“Mr De León!” she exclaimed. “You’re so very welcome here!”
Tom looked up, all blood draining from his face. A man was pulling his coat from his shoulders, ruggedly handsome and oh-so-familiar to him.
The man from the road.
The man from Ari’s apartment,Tom realised with horror. The man he’d thought was her husband.
But he couldn’t look at him for long. Because behind the man, standing still and staring at him with a look of heartbreak and longing all over her face, was Ari. His Ari.HisAri.
He met her gaze and held it, hoping and hoping against hope itself to transfer just a little of the love and yearning he held for her from his soul to her own.
There’s still magic between us,he tried to tell her.It’s you and me. It’s always going to be you and me.
But whatever magic still lay between them dissipated when Sasha spoke, turning to dust before his eyes.
“Mr De León, you have no idea how glad we are that you could make time for our simple little garden wedding.”
At the words ‘we’ and ‘our’ all the softness in Ari’s eyes fled, and now she gazed at him with hard eyes. Eyes that were full of recrimination and anger. Tom felt pain strike him hard as he saw himself through her eyes. A wastrel of a man, cold and calculating and with another woman’s arms around his waist. He’d thought he’d sunk low during his years as Tom Miller, but he realised now, with startling clarity, just how much deeper the mire beneath him was.
“I’m glad to meet you,” De León replied smoothly, in that caramel voice of his. “It’s always lovely to meet a bride.”
“This is my fiancé, Tom,” Sasha carried on, stroking his arm possessively, but to him De León only nodded, his eyes narrowing.
“Okay,” De León said, the caramel tone replaced with a voice full of hard toffee. “So, this is him.”
Silence fell, broken only by the occasional click of a camera. Stella, damn her, was collecting every image — a hoarder of raw human emotion and ultra-polite bullshit.
Tom looked pleadingly back to Ari, but her face was still hard and worryingly blank of any emotion but hate.
“Ari,” he finally broke, his voice slamming into the void between them. “Ari, I—”
“Mr Somerset,” she cut in, her voice like brittle glass. “How nice to finally meet you.”
Chapter 13: Tokens
Tom’s been gone for five weeks, and the number he left Ari with is useless, endlessly ringing out whenever she calls it. At night she lies in her hostel bed, her phone clutched in her hand, hoping against hope that he’ll answer, or call her, or send her a text. An email even. At this point, she’d even take a post-it note sent by a carrier pigeon. Something, anything really, to let her know that he was real, and they were real and that he is coming back, one day, just as he promised. But as time drags on and the silence on the other end of the line remains stark and unending, Ari is forced to come to terms with the truth: that Tom is gone, and all he has left her with is a faded playing card and a phone number that leads to nowhere.
Well, not the only things he left her with.
The second line appears in a depressing hostel room in Amsterdam, and Ari cries into her pillow until the cheap polyester fabric is sodden with tears. She’s travelled half-heartedly since Tom left, her backpack heavy but heart even heavier, until the exhausting sickness she first put down to food poisoning made her stop. She buys the test before checking into her hostel, splurging on a private room so that she can vomit and cry in peace. For two days, she stares at the box with wary eyes until, after another bout of horrific puking, she bites the bullet and opens it up.
She can’t be pregnant, she tells herself. She just can’t be. She’s twenty years old. She has her whole life ahead of her. She’s friendless and mostly without family. She’s poor and ill-equipped to deal with a whole other person. She can’t have a baby. For a moment, Ari closes her eyes, praying for the first time in her life to any and all the gods that she can think of.
Please don’t let me be pregnant.
Please don’t let me be pregnant.
When she opens her eyes, the second line stares back at her. Ari sinks to the floor in a ball, before crawling onto her borrowed bed, tears flowing down her face.
Later that night, when she’s all cried out and the moon shines in through her window, lighting the tear-tracks on her pale and woebegone face, Ari picks up her phone.
As usual, the call goes nowhere. This time however, she lets it ring through to the voicemail, and when the beep sounds, she lets out a shaky breath.
“You need to come back for me,” she whispers into the receiver. “Please come back for me. Please. Please come back. Please don’t leave me alone like this. Please.”
* * *
She considers having an abortion and moving on with her life. It’s one of the options the kindly NHS doctor she sees in London gives her, and Ari chews on her lip while considering her words.
