‘Not Jeremy?’
Anna shook her head. ‘No, not Jeremy.’
‘A friend?’ Gabi said again with more than a dollop of disbelief in her tone. ‘No one talks that long on the phone anymore,not unless it’s your significant other. Even we text each other more than we talk to each other.’
‘Well, I do. I talk on the phone to… people. Sometimes.’
Gabi stared back at her. ‘Was it that guy… Brett?’
‘Brody…’
‘Tell me how you met him,’ Gabi asked, frowning. ‘You said “through Spencer”, buthowthrough Spencer?’
This was it, then. Anna had a choice to make; either she kept being evasive, fudging the issue and risk hurting Gabi when she was already feeling so low, or…
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you about him, but we might as well get comfy if we’re going to do it.’ She gestured for Gabi to go inside the bedroom and they both climbed onto the bed, Gabi under the duvet, Anna on top of it, where she sat up against the pillows with her legs crossed.
She began her story with her exit from the party on New Year’s Eve all those months ago and ended with the pictures and messages that pinged between his phone and hers on a regular basis now. Gabi listened to it all, without comment or interruption, which, in itself, should have been a warning signal.
Anna finished talking and glanced across at her best friend, who was propped up on pillows, her arms folded across her chest. She didn’t look very happy.
‘Are you in love with this man?’ Gabi asked.
‘What? No!’ Anna paused before she said more. ‘No,’ she said again, more calmly this time. ‘I’m not in love with him. He’s just someone who understands.’
Gabi gave Anna a look that said:What am I? Chopped liver?
Anna leaned over and hugged Gabi with one arm. ‘You know I appreciate everything you’ve done for me, and no one could ever replace you, it’s just… He lost someone himself, that’s all. He knows what it’s like.’
Gabi pulled away and made herself comfortable, turning onto her side to face Anna. ‘Who did he lose?’
‘His wife.’
Gabi just looked at her and waited for more information to be forthcoming. Anna thought hard, trying to remember the detail of that conversation they’d had a while ago, and it only highlighted the fact that Gabi had a point. Even though Brody knew every intimate detail about Spencer’s death and its aftermath, Anna was still a little fuzzy on his history. Something dramatic always seemed to be happening in her life at the moment, and she realized she’d got side-tracked from her mission to dig deeper into the mystery that was Brody.
‘We don’t talk about her much – everyone deals with grief in their own way – but he has mentioned her. He told me they’d been having problems before she…’
What was the phrase Brody had used? He hadn’t said ‘died’. Passed on? No. Left him? Not that either.
‘What do you actually know about this man?’
‘I know his name is Brody Smith, that he lives near Hexworthy on Dartmoor, and that he has a dog called Lewis.’
Gabi’s eyes widened. ‘Lewis?’ she repeated slowly. ‘Like Spencer’s dog Lewis?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s weird, isn’t it?’
‘Not really,’ Anna said ‘It’s just a coincidence.’
‘Really?’ Gabi plucked her phone out of her dressing gown pocket and pulled up Facebook.‘Do you remember what is on Spencer’s page?’ she said as she scrolled through the posts.
Of course Anna remembered what was on Spencer’s page. There were hundreds of posts from three years ago, outpourings of support and sympathy, exclamations of shock and sadness at the news. It had been comforting at the time to know that he’d been so loved, so she’d kept his profile active, and had never quite got around to deleting it.
Gabi’s eyes lit up. ‘Aha!’ She turned the phone around and thrust it at Anna, a triumphant expression on her face. ‘Look!’
There was a picture of Spencer, arms tight around his beloved dog’s neck. Both of them seemed to be grinning at the camera. She remembered him scanning that picture in. The caption read:Five years since we lost our Lewis. Miss you, mate.
