“No? I must’ve got that wrong, then.”
Elliot shrugs, as if he doesn’t care either way. It makes me feel irrationally crushed.
“Yeah. You did,” I tell him. “We haven’t been together for a while now. But I still can’t stay here, Elliot. I have … I have …”
I pause, trying to think of even one good reason why it would be impossible for me not to return to my lonely little cottage tonight, but there isn’t one. Even Ed the Cat has chosen to stay with Paris in the flat, meaning there’s literally no one to go home to.
“I have the book festival tomorrow,” I say, trying not to dwell on the fact that I’m so lonely I can’t even call myself a crazy cat lady any more. “We’ve got a table at it for the store. And I need to work on my book. I have a deadline.”
“That’s fine,” says Elliot, turning and heading for the door that leads to the kitchen. “I’m going to the book festival too, so I can drive you. And you can borrow my laptop if you need to work.”
I open and close my mouth like a goldfish in peril.
“There’s a spare bedroom, if that’s what you’re worried about,” he says over his shoulder. “And even if there wasn’t, you don’t have much of an option, I’m afraid. Look outside if you don’t believe me.”
He goes into the kitchen and I dash across the room to the front door, which I pull open, looking out at the other side of the house, just in case the snow isn’t as bad there.
Surprisingly enough, though, it’s exactly the same. On the driveway, Elliot’s hire car looks like an iced Christmas cake, under its blanket of white. The narrow road which serves as a driveway looks completely impassable.
Elliot wasn’t wrong. There’s absolutely no way either of us is going to be leaving this house tonight; or not safely, anyway. And given that I value my life too much to go venturing out in a blizzard in just a wool coat and a pair of high-heeled boots, that leaves me with only one option: I’m stranded in a house in the middle of nowhere with the ex-boyfriend who broke my heart, and then wrote a book about it.
And there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it.
24
PAST
DECEMBER, 10 YEARS AGO
Ireally wish I’d asked Dad to drive me to the airport. Or anyone else, other than Martin Baxter, who drives so slowly and methodically I’m pretty sure even Maisie Poole would have overtaken him if she’d had the misfortune to be stuck behind him on the winding country road he chooses to take us on.
“I thought you said it would be quicker to take the motorway,” I say anxiously, almost squirming in my seat as Martin slows down to take a not-particularly tight corner. “It’s going to take forever at this rate.”
“More haste, less speed,” replies Martin soothingly. “Slow and steady wins the race.”
I grit my teeth in frustration, realizing that Martin’s exactly the kind of person who repeats platitudes like “Everything happens for a reason,” thinking they’re being profound.
He’s also, however, my only chance of finding Elliot right now — assuming Sandra wasn’t lying, and he really did leave for the airport this morning — so I bite my tongue and try to focus on listing all the different scenarios in which Elliot would justup and leave the country on a different flight to the one we’d planned, and without bothering to tell me.
The problem is, there are none.
There are literally no scenarios in which Elliot — the man I was willing to change my entire life to be with — would fly back to America and leave me behind.
Are there?
“So, um, how well do you know this Elliot chap, then?” says Martin, awkwardly drumming his fingers on the steering wheel as we wait for a traffic light to change. “It’s just been a couple of weeks, hasn’t it?”
“Three,” I mutter reluctantly, knowing where he’s going with this, and not particularly wanting to hear it. “It’s been three weeks. But it’s … it feels like longer, with Elliot. It feels like we’ve always known each other.”
Just not well enough for him to tell me he was leaving, obviously.
The unspoken thought hangs in the air above us, and I stare at the road ahead of us, grateful that Martin’s too polite to voice it either.
But the thought is there, all the same; desperate to be acknowledged. It whispers traitorously in my ear that three weeks is a pitifully short amount of time; not nearly long enough to reallyknowsomeone, and certainly not long enough to love them.
And yet, Elliot did say he loved me. He said it first. He wouldn’t have said it if he didn’t mean it. Why would he say it if he didn’t mean it?
The thoughts torture me all the way to the airport, getting progressively harder to ignore the closer we get. Just before we set off, I borrowed Martin’s phone and looked up today’s departures, so I know there’s only one flight to the U.S. this morning, which Elliot could conceivably be on. It’s going to NewYork, rather than to Florida, and it’s due to take off in less than an hour, so if it’s the one Elliot’s planning to take, we don’t have any time to lose. I have to get there before the flight takes off. I have to find out if he’s on it. And if he is, well … well, I guess I’ll have to figure that out if it happens. Because, God knows, it’s making absolutely no sense to me right now.
