Even with all that baying, Anna’s voice was still in his ears, like the echo of a song heard after the radio has been turned off. He switched to his messages app, looking at Anna’s photo. She was wearing a thick grey scarf and a purple beanie with a paler crocheted flower on one side.The sun was low and slanting, highlighting the out of focus frosty fields in the background, but it was the foreground Brody was interested in.
God, she was beautiful.
He couldn’t stop looking at her eyes. He’d been right about them. They were large and open, wistful. But he saw other things there too, things he’d known about her even without seeing this photograph: determination, courage, compassion.
The rest of her face came into focus.
If he’d been a stranger, if he’d just seen this as a profile picture on Facebook, he would have probably thought it was a nice enough face but wouldn’t have given it more than a passing glance. It was interesting more than traditionally pretty.
But he wasn’t a stranger, and he couldn’t seem to maintain that kind of detachment for too long. He stared at the photo, drinking it in, God help him.
You’re a sad case, Brody Smith. A really sad case.
Half in love with a girl you’ve never met, never even seen, and she sends you a picture and then, well…
You need to get out more, mate.
He exhaled loudly and forced himself to put the phone to sleep. He didn’t, however, manage to make himself put it back down on the desk. Instead, he tucked it into his back pocket.
He’d chickened out of sending her a picture in return. What had he been so afraid of?
No, I mean, really… Maybe you should take a good look?
There was a mirror in his hallway. Not because he actually used it much, but because the previous owners had left it, and mirrors seemed to belong in hallways. He marched himself off to it and stood in front of it, feet planted wide.
This is the face of a coward,he told himself.Are you really so vain that you couldn’t have held the phone up and taken a picture, right then and there? Afraid she’d see the grey in your stubble, the hardness in your jaw?
No, he wasn’t afraid of those things.
Afraid she’ll be able to see why you lock yourself away like this? Afraid that if she ever found out, she’d never speak to you again?
That was more honest. Stupid, but honest. His logical mind knew this, but he still wasn’t any closer to taking the picture than he had been twenty minutes ago.
And, God… How he wanted to meet her! But it was a bad idea, on so many levels.Never going to happen, mate. Stop kidding yourself.A friend, she’d said. Nothing more. That would have to be enough.
He’d been okay for a long time in this cottage, insulated from the world outside – comfortably numb, as a well-known song suggested – but it was no longer the sanctuary it had once been. In fact, he was starting to find it a little claustrophobic.
Lewis was still howling outside, and as Brody listened to the sound, it seemed to reverberate inside his chest, building up to a sense of longing that was almost unbearable. He lifted his phone out of his back pocket and stared at the picture of Anna once again. The ache intensified. It was a knife in his chest, and someone was twisting it.
You might as well go outside and cry at the moon with the dog, he told himself.It’ll do you just as much good.
IF IT HAD been Gabi who’d been speaking to Brody, she would have Googled him the moment she was in possession of a surname, but Anna lasted six days before she cracked and decided to type Brody’s name into the search box on Facebook. She did it early one morning when there was no chance of him ringing her. Because that would be awkward.
Not that they’d agreednotto do this. They hadn’t even discussed it with each other.He’s probably looked you up already,she told herself flatly.Nothing to get all silly about.
But…
Stuff it.Her fingers moved quickly on her laptop keyboard, and she pressed Enter before she could talk herself out of it.
The results were much more plentiful than she’d anticipated. Crap. While Brody wasn’t a terribly common name, Smith was. Obviously. Well, the only thing to do was to go through the list. She knew a bit of information that would help her narrow it down: his location (Devon) and his age (older than her but not geriatric), and so she began to trail through them.
There was a Brody Smith who was a researcher at Stanford.
A travel writer based in New Zealand who spent six months of the year sailing around the South Pacific on his boat.
An up-and-coming sixteen-year-old actor, who already had a legion of besotted teenage girls following his every move on social media.
Anna looked through them all but nothing matched. Her curiosity had been fanned fully into flame at that point, so she switched to Google. It was much the same story there. So many Brody Smiths! And that didn’t even include the ones who also had middle names. There was a Brody Michael Smith, a Brody Alexander Smith, even a Brody Zephaniah Smith.
