.

When her mum died three months before the wedding Nora’s grief was

immense. ough she had suggested that the date should be put back, it
somehow never was, and Nora’s grief fused with depression and anxiet y and