She knew Gayle would be staring after her as she drove away.What about the finger sandwiches, Anna? What about the vol au vents?But Anna didn’t care about the sodding vol au vents.
She drove home with her fingers tight around the steering wheel, jaw clenched, resisting the urge to use the accelerator to vent her anger.Hold on,she told herself.Just a little longer, then you can close your front door behind you, sink against it, and let it all out.
Almost an hour and a half later, thanks to a snarl-up around junction five, Anna hauled herself from her car and stared at her house. Just the sight of it almost brought tears of relief to her eyes. The walk to her front door seemed to go in slow motion, but she finally put the key in the lock, opened the door and then banged it closed behind her.
Thank God.
She sank against the back of the door and waited for the emotions to start flowing…
But nothing spilled out, nothing exploded. There was no pounding of fists on the tiled floor of her hallway or shouts of rage echoing up the stairwell. She opened her mouth, giving permission for the howl of fury she’d been keeping inside all the way back from the beach to emerge, but all she could hear was her own shallow breathing. She closed her eyes, giving tears a chance to gather behind her lids, but when she opened them again, they were as dry as Gayle’s pork and sage stuffing.
She let out a growl of frustration and made her way upstairs to her bedroom, where she lay down on the unmade bed and pulled the duvet up over her head. Damned if she did, damned if she didn’t. It was all too much.
But the usual comfort of her blank, white cocoon didn’t help her today. Even so, she closed her eyes and breathed in and out, at a total loss for anything else to do.
One moment, that was all she had wanted.
One moment to be still today, to remember him in the way she wanted to, so she could start doing what everyone was always telling her she needed to and move forward. But it seemed she wasn’t allowed that.
As much as the focus was always on Spencer when she visited his family,she couldn’t talk freely to Gayle, even though she wished she could, and she didn’t want to worry her own parents. Gabi tried, God bless her, she really did, but she only wanted to hear good and positive and healthy things, and the truth was, some days Anna was anythingbutthose things. Sometimes sheneededto be despondent and negative and toxic. It was the only way to let the poison out.
She lay under the duvet in a half-trance, letting her thoughts wander, like a bird hopping from branch to branch in search of a roost. They came to rest in an unexpected place.
There had been one person who’d listened, asomeonewho’d seemed to actually understand.
But this person was also ano one, an anonymous voice at the end of a phone line, completely unconnected from her life, from all the emotional baggage anyone who’d known her or Spencer came with.
Things happen, he’d said.Things that turn you upside down and your life takes a very different path.
Spencer’s number had been assigned to him, theno one. She really wanted to call that number again, she discovered, which was more than a little surprising. Maybe it was because, in her mind, he was still part of that connection to Spencer.
But phoning again would be completely weird. This time she’d be ringing to speak tohimand not the ghost of her long-dead husband. This man. This stranger.
This kindred spirit.
That thought stuck in her head for the rest of the evening. She stayed in bed, reading, moping, staring at the ceiling. After a few hours, she took a bath and got into her PJs, then returned to bed to read and mope and stare at the ceiling some more.
Eventually, she could avoid the urge no longer. She pulled her phone off the bedside table and pressed the entry near the top of her ‘recents’ list, the number still labelled as ‘Spencer’. Her heart thudded as she waited for it to connect. She closed her eyes and prayed hard she wouldn’t hear the robotic voicemail message, and it seemed, for once, her prayers were to be answered. The ringing stopped, and shortly afterwards, a deep male voice said, ‘Yes?’
‘It’s me again,’ Anna replied, then blew a breath out to steady herself. ‘It’s Anna.’
Chapter Twelve
‘ANNA.’
There wasn’t a hint of surprise in his tone. There wasn’t a hint of much, actually.
Instead of apologizing and hanging up like any sensible person would have done, she asked, ‘Do you remember me?’
A pause followed, one she couldn’t interpret, then he said, ‘Yes. I remember you.’
A bald statement of fact. No joke that strange women who phoned at random times of day or night might be hard to forget. That was the sort of thing Spencer would have said, but this man wasn’t Spencer. She needed to remember that.
Her throat dried. Where were words when you needed them? She’d had thousands waiting and ready to go, but now they’d all run scurrying into the shadows.
‘I wondered if you’d phone again,’ he said.
‘Really? You were expecting me to?’ Until tonight she’d had no intention of doing so. How had he known?
