CHAPTER ONE
‘If you ever want to know how someone really feels about you, ask them to pick you up from the airport at rush hour,’ Suzanne said. ‘No one in this town would willingly drive to LAX for anything less than true love.’
‘Flattery will get you everywhere,’ I replied as my sister pulled sharply away from the arrivals terminal of Los Angeles International Airport. She cut in front of ten other cars, all of them hitting their horns at the same time, sending us off with a chorus of discordant honking, as my suitcase slid back and forth across the boot of her SUV. I closed my eyes and clutched at my seatbelt, nerves already jangling with jet lag. It felt as though I’d left my brain somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, several time zones behind me. Humans weren’t meant to be up in the air for eleven straight hours, it simply wasn’t right. My watch said it was 4 p.m. but my body said otherwise. Why was I awake? Why was it daylight? And why did I decide to watch the entireTwilightsaga instead of sleeping? I had been a fool.
‘You didn’t have to come and get me,’ I said, twisting against my seatbelt to get a proper look at Suzanne. ‘I could have got a taxi.’
Life in California suited my sister. She looked happy and healthy, her blonde hair was freshly cut and coloured, her skin was glowing and there was something else I couldn’t quite put my finger on, a kind of glossy sheen that she definitely didn’t have when she worked in Slough.
‘Phoebe Chapman, sister of mine, love of my life, you know I would go to the ends of the earth for you.’
I yawned and smiled at the same time, utterly exhausted but deliriously happy. It was almost two years since we’d been in the same place at the same time and they had not been the best two years of my life. The thought of this holiday was the only thing keeping me going for the last few weeks, sun, sea and sisterly bonding. It was just what I needed.
‘Also, I was feeling guilty,’ she added. ‘I have to go to Seattle for a meeting. I’m leaving tonight.’
She slammed her foot on the brake, barking obscenities at a little red car as it pulled in front of us. The driver flipped up their middle finger and promptly sped away, drifting across another two lanes, the Fiat and the furious.
‘What do you mean you’re leaving?’ I asked. ‘They’re making you fly all the way to Seattle for a meeting? Couldn’t you Zoom in?’
‘I’m so sorry, Pheebs, I need to be there. If I don’t go and fix things today there’ll be literally no internet by this time tomorrow.’ She pursed her lips and two little lines, permanently etched between her eyebrows,dug their way deeper into her forehead. It was an expression I knew well. Standard Suzanne exasperation. She’d been working on it ever since I was born.
‘But I was thinking, you could come with me if you want? You might like Seattle, it’s an interesting place, there’s plenty to do.’ She paused to flick her fringe out of her eyes. ‘Well, there’s a few things to do. Not as much as there is in LA but there are shops and museums and things like that. There’s the Space Needle. Oh, and there’s this cool market where they chuck whole fish at you.’
‘On purpose?’ I asked, horrified.
A notification popped up on the screen of her iPhone and she actually growled. Whoever David Sales might be, I would not want to be him.
‘The only thing is the weather isn’t forecast to be that great this week,’ she said, flicking the message off the screen without reading it. ‘It rains a lot. And I mean, a lot.’
Seattle was sounding more and more appealing by the second.
‘But if you want to come we could try to get you on my flight. Or the one after. Worst-case scenario, first thing tomorrow morning. I’ll be in meetings most of the day but I could dinner in the evening, if you don’t mind eating late.’
It was one thing to threaten me with a flying fish to the face but quite another to mess with my meal schedule. I looked out the window and watched my dream of a perfect holiday swim away upstream like so much Seattle salmon.
Suzanne glanced over at me, her hands gripping the steering wheel at ten and two. ‘Or you could stick to the plan and stay at my house. If that’s easier.’
‘How long will you be gone?’ I asked lightly.
‘Two days. Three tops.’
She seemed to have forgotten I spoke her language fluently. ‘Leaving soon’ meant you’d be waiting an hour. ‘On my way’ almost always translated to ‘I’m still at my desk’ and two or three days meant she’d be gone for at least a week. Half my entire holiday.
‘And you have to leave tonight?’ I pulled at my suddenly too-tight seatbelt. ‘You really have to go right away?’
Her tasteful diamond earrings caught the light as she nodded, dazzling me. ‘Two trips to the airport in one day. Am I a masochist or what?’
‘We’ve known that ever since you chose to do advanced maths at A level,’ I said with a half-hearted smile. ‘If you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go. Can’t have the internet imploding just so you can babysit your little sister.’
‘I’ll make it up to you when I get back,’ she replied, relieved. ‘We’ll go to a fancy spa or something, really push the boat out.’
Flapping a hand in the air between us, I waved away her non-apology. It wasn’t her fault and it was only a few days. I could survive in LA on my own for a few days. And it was like Therese always said, there’s no point getting frustrated about things you can’t control.
‘You can’t help work,’ I told her. ‘I get it. I had to work last weekend, totally cocked up my plans.’
‘Oh no, was there some kind of greetings card emergency?’ Suzanne said, smothering a half-laugh with an apologetic grimace. ‘Sorry, that was rude. I know your job is entirely as stressful as mine.’
‘Rude but fair,’ I laughed. ‘The furthest I’ve ever travelled for a work emergency is to the big Tesco when we ran out of teabags.’
