The stench of decaying seaweed hits me as I shut the car door behind me and make my way to the sea. The waves battle against one another as if in a fight to stay one step ahead of the other – on the cutting edge. Trends. What’s next? Keeping up with the Joneses. Knowing that if you fall behind, if you stop roaring, if you take just one second of silence, another wave will eat you alive, and you’re yesterday’s story. Done.

I roared for thirty years. Swallowed wave after wave, clapped rock after rock, raced against the fiercest and won. For a woman, I exceeded all expectations. But the tide has changed. Time has caught up with me. Cancer has found me.

Suddenly, my diary is full of hospital appointments, my phone is full of commiserations, and my brain…silence. I am close to being eaten alive. Something I never thought would happen. I thought I would be the one to decide. To step down, to open the path for younger blood. But let’s face it. I would have roared until the very end.

Control is a funny thing. You think you have it in the palm of your hand until it’s snatched away, and before you know it, it has you in its grip.

Perhaps that’s why this is happening to me. Happening. Not happened. It’s not over yet. It’s been found early. Early enough. Simply because I had a check-up. Because my weather-beaten assistant nudged me for the twentieth time. If it weren’t for her…Though, there’s no guarantee. So, I have finally been ordered to take it easy. To take that second of silence. To let the waves around me roar and lap gently on the shoreline. My career is likely over. All those years of battling. And it’s come down to one battle for my life.

‘Look at those waves, Peter!’ A young man strolls along the pebble-adorned sand with his son perched on his shoulders.

‘Can we paddle, Dad? Pleeease!’

They take their shoes off and stand, hand in hand, leaping over the small waves, squeals of delight, calm, reassured.

I sit on a rock further back, surrounded by thousands of stones, brown, white, grey, black, some big, some small, jumbled up together, and inhale the salty air deep into my lungs.

If I’d had a son or a daughter, I wonder what they would have looked like. The squeeze of my heart forces my gaze away. It was my choice not to take that path. My choice to be alone, to be married to my work. But now my work has been taken away from me…

My phone buzzes in my coat pocket, and I’m torn from another world. I expect to see clients, doctors, well-meaning friends, co-workers. But it’s my ex-husband.

‘Al.’

‘Hello.’ He clears his throat as though he didn’t expect an answer.

‘I haven’t heard from you in years.’

‘Your assistant rang me, Beth.’

The sound of silence.

‘Do you have time for a coffee?’ he asks.

I watch the crashing waves, a never-ending rendition. ‘I have time now.’

‘I’ve waited to hear those words for a very long time.’

I catch a cry before it falls out of my mouth. ‘Al…I’m…’

‘I always told you…’

‘You didn’t, surely not.’ One tear escapes down my cheek.

‘I signed those papers because it was what you wanted.’

The ocean becomes a blurry noise as my regret screams out.

‘I said I would wait,’ he says.

I daren’t move my mouth because what dare I say? It’s been five years since I told him if he loved me, he would agree to a divorce. I was the one who consumed our marriage with my work, I was the one who abandoned him for conferences and networking events, I was the one who said I wouldn’t sacrifice my work to give him a child. He quit his job because he didn’t think he had a choice. He wanted to give our marriage his attention. He wanted to believe that if he freed up his time, I would do the same, and we could slip back into what we had when we first met. But I told him he was a foolish man asking me to give up something that only a man could so easily get back. It wasn’t the same if I gave up my job. I wouldn’t get it back like he could get his back.

So, to me, that was the end. He wanted to hold me back. And like my father told me, ‘If you want to get anywhere in this world, you don’t let anyone hold you back’. But he wasn’t just anyone. He was my husband. He was the boy I fell in love with at the school dance. He’s the man who has loved me in the stormiest seas – the storm that I brewed myself.

‘I don’t deserve you,’ I manage, grasping a cold, smooth stone.

‘I didn’t marry you based on whether you deserved it or not. I didn’t fall in love with you based on whether you deserved it or not. And I won’t continue to love you based on whether you deserve it or not.’

I drop the pebble and pour decades of built-up pressure down the phone, weeping like a little girl, hugging the replied silence like an old friend.            

‘Beth,’ Al softly interjects.

‘I’m sorry,’ I croak, pulling a tissue out of my pocket.

‘I would like to see you.’

‘So would I.’

‘This won’t be easy, but…’

‘I’ll do anything.’

‘Once we heal your body, we’ll work on healing us.’

‘Us.’

‘I hope so.’

I dry my eyes with my sleeve, look out at the roaring waves, and thank God I’ve found the shore.