Anna chuckled again. ‘After Lewis Hamilton. Spencer worshipped that man – followed his career right from his karting days.’
Brody shrugged to himself. Not a bad choice. ‘I suppose he’s very good at Formula One, but worship might be taking it a bit too far.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ she said cheerfully, then sobered slightly. ‘The year Spencer died, I’d planned a surprise for his birthday. I’d booked for him to drive a high-performance car at Brands Hatch, but he never got to do it. The company was wonderful about it, though. They gave me a voucher to use another time, no expiry date or anything.’
‘Did you use it?’
She sighed again. ‘I’ve been meaning to give it to my brotherin-law, but I keep forgetting. I think it’s sitting in a drawer somewhere… That’s the funny thing about the future, isn’t it? We have all these plans, some small, some grand, but things don’t always work out the way we expect them to.’
‘No,’ Brody replied thoughtfully. No, they really didn’t. Ten years ago, if you’d asked him what his life would be like now, he’d have said he’d still be happily married to Katri.
‘I imagined my life – mine and Spencer’s, really – like a giant calendar stretching into the future, reaching through the decades. I’d pencilled in plenty of future events. You know the sort of thing… In three years, we’ll definitely have a baby. In five years, hopefully, a second. Ten years after that I’ll be moaning about ferrying them around to all their activities,and ten years after that I’ll be attending my first university graduation.
‘I kept filling in the pages of my imaginary calendar, not even realizing I was doing it, because they were just wisps of hopes and dreams I was jotting down. I saw us growing old together, becoming grandparents, our hair going white, always griping that we couldn’t remember where we’d left our reading glasses, even though they were on top of our heads…’ She tailed off and made a noise that was half-sob, half-chuckle. ‘I thought I’d be the sort of grandma who wore knitted cardigans and slippers and smelled vaguely of peppermints.’
Brody smiled at the picture she’d painted.
‘But now I might never get to be a grandmother. Or even a mother.’
He felt a stab of pain on her behalf.
‘And then one day I woke up and all the pages in my calendar were gone. Ripped out.’
He nodded to himself. ‘And then you don’t know what to do, where to start.’ At least, that was how he’d felt in the beginning. Those paths were clearer in his imagination now. It didn’t mean he had any more ability to travel down them, however.
‘Exactly. And now every day I wake up and all I have is blank pages. It’s like a fog I can’t see through, stretching on for the rest of my life.’
Brody didn’t say anything. He didn’t have any answers and he wouldn’t insult her with platitudes.
‘I know that I need to start putting something in there,’ Anna continued, ‘that I need to start dreaming again, hoping again. But how do I do that without him?’
He could hear the tears in her voice and it almost broke his heart. He wanted to give her a step-by-step plan, a bulleted list, of how to climb out of that hole, but he wasn’t sure he had anything helpful to give her.
‘So I just keep travelling through the nothingness,’ Anna said, sounding even wearier than she had before. ‘Waiting for the fog to clear, for inspiration to strike, but it never does.’
Brody knew all about inspiration, about its stubborn refusal to arrive on time, if at all. ‘Do you think you’ll get married again?’ he asked, needing to take his mind off the current subject.
‘Yes… No… I mean…’ She let out a huff of exasperation. ‘I don’t know what I mean! I don’t want to be lonely, so getting marr—’ She broke off and tried again. ‘So not beingalonesounds good. I’m just not sure I can ever see myself with someone else.’
He absorbed her words for a moment. ‘You feel guilty for even thinking someone could fill their shoes.’
‘Yes,’ Anna said, sounding quietly relieved. ‘You’ve felt that way too?’
‘Yes,’ he replied. Such a small word for all it encompassed.
‘What happened to—?’
Anna’s voice was drowned out by Lewis, who suddenly leaped to his feet, ran to the French doors in the living room and started barking at the blackness outside.
‘Sorry,’ Brody muttered as he ran after him, grabbing him by the collar and leading him back to the study. ‘He’s been a bit of a nightmare since he heard that owl outside last week. Every time there’s the slightest noise, he’s off, just in case it’s come back.’
Brody had just about got his dog back to the study, but Lewis wriggled,pulling his collar out of Brody’s grasp, and raced back to the French doors, making twice as much noise as before.
Anna laughed. Brody had to stick a finger in his free ear so he could hear her properly. ‘I’d better let you go and sort him out,’ she said. ‘Thank you, Brody, for listening. I’m so glad you picked up when I called.’
Brody nodded to himself. ‘So am I,’ he admitted, before ending the call to go and deal with his dog. He opened the doors to let Lewis run around the garden. Hopefully, it would confirm the owl was long gone.
When Lewis finally trotted back inside, panting, Brody didn’t scold him. Instead, he gave him a treat, reached down and scratched his head. ‘Good boy,’ he said softly. ‘Excellent timing.’ Because he’d had a nasty feeling Anna had been about to ask him a question he didn’t want to answer. There were some things he’d really rather she didn’t know about him.
