‘Unless you and Rory leave today. Now. Go away and don’t come back. Then Danny need never know and we’ll all be happy.’
I shook my head in despair. ‘That won’t work. We’re here to fix our marriage, I told you. Put the ghosts of our past behind us.’ I gave a bitter laugh. ‘Well, that’s bloody ironic, isn’t it?’ If it was up to me, I’d jump in the car right now and get as far away from Rowan Vale as possible. I could only pray that it wasn’t too late already. But if Danny hadn’t told Rory what happened that night of the accident there was no way Rory would want to leave yet. Was there? I massaged my temples feeling thoroughly confused.
‘I don’t see how your marriage is even worth fixing, since you’re both lying to each other,’ Brooke said. ‘You clearly didn’t tell Rory you’d met me, and he didn’t tellyouhe’d been talking to Danny. What kind of a marriage is that?’
‘You know nothing about it,’ I said hotly, while thinking that she had another point there. What on earth did it say about us that we were both keeping secrets of such magnitude? ‘You should have told me Danny was here yesterday,’ I said, because I couldn’t have a go at Rory right now and Brooke was giving me such a smug look that I needed to lash out at someone. ‘I can’t imagine why you didn’t.’
‘To be honest, I didn’t think you’d be bothered,’ she said.
‘How can you say that? Danny was my husband!’
‘Yeah, and the entire marriage was on your terms.’
I didn’t understand why she was suddenly so hostile. ‘Where is this coming from?’ I asked. ‘You know how I felt about Danny.’
She leaned forward, her eyes flashing with anger and I reared away as it dawned on me that Danny might have told Brooke the truth, too. Hell, if they’d been together here for eighteen years it was almost inevitable. No wonder she looked so contemptuous of me.
‘Yeah,’ she snapped. ‘I do. You treated him like an idiot. Do you think I don’t know that you made all the decisions and made him dance to your tune? You led him on and lied to him! I heard Mum and Auntie Sheryl talking one day. I know what you’d told your mum when Danny was thinking you were both about to make an offer on that cottage. You strung him along! And about much worse than that, too.’
‘You don’t understand,’ I said weakly. ‘It wasn’t like that.’ That’s what she was mad about? Maybe Danny hadn’t confided in her after all.
‘Oh, I think it was exactly like that.’ Brooke got to her feet. ‘Anyway, I’ve delivered the message. Talk to Rory. He needs to break this to Danny as gently as possible, and then you two should get out of here fast. Let me pick up the pieces. Again.’
She headed for the door then glanced back. ‘Don’t forget to change your shoes.’
Then she was gone and I sat in stunned silence, thinking about what she’d said. Ihadn’tstrung Danny along!
Well… Maybe I had, but it wasn’t because I’d wanted to. I just hadn’t known what else to do. Like Brooke, I hadn’t wanted to see him hurt. But maybe by keeping the truth from him I’d made things ten times worse.
I buried my head in my hands as tears welled up.
Remembering.
Who was I kidding? There was no ‘maybe’ about it. I’d made things ten times worse, all right, and then some.
23
2008
‘It’s so beautiful, isn’t it?’ Danny sounded like a child on Christmas morning as he hugged me tightly, his voice full of excitement.
‘It is,’ I said truthfully, because it was. Cherry Tree Cottage was a cute, semi-detached three-bedroomed cottage, with a decent-sized garden complete with the titular cherry tree.
It was in a pretty village just a ten-minute drive to the nearest market town where the railway station was situated.
‘But our commute will be over twice as long,’ I reminded him as we pulled apart. ‘You have to take that into consideration.’
‘But so what, when we’d be coming home to this?’ His eyes shone with happiness and hope.
‘It’s not very big,’ I pointed out. ‘That third bedroom’s just a box room really, and the kitchen’s very small.’
‘I know but it’s a starting point,’ he said. ‘We could knock the dining room into the kitchen and make a big kitchen-diner. And the box room will do for a nursery.’
I swallowed. ‘A nursery?’
‘What I was thinking was, we could stay here for – I don’t know – say five or six years. By then we’ll probably have two children, and the eldest will be in the bigger back bedroom and the baby in the nursery. Then we’ll look for a larger house. If we’ve made the kitchen into a kitchen-diner and improved the place in other ways the value’s sure to have gone up, and then we can move into a more suitable property. Maybe even our forever home.’
He gazed around the poky little galley kitchen, clearly not seeing it as it was but as what he imagined it could be. ‘The village is stunning,’ he said wistfully. ‘And the primary school’s got very good ratings. Something to think about.’
