He stopped pacing and stared at her. ‘Why what? What do you think? Why you didn’t tell me that Kirsty was here in Rowan Vale! What else?’
Brooke eyed him miserably. ‘I might have known that, after everything those two have done, I’m the one who’s going to get it in the neck.’
‘Don’t play the victim here! You knew how much I missed Kirsty, and yet you deliberately kept that information from me. It’s bad enough that Rory didn’t tell me, butyou! After everything we’ve been through!’
‘So your brother marries your wife then lies to you about her being here, and your wife knows you’re here but doesn’t bother to seek you out or come with her new husband to break the news to you, but somehow,I’mthe bad one! Thanks a bunch, Danny.’ She leapt to her feet. ‘It’s always the same story, isn’t it? The truth is, I’m always to blame. And we all know why, don’t we?’
Danny looked taken aback by her outburst. ‘I don’t know what you mean. What’s this about?’
‘It’s about you, blaming me! And you always have, haven’t you? Because deep down you think it’s my fault that we’re stuck here in Rowan Vale. You blame me for our deaths. You know you do.’
Danny glared at her. ‘I have never,eversaid that.’
‘No, you haven’t. But it’s always been there, hasn’t it? That’s why you’ve pushed me away for so many years. I’ve seen the battle raging in your eyes. Every time we start to get close it’s like the shutters come down and I know – I absolutely know – that you’re reminding yourself of what I did and that you can’t forgive me.’
Danny folded his arms. ‘Well… I never thought it wasallyour fault. Lee Hardwick was high on drugs. He was driving. He smashed into a tree, not you. And if we’d been wearing seatbelts, we might have survived it anyway, so that’s on both of us.’
‘Except we were too busy arguing to put them on.’
‘Well…’ He shrugged helplessly. ‘You were very angry.’
‘Yes.’ Brooke sighed and sat down again. ‘Yes, I was.’
A subdued looking Danny sat next to her. ‘I just never understood why you were so intent on going home all of a sudden,’ he confessed. ‘All right, you weren’t exactly having a brilliant time at the party, but neither of us were. Even so, we’d booked the hotel rooms and it would have been much easier if you’d just had an early night instead of hitching a lift with that idiot.’
‘I lost my temper,’ she admitted. ‘I needed to get out of there. Fast.’
‘But with Lee?’
‘There was no other way of getting home!’
‘If you’d asked me, I’d have got you home somehow. There was no rush, was there?’
There was, Danny. I wanted to catch Kirsty with her mystery lover. But you can never know that.
Brooke shrugged. ‘At the time it seemed important.’
‘And because of that we both ended up dead!’
‘You didn’t have to jump in the car with me,’ she said hotly. ‘I never asked you to. That was your decision. If you remember I tried everything to get you to go back into the hotel.’
‘And leave you withhim?’ Danny asked incredulously. ‘He was a letch at the best of times, and I didn’t trust him with you even without knowing that he’d been snorting cocaine all evening. Can you imagine what he might have done to you when he was off his head? No, you’d best not imagine it. Anyway, Ican, and I’m still glad I made the decision not to let you go home with someone like him.’
‘I wasn’t your responsibility!’
‘Of course you were!’
‘Just because I’m Kirsty’s cousin didn’t mean you owed me anything!’
Danny stared at her for a moment then he slumped. ‘No. It didn’t. Even so…’ He shrugged. ‘It was the decent thing to do.’
Brooke wiped tears from her eyes, even though it was pointless as they could never fall. ‘If I hadn’t been arguing with you, telling you to get out and leave me alone…’ she said wretchedly.
‘You had my phone,’ he remembered suddenly. ‘I asked what you’d done with it, and you said you’d left it at the party, but I saw it sticking out of the pocket of your trousers. I called you a liar and demanded you give it back.’
‘And I threw it at you,’ she said sheepishly. She really hadn’t wanted to. She’d wanted to show Kirsty what her lover had done while she was sleeping. Not that it mattered now. Kirsty had no idea that he’d sent the photograph to Danny. She couldn’t decide if she was glad or sorry about that. She was just relieved Kirsty hadn’t gone on to marry him. At least she’d picked a decent husband in Rory. Brooke could only hope that Kirsty treated him a lot better than she had Danny.
They sat in silence, remembering.
