‘Then don’t waste time,’ Jen said firmly. You know where he’ll be at what time, so get there and ask him directly how he feels about you. Ask him why he’s running away when he should be staying here, with you. So long as you have genuine feelings for each other, there’s nothing else that can’t be sorted. God, I learnt that lesson the hard way.’
Lucy turned to look at her and knew she was thinking of her fiancé, Sam. They’d been childhood sweethearts, driven apart because of misunderstandings and rash decisions.
Jen finished off her wine and got up. ‘Don’t make the same mistakes I made, Luce. Go to him and tell him everything you want him to know. Then, if he still decides to leave without shedding any light on it, then it’s on him. He clearly has greater demons to face than you can help him with. And he needs to do whatever he has to do alone. And that might very well be the case. But it doesn’t mean he feels any less for you.’
‘But I can help him.’
‘If he thought you could, I think he would have asked you. Don’t you?’
Jen’s final words resounded in her head as her sister hugged her goodbye and left the apartment. They continued to echo and repeat as she grabbed her phone and car keys and left the apartment herself. She knew they were both right, but it wouldn’t stop her from seeing him one last time. After all, it might be the last chance she had.
* * *
Her texts had stopped coming.
Oliver didn’t know whether to feel relief or loss. He needed Lucy to stop believing there was anything between them. He needed her to heal. To go back to her life. To return to the kind of world he couldn’t step into without breaking it.
He went through the motions of packing his suitcases, and leaving instructions for the removal co-ordinator for the rest of his stuff. He’d already put the apartment up for sale. As for the sale of his other New Zealand assets, well, he could manage those from Australia. It was no longer his focus — and he had to figure out what was. Alone. That part mattered more now than he cared to admit.
He instructed the taxi driver to take the route to the airport through the Mt Victoria tunnel, rather than drive around the bays with their views of Wellington city and the harbour. He didn’t want to see the prime real estate that had once felt like destiny. He didn’t want to look at it. Not when he’d walked away from it. Not when he didn’t even know what he was without it.
They emerged from the Mount Victoria tunnel into sunlight. Wind sculptures spun along the harbour to his left, but Oliver kept his eyes forward, jaw locked.
He tried to feel numb, tried to imagine he was the same man who’d made this trip numerous times, but he failed. Because he wasn’t the same man and there was no way he could numb his emotions any longer. They existed. Lucy had uncovered them. And he had to live with the consequences.
Lucy.
He closed his eyes as the taxi driver went through the ticket machines and remembered the first time he’d seen her. She’d had him hooked at the first glance. Sassy, gorgeous and completely charming. He’d miss the sparring, her eyes, but most of all he hated to think he’d never kiss her again, never hold her hand, or let her rest her head against his shoulder. Sleeping together, innocent and yet not innocent.
He refused to think of the last time he’d seen her.
‘Sir?’
The call from the taxi driver brought him to his senses, and he jumped out while his bags were being brought round. Wheeling his carry-on suitcase, he walked up the concourse towards the First-Class Lounge, where he’d take refuge until he had to board. As he turned to ascend the escalator, which would take him to the mezzanine lounge, he halted abruptly. Someone bumped in behind him. For one moment he’d thought he’d seen a head of platinum blonde hair, a shade taller than everyone else, but then his view was lost among people crowding past. He shook his head and carried on. He must have been imagining it.
* * *
Lucy had positioned herself where she’d see anyone walking into the airport. She’d got there early, but panic began to mount as time went on and the airport became more crowded. But then she saw him, striding through the public areas of the airport, heading up to the First-Class lounge.
She should move, go to him now, speak to him. Make him see this one last time that whatever they felt for each other wasn’t over. And that he should stay, not run away. But, as she was about to step forward, a sports team pushed past her, obstructing her view momentarily and Lucy lost sight of him. By the time they’d moved out the way, he’d vanished.
She spotted him a few moments later, walking briskly towards the escalator, as if he couldn’t wait to leave.
Who was she trying to kid? This wasn’t a man undergoing some kind of identity crisis. Not a man fighting to stay. Not a man torn in two. This was a man leaving — cleanly and efficiently — exactly as he’d said he would.
A woman stepped off the elevator, smiling at him — one of those reflex smiles people give handsome strangers. Oliver didn’t return it. He didn’t even seem to register it. He was elsewhere. Already gone.
She might not attempt to see him, but she needed to see him leave. Otherwise she’d have wondered if he was still here somewhere. Sitting outside a restaurant, gazing at the moonlit water as it lapped the jetty. Or at the window of his apartment, looking north to where MacLeod’s Cove lay, over the hills. But now she knew. He wasn’t doing any of these things. He was probably having a whisky and soda while checking his emails and waiting to board his flight, which would take him away from her and a future they could have had together.
She remained seated behind the pillar, her untouched tea cooling in the cup as the minutes slid by. She felt sick when the noticeboard changed to ‘Final Boarding Call’.
Only then did he walk leisurely down the steps and across the concourse to the gate. He wasn’t the kind to wait in line or to wait on a plane while others were boarding, or to wait at all. No, he’d be the last one on before they secured the door. She watched him walk down the long corridor to the gate and then disappear. Even then she didn’t move. He might change his mind.
But no one re-emerged. The noticeboards changed to ‘flight closed’ and she turned her head to watch the plane taxi away from the walkway and out to the runway. She watched it proceed slowly to the end, turn, and then pick up speed and ascend into the evening sky. She watched it until her eyes watered and the plane became a dot. Only then did she accept it. He was gone.
Chapter Twenty-One
Oliver parked outside the hotel and took it in with a quick, assessing glance. In the three months he’d been gone, the Old Colonial had changed. Scaffolding hugged parts of the façade. The garden bar looked almost lived in. The place had movement about it again.
