Her thumb hovered above the ‘end call’ button. In all the times she’d dialled his number just to hear his voicemail greeting, she’d never once left that message because, even though Gabi might tell her she was stuck in the past, she really wasn’t. She wasn’t kidding herself. This was just an echo of him, nothing more. She knew she couldn’t bring him back.
But it seemed that if she was going to fall from grace this evening, she was going to do it spectacularly. Maybe it was because she saw the time at the top of the phone change to a row of perfect nothingness that she did it. Maybe it was all the swelling emotions inside her from that evening clamouring to be let out. Who knew? All Anna understood was that all the words she thought she’d have a lifetime to say were stuck in the logjam of her throat,and then, suddenly, three escaped. They would have to be enough.
‘I love you…’ she whispered in a voice that was raw with tears.
There was a heartbeat of silence, then another.
And then the reply came.
‘I beg your pardon?’
Chapter Four
SOMETIMES, WAKING UP is like emerging from a gentle, white fog. Slowly, the mist clears, and one finds oneself refreshed and ready to face the morning, seeing and thinking clearly. Unfortunately for Anna, waking up the following day was more like the aftermath of being buried alive in an avalanche. Her sleep had been blessedly blank and white, but it felt as if something heavy was sitting on her chest, pinning her to the bed, and she couldn’t quite make sense of her surroundings. She lay there, unable to move, unable to think. Eventually she began to punch herself free.
The first step was to get her eyelids open. She blinked a few times and just about managed, even though one eye was being more co-operative than the other, and turned to focus on the clock, but where she’d expected to see a digital display, there was now an old-fashioned alarm clock with bells on the top and little brass feet.
Even though the thick curtains were drawn, only barely emitting light, she realized the window was in the wrong place. It should have been on the right side of the room, but it was clearly on the left.
She sat up in bed, frowning, and then – finally – it all began to fall into place.She wasn’t in her bedroom, but the spare room. She rubbed a hand over her gritty eyes and her stomach lurched.
Oh, God. Last night… The phone call.
She didn’t even remember hearing Spencer’s voicemail greeting, she realized, only what had come afterwards – the voice, the one that had spoken where there should have been only emptiness and silence.
When she’d heard it, she’d immediately thrown the phone into the far reaches of the wardrobe, then had half-crawled, half-scrabbled her way across the bedroom floor until she’d reached the opposite wall, where she’d sat with her back pressed up against it, her knees pulled up against her body, staring at the open wardrobe as if a ghostly apparition might emerge at any second. At some point, she’d stopped shaking enough to stand up, stumble from the room and make it across the hallway, where she’d collapsed into this bed and, if the bedclothes were anything to go by, had slept fitfully and frantically.
She’d had all sorts of strange dreams after Spencer had died, ones where they’d been living their normal lives, and they had seemed so real that waking up again had been like being back in those first awful days after the accident. And then there were the nightmares…
But the dreams weren’t always bad. Sometimes, in that twilight between sleeping and waking, she’d imagine him there in the bed beside her, warm and solid and alive. Once or twice she was sure she’d felt his breath on her back, his fingers brushing her thigh, but when she’d woken up properly, his side of the bed had been cool and unwrinkled. She’d assumed it was her subconscious refusing to accept the truth,trying to fill the gaping hole he’d left behind.
Had last night been something like that? She’d been upset leaving the party. It could have triggered something…
Anna pondered the idea as she shifted position, realizing she’d got distracted and hadn’t actually registered the time on the alarm clock. She turned her head to take another look.
Eleven thirty-two?She sprang out of bed.
She was supposed to be having a New Year’s Day lunch with Spencer’s parents at half past twelve, and it was a forty-five-minute drive to Epsom – at the very least. That meant she had to get into the car, well, now!
But one quick glance in the mirror confirmed that plan was a bust before it had even got underway. She was still wearing the same wrinkled black dress from the night before, her tights had a ladder that started under her heel and disappeared up under her hemline, and her hair looked as if she’d been caught in a hurricane.
There was no time to analyse what had happened last night now. She had to get herself in the shower and dressed in a presentable manner in under fifteen minutes, and then, even if she flirted with the speed limit all the way to Epsom, she was still going to be cutting it really fine.
Spencer’s mum was a stickler about punctuality, and Anna always made sure to turn up to their fortnightly Sunday lunches on the dot of half past twelve, even if they never ate until one. While Spencer had been famously late for everything, and Anna couldn’t remember one family function she’d been to with him where they hadn’t arrived at least half an hour after they were supposed to,Gayle seemed to hold her daughter-inlaw to a different standard.
Maybe that was because the lunches had started not long after Spencer had died, a way to support each other through that awful time, to laugh and cry and remember him, and the tradition had just kept going, no one brave enough to suggest otherwise. Being late would have seemed disrespectful.
By noon Anna had got a grip of herself and made it into her car. By twenty past, she was joining the M25 and putting her foot down. It was raining hard, that horrible, cold, icy stuff that would have been sleet if the temperature had been a degree or two cooler. She put the windscreen wipers on max and forced herself to overtake a few cars and lorries instead of hugging the slow lane, as she usually would have done in such weather. However, the journey was a familiar one, and it wasn’t long before she was driving mostly on automatic pilot, allowing her thoughts to wander.
What hadreallyhappened last night?
There were only two possibilities: either she’d heard the voice on the phone – Spencer’s voice? – for real, or she’dthoughtshe’d heard it. Neither scenario calmed her down much – option one was just too ‘out there’ to consider, and option two meant she was starting off the New Year by having a nervous breakdown.
Because he hadn’t just said any old words, had he? He’d said, ‘I beg your pardon?’Theirwords, their thing.
Had she just wanted to hear it come back to her so badly that she’d imagined it? It had to be that. She’d been running off emotion last night, even before she’d got home and ended up curled on the floor of her dead husband’s wardrobe.Look at how she’d spoken to Gabi…
Oh, God. Gabi!
