‘No, you won’t,’ I said, pulling my car keys from my pocket. ‘I don’t need some eleventh-hour act of chivalry from you. You don’t want me here. Fine. You don’t want to talk to me. Also fine. But you don’t get to play protective hero. I’m perfectly capable of finding my own way back.’
‘Are you? What if your phone loses signal?’
‘It won’t,’ I said with totally misplaced conviction.
‘It happens out here all the time in severe storms. The mast has a habit of coming down in bad weather. And this storm is predictedto be one of the worst we’ve had in years. Which you’d know if you’d bothered to listen to the forecasts.’
I narrowed my eyes, and wondered if he could feel the flames shooting out of them.
‘You’ve made your point, Josh. There’s no need to rub it in. And there’sdefinitelyno need to follow my car. If you won’t talk to me ... well, then there’s nothing more I want from you.’
I stepped on to the veranda and was almost catapulted straight back into him with the force of the wind. He was right. The storm had intensified in the short time I’d been there. My body bowed into the wind as I fought my way through the falling snow to my car. I flung open the car door and whistled to get Fletcher’s attention. He was still sitting in the doorway of the cabin, which was looking remarkably cosy and appealing from my current position in the middle of swirling snowflakes and biting wind.
‘Fletcher! Come on.’ My dog’s reluctance to join me felt like the final straw. Normally he couldn’t leap into the car fast enough. It took three more attempts before he finally ran at speed across the clearing and jumped into the back seat. I fastened his harness quickly before he changed his mind.
Josh was now standing beside my car, looking not at me, but at the darkening skies.
‘Wait. I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to leave right now. This storm is worse than I realised. You’d better come back inside.’
I tightened my grip on the driver’s door, which the wind was trying to tug from my hold. ‘Josh, nothing – I repeat, nothing – could induce me to return to your home. You’ve made it perfectly clear that you don’t want me here, so now I’m going.’ I climbed into the car and reached for the seat belt. I clicked it into place and went to pull the door shut, but he had a firm hold on it.
‘I don’t want you to go.’
For just a moment his words affected me in a truly visceral way, because it made it sound like he cared, but I knew from his actions that he didn’t.
‘Careful,’ I warned. ‘You’ll get whiplash from changing your mind that fast.’
‘I’m not joking, Lily. Get out of the car. It’s not safe to drive in these conditions.’
‘Well, that’s my decision to make. Not yours. You wanted me to leave and now I’m leaving. And the quicker you remove your hand from my door, the quicker I can reach my destination and you can forget all about me. Again.’ I didn’t know why that last word had come out so plaintive. That certainly hadn’t been my intention.
‘I never forgot about you.’ Josh looked shocked, as though the words had escaped unbidden.
This wasn’t a conversation I wanted to have. Not now, in the middle of a raging blizzard. Not ever, in fact.
‘Try,’ I said, yanking on the door handle and somehow managing to pull it from his grasp. ‘And don’t follow me,’ I added, seconds before slamming the door shut.
My tyres skidded on the snowy ground as I put the wheel on full lock and accelerated faster than I should have done out of the clearing.
‘This wasnotone of your better ideas, my love,’ I told the Adam who lived on in my head and was always happy to hear whatever I had to say. Unlike the man who I could still see in my rear-view mirror, who was standing in the blizzard, staring after my car until the red of my brake lights was swallowed up by the forest.
Chapter Eight
Realising I’d made a colossal mistake wasn’t something that occurred to me gradually after driving away from Josh’s home. Iknewit was a bad decision before I’d even left the clearing. Despite the quality of its tyres, my car was under a double assault, skidding on the slippery surface of the track and being buffeted by strong winds whistling through the gaps in the trees. It was only mid-afternoon, but already it was as dark as dusk. When I entered the forest, the tall trees immediately stole the last of the daylight. Even on main beam I was struggling to see where the track ended and the undergrowth began.
The wind was vicious, tearing twigs and leaves from the trees and hurling them at my car. Some sounded as loud as bullets as they hit the metal panels. When a branch was suddenly ripped from a tree up ahead, I only just managed to swerve and avoid it – a manoeuvre I instantly regretted when the back of my car began to fantail into a skid.
‘Go into a skid, don’t fight it,’I could remember my dad once telling me, but we’d been on a tarmacked road at the time, and I had no idea if the same rules applied on an unmade surface.
My attention was on regaining control of my car and keeping it away from the ominous-looking ditch that ran along one side of the road, so I missed the exact moment when I lost phone signal.One minute my mobile had been displaying a map to get out of the forest, and the next it was totally blank.
With more luck than skill I brought the car to a standstill. ‘Nooo,’ I cried, plucking my phone from its mount and staring at it desperately, in case sheer force of will might make it light up again. On its screen were the two words no one ever wants to see on their mobile:No Signal.
Fletcher gave a fearful whimper from the back seat, clearly picking up on my panic. The sensible thing to do would be to return to Josh’s cabin. Thereallysensible thing would have been to never have embarked on this journey in the first place. I peered through the sweep of the wiper blades. The snow was falling thicker and faster, settling in wind-driven drifts on either side of the lane. The track was too narrow for me to turn the car around, so as much as I hated to admit it, my safest option was to keep going.
Without your phone?
Without knowing in which direction you should be heading?
