This is how it should have happened:

He would continue his meteoric rise to fame in a world renowned fashion house. You would work long shifts at the hospital. You’d both be busy but you’d make it work, even if that meant that some weeks you mostly communicated through notes on the fridge and hurried phone calls between meetings and patients. You’d get married without ever being formally engaged. It’d just happen and no one would question it. Everyone had been waiting for you to get your act together for years. You’d adopt kids, three eventually. His work would mean he could stay at home with them and work on designs in his study while they were quiet. If he needed to go into the office, he’d take the car and the sling or the stroller and drive into the city with the kid(s) to show them off to his colleagues with a proud grin. Meanwhile, you’d be starting to regret specialising in paediatrics, because you’d see kids with every terrible illness under the sun and start becoming paranoid about your own. You’d freak out if they so much as sneezed and he’d tell you that you were overreacting, but you’d already know that really. Gradually, the kids would grow up and leave home and go off to college. Your eldest daughter would want to be a fashion designer like her dad, and she’d have enough artistic flair and family contacts to make it big. Your middle son would want to be a high school science teacher, but a few big research breakthroughs would land him a position in a cutting-edge lab. Your youngest daughter wouldn’t have a specific ambition like her siblings, but she’d love books and people and end up double majoring in literature and psychology. She would end up writing psychological thrillers for a living, combining her passions and talents in the best way, and you would be her biggest fan.

He wishes that was how it happened.

His coffee is really good. He buys this expensive blend from somewhere far flung and exotic, and always adds a shot of the vanilla syrup he managed to liberate twelve bottles of when his favourite coffee shop closed down. It’s strong yet sweet, with just enough bitterness to keep it this side of too sweet for the early morning. The prospect of the coffee is sometimes the only reason he gets out of bed, and he’s scared of what will happen when the syrup runs out. He knows you’d love it.

He still takes two mugs out of the cupboard.

He can feel age creeping into his bones. It’s only just starting to become something he notices, but every time a joint creaks, or a muscle stiffens, or he gets out of breath too quickly while running, he’s reminded of you. Of how you should be right next to him, running a little faster and a little further and all the while teasing that you’re younger and he’s such an old man, when there’s only a handful of months between you.

You were supposed to grow old together.

He used to drink. Alcohol helped, or it felt like it helped. Strong whisky had been his drink of choice. Always classy, even at the precipice of alcoholism. He liked the burn in his throat, the floating sensation in his limbs and the way it made his brain shut up and stop thinking about you for a little while. It was just at night at first, to help him sleep. But then he started to add it to his coffee, then started hiding some in a water bottle to carry around with him, and it started to feel less like helping and more like needing. It was a doctor telling him that if his liver would fail soon if he carried on that made him stop. The doctor looked a bit like you, when you were younger. He felt like it was a sign.

You hated whisky.

He sometimes gets asked out. A bit less now than he did, but still sometimes. Occasionally, he goes. He lets a guy buy him dinner and maybe they dance and maybe he goes home with them. Sometimes he has sex with them, but he never stays long. It’s just sex, and that’s okay because you never just had sex. You always made love. Even when it was rough and hard and dirty, it was still more than just sex. He doesn’t kiss anyone. That was just for you. He misses that, the intimacy of a kiss.

Your kisses always made his stomach swoop.

He looks through photos of you sometimes. Just to see your face and remember. He can still hear your laugh; the full, unrestrained belly laugh you would only ever let out for him. He has videos of you too, but he’s never been able to watch them. He knows he’d break at the sound of your voice, and he’s spent too long making himself unbreakable for that. He keeps a photograph in a frame on his nightstand. It’s old now, faded slightly. In it, you’re draped around each other, grinning broadly in your formal wear – you in a tux, him in his kilt, adorned with his plastic crown and staff. You’re so happy, just two teenagers in love.

You were so brave that night.

There are still pieces of you around. Your clothes are still in the closet – he still has the spare bedroom as his dressing room. It was going to be a nursery one day. At times, he’ll open the closet and look at your clothes, breathing deeply to try to find the scent of you on them. There are things scattered around the apartment: your half-used hair gel with your finger prints still dragged up the sides of the tub, an old notebook with your scrawl over the pages, a bottle of your cologne. He seems to come across something new of yours whenever he’s feeling particularly low. He doesn’t believe in God and he’s never believed in anything after, but he still takes comfort in thinking that you might still be there.

You always left your things everywhere.

One day, he takes the big white folder from the shelf where it has sat untouched for so long that it’s gone yellow. It started out as his but it quickly became yours too. He looks through the pages and cries a lot but laughs at your little notes and scribbled attempts to be helpful. The folder has all of your plans. The venues you liked, the colour scheme he had decided on when he was six, the sketched suit designs with fabric samples. Suburban areas of New York you liked, with a rating system based on things like the distance into the city and the quality of the schools in the area. There’s a list of names; the ones you liked are red, the ones he liked are blue and the ones you could agree on are green. You didn’t know if you’d get the chance to name the kids you planned to adopt, but you wanted to be prepared. Everything in the folder is what was meant to happen. He’s sobbing so hard by the time he reaches the end that he nearly throws up.

You always held him tightly when he cried.

At night, he curls onto his side and reaches out across the bed to feel the cold sheets where you should be and wishes he still drank because it’s nights like these he needs the whisky more than ever. He still doesn’t understand how it’s fair that he fought so hard and dreamt so big and planned a life with you, only to lose you before you were even thirty. He’s getting older and older and it’s been twenty years, it’s been thirty, fifty. He knows precisely one thing with any degree of certainty. Even if he lives to be a hundred and two, he will never move on. He will never get over you.