I gesture at her face. “Feeling better?”
She grimaces. “You saw that then?”
“Hard to miss someone looking like a sodden, crumpled tomato. No offence.”
“Oh, offence very much taken.” She tilts her head back to look at the sky. “But yeah, I am. Feeling better.”
“Want to talk about it?”
Who is this person speaking through my mouth, and what have they done with Angus?
Her lips part as if she does want to talk about it, and I get the sense, again, that she is holding something back. I can’t fault her. It’s my preferred coping mechanism too. At last, she blows out the air she’s been holding.
“What’s there to talk about? I walked in on my boyfriend less than a month after we moved in together, cheating on me in our bed. And now I have no boyfriend, no home, and I drunkenly bought a train ticket to do this stupid walk because I thought it would be better than slinking back, and I couldn’t bear to sleep on my best friend’s sofa while she looked at me with her I-told-you-so eyes because Iknowshe never liked him, and to top itall off, my sister is getting married in less than a week to a rich, pretentious prick and I am meant to be there supporting her in making one of the worst decisions of her life, and instead I’m sitting here, in more physical pain than I think I’ve ever been, and the only person I have to talk to is possibly the rudest man in Scotland. No offence.”
Well, that explains the tears.
“Sounds like a shit ride.”
She takes another deep breath, closing her eyes. “Yeah. It is.”
“For the record, your man’s the idiot. Not you.”
Rowan huffs a laugh. “And how’d you figure that then?”
I don’t look at her when I say it. “If you love someone, you don’t cheat on them. You don’t go behind their back and leave them in the dark. You work on it. You fight for it. You do everything in your power to fix it. And if your man isn’t clever enough to see that? Well, like I say, he’s the idiot. Not you.”
“That’s very black and white of you. What if I wasn’t easy to talk to? What if I made it hard for him to tell me how he was feeling? What if I was too much all the time and there was no space for him to start the conversation?”
“Bullshit.”
“But—”
“If he wanted to, he would have. End of story. He chose the coward’s way out. And that’s not on you.”
The last vestiges of the sun dip below the mountains. Around us, the chirrup of insects, the distant lapping of the waves.
A crescendo of hauntingly sweet notes drifts from the campsite. The little girl must have retrieved her violin. She’s good, even I can tell that, and the music tugs at my chest. A key slipping into a lock that I very much do not want opened. My heart speeds up, but even as my throat tightens, I breathe deeply, closing it down. Locking it off.
“It’s getting late.” I hoist myself to my feet. “Good luck with the walk tomorrow.”
“Thanks.”
I leave her there in the dark.
Chapter Ten
Rowan
It rains all through the night, stopping only when dawn shrugs over the treeline. The sky is thick with clouds, and when I step out of my tent, my boots squelch in the grass. Every step is agony. I found half a dozen blisters when I peeled off my socks last night, and I didn’t have enough plasters to cover them. My back aches, and my shoulders are raw from the bag straps and the weight my body isn’t used to carrying. I feel tired. Spent. Every inch of me screaming tostop.
But I can’t. Not yet. I want to. God, I want to. But when I pause, even for a second, I can feel the doubts and the hurt and the embarrassment rushing out from the cage where I’ve locked them, waiting for their chance.
Today, I don’t want to think about Ethan, or my life back in London, or work, or what a failure I am.
And for that, I need to move. Step after torturous step.
I look around the campsite, but it’s quiet. Peaceful. Me and the never-ending drip of rain. For once, I’m the first awake. Slowly, painfully, I pack away my sodden tent, treating myself to a blueberry breakfast bar and an apple I find buried in one of the pockets that I don’t remember packing.
