The Last Goodbye

by Fiona Lucas

  She looked back at Gabi. “What are you trying to say?”

  “That this man may not be who he says he is. Remember all those episodes of Catfish we watched together?”

  Anna nodded. Gabi had become obsessed with the show after a dodgy internet dating experience. She’d made Anna sit though hours watching the two presenters, Nev and Max, helping people uncover the true identities of their online loves. Hardly anyone had been who they’d said they were.

  “Well? Have you done a reverse image search?”

  “No . . .”

  Gabi let out an exasperated sigh. “That is beginner stuff, Anna! Basics!”

  “He’s never sent me a picture,” she explained.

  Gabi buried her face in the duvet and let out a strangled sound.

  “What’s this all got to do with Spencer’s dog, anyway?” Anna asked, sitting up a little straighter and folding her arms.

  Gabi lifted her head and sighed. “This is what happens when you watch Catfish and you are in a happy relationship, Anna!” She tapped her temple with a finger. “You didn’t pay attention, because you didn’t think it would happen to you.”

  Anna blinked. Obviously not.

  Gabi sat up too, all traces of sleepiness gone. “He could look you up, find your page, which leads into Spencer’s page—which you made fully public, remember, so anyone could post? All he had to do was what I did, and he would find lots of little details to trick you.”

  Anna shook her head. “No. No way.”

  Gabi gave her a pitying look. “That’s what every person on that show always thought.”

  Anna racked her brains. She didn’t know how she was sure Brody was okay, she just was. All those hours they’d talked, the details they’d shared . . . She frowned. Well, okay, the details she’d shared, but still.

  And then it struck her. “He didn’t know my last name until recently! I’d wanted to tell him before that, but he wouldn’t let me. He can’t have looked me or Spencer up on Facebook without knowing that!”

  Gabi pursed her lips. Despite Anna’s protestations, she didn’t look convinced in the slightest. “May-be,” she said. “But I am sure there are ways, if someone knows what he’s doing.”

  Anna stared across the room. “I know you’re just looking out for me, but it’s okay, really,” she said. “A couple of weeks ago, I asked to meet up with him and he said no. He wouldn’t have done that if he had dubious intentions, would he?”

  “Oh, my God! You were going to meet him?”

  “Yes,” Anna said, getting irritated despite herself. Gabi was missing the point.

  “Anna . . .” Gabi said, as if she was explaining something to someone who was very, very simple. “Seriously?”

  Anna hung on to the one detail that was solid, that proved her case. “He said ‘no.’ But even so, I still would like to meet him. Someday.”

  Gabi searched her face. “You’re really serious about this, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even though this means you . . . What did Spencer used to say? That you have ‘lost the plot’?”

  “Yes.” That was what Spencer always used to say, and this was much more like the pre–Lee breakup Gabi. Anna almost hugged her, welcoming this version of her best friend back.

  “Please tell me you’ve done some research of your own.”

  Anna colored. “A little.”

  “Hallelujah! What did you find out?”

  “Not much. I couldn’t find any social media accounts that matched what I know about him. Perhaps he doesn’t have any?”

  Gabi shook her head again and muttered something about newbie mistakes. “Red flag, Anna. Nev and Max would be ashamed of you!” She reached over to grab her phone off the bedside table. “What is his last name?”

  “Smith.”

  “Smith?” she said, raising an eyebrow at Anna.

  Anna looked over Gabi’s shoulder as she searched Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. When she’d finished, she waved her phone at Anna. “This is suspicious. I don’t like it, Anna. I don’t like it. Everybody has some kind of online stuff these days, so it’s weird that he does not. What is Brody Smith not telling you—if his name really is Brody Smith?”

  Nothing, Anna wanted to say, and she was about to when she remembered the feeling that had been creeping up on her recently. Brody was holding something back. She knew that as clearly and certainly as she knew that he was a good, decent man, and not a scammer or a pervert.

  “Just promise me—if you ever, ever think about meeting him, you’ll find out more,” Gabi said earnestly.

  Anna swallowed. “Of course.”

  However, she thought as she eased herself off the bed and said good night to Gabi. It really was a moot point. She wasn’t going to have to worry about the ethics of it, because, as much as she wanted to meet Brody, he obviously didn’t want to meet her.

  Chapter Forty-One

  A couple of days later, Brody stood at the back door to Moji’s shop, his arms full. He felt a quiver, a flash of something across his consciousness, and his stomach dropped. He closed his eyes and felt the solid reality of the cardboard box he was holding, the weight of its contents. He breathed in and out, then opened his eyelids.

  Okay. He was going to do this. This was a concrete opportunity to put into practice the things he’d only been working on in private up until this point. He’d laid his foundation: exercise, nutrition, better sleep. He’d rehearsed the techniques Ibrahim had introduced him to. They’d both agreed the next step was to use them in a real-life situation, and waiting for the next pair of hikers to appear on his doorstep was not really an option.

  They’d kept the toolbox of techniques simple. First was breathing. Second, counting. He’d practiced this lots recently, counting birds, trees, clouds. He’d even mentally prepared for being in the town, adding cars of a particular color or a certain breed of dogs to his list, anything to distract himself from the mounting physical sensations. The more attention he paid to them, the more he was likely to tip himself over the edge.

  The third technique was one he found harder to do, but which Ibrahim had suggested keeping in reserve, a last resort, if you like. It involved stepping outside of himself, outside of his symptoms, and analyzing the panic as if it was an external thing, not something happening to him right then and there.

  Moji’s shop was a good a place as any to start, partly because it had been a challenging situation in the past, and partly because Moji’s presence would help, but mostly because he’d been working all hours making wooden toys recently. Something was driving him, some lost creative urge.

  Right. He balanced the box in one arm and reached out to knock on the glass. A couple of seconds later, Moji appeared. She beamed when she saw him, then unlocked the door and let him inside. He followed her through to the main area of the shop.

  “Cuppa?” she said, waving an empty mug at him with a slogan across the front that read Toy Shop Owners Do It for Fun.

  “Please.”

  Once tea was made, Moji set to work unpacking the box. She exclaimed and commented over every set of stacking rings and every pull-along dog (one of which looked remarkably like Lewis) or set of train tracks. However, when she got to the bottom of the box, she really started to gush. “Oh, wow! You made her for me!” she said, unraveling an elegant elfin figure from the roll of bubble wrap. “She’s even prettier than the first!”

  The new elf was indeed beautiful, even if Brody did say so himself. She had long limbs, pointed ears, and gently waving tresses. She clasped a longbow loosely, and there was a look of focus, of determination, on her finely featured face.

  “What am I going to do now?” Moji said, laughing. “I don’t want to sell this one either!”

  Brody smiled, but as she reached into the box to fetch the last item, he grew serious again. Moji looked up at him, a smile on her lips and a question in her eyes. “You made me more than one?” She was still smiling as she started to unroll the protective
layer of plastic bubbles.

  “Oh!” Moji exclaimed again as she turned the little wooden figure over in her hands, inspecting it from every angle. “This one is different,” she said, looking up at him.

  Different, she certainly was, Brody thought. She was his Not Elf. He’d taken her down from the bookshelf in his study. While it had been nice to see her sitting there every evening, keeping him company, he thought it was probably better that he didn’t get too attached to her.

  “Are you sure—?” Moji began to say, but at that moment the shop door opened and the old-fashioned bell above it jangled.

  Brody froze. The hairs on his arms and on the back of his neck lifted. Ice cubes tumbled into his stomach and swirled around there. He began to breathe—in for three, hold for three, out for three. It was an exercise he’d repeated multiple times a day over the last few weeks and, as he began to feel the oxygen reach his bloodstream, muscle memory took over and he realized he had space in his brain for more than just the processing of oxygen.

  He looked over to the shop door, where a woman in a chunky sweater and jeans was standing. She didn’t even make eye contact with him, just nodded at Moji and then began to browse in the books section.

  He hadn’t tumbled into a full-on panic attack yet, and if he didn’t want to, he needed to find something to count . . .

  But he couldn’t find anything suitable in Moji’s shop. It was crammed to the rafters with all sorts of different toys and objects, but he couldn’t find a pattern in any of them. No terriers or red cars here. The woman moved closer, only six feet away now.

  He couldn’t get enough distance, not mentally, not physically. There was no room to pull back the lens from close-up into panorama and observe himself. Breath became harder to find. He started having that weird “everything’s not real” feeling, a sign that he was teetering on the edge of that dreaded slippery slope.

  No. He closed his eyes. No! He did not want this to happen. He did not want to fail his first time out. Not when he’d tried so hard. He searched his memory desperately for anything else, but the only other technique he could remember was visualization, and he’d been pretty sure that wasn’t going to work for him.

  He’d once had a special, secret place like the one Ibrahim had suggested inside his imagination, a place that had always made him feel at peace and alive, but it was gone now. Bulldozed. He tried to go back there with Ibrahim’s help, but it had been worse than he’d remembered: barren trees and scorched earth. He’d still recognized some of the landmarks, though. He realized he could have persisted walking through that once gentle meadow with the copse at the end if he’d wanted to, but the air had been thick with fear because he’d known what lay at the end of the path he was treading.

  The pond. He couldn’t even think about the pond. So he’d run away from that place, locked the gate on it in his imagination. Buried the key.

  The woman came to ask Moji a question. Brody didn’t hear what. It sounded as if she were talking underwater. Moji laid the wooden figure she’d been holding on the counter and went over to help the woman find the particular book she was looking for.

  His Not Elf.

  Anna.

  He thought about Anna. He thought about the photograph on his phone, about the expression in her eyes, at once curious and open. She’d been outside when it had been taken. There’d been blurry woodland in the background. He imagined her somewhere else near woodland—on his terrace overlooking his garden, sitting at the little table and chairs. She wore the gray scarf from her photo and the purple hat with the flower on it. Her breath was coming in pure white clouds as she stared into the distance, and he realized she was looking out for someone, waiting. And then she turned and smiled at him.

  Brody’s heart rate slowed, settled into a steady thump.

  Even though she hadn’t been smiling in the photo she’d sent, he could see it so clearly in his imagination. The way her mouth curled and creased felt real, felt true. She was looking at him as the sun rose behind her head, its pale golden rays making the frost on the twisted, barren wisteria that clung to the side of the house sparkle.

  “Are you okay, Brody?”

  He turned to find Moji looking at him. The shop was empty, the memory of the bell over the door an echo in his ears. He was still breathing methodically and slowly, his unconscious brain counting beats of three even as his imagination had drifted elsewhere. “Yes,” he said, a smile threatening to curve his lips. “Yes, I think I am.”

  Moji looked at the Not Elf. Brody was holding it tightly in both hands. “Are you sure she’s supposed to be in the box?” Moji asked. “I mean, I’ll take her. She’s lovely. But she’s not the usual sort of thing you bring me.”

  “No,” he said, staring down at the determined chin, the faraway eyes. “You’re right. It was a mistake. She shouldn’t have been in there.”

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Anna leaned back in her office chair at Sundridge Plumbing and Heating and rubbed her temples with the tips of her fingers. She’d just got off the phone with a customer, irate because their hot and cold tap labels were on the wrong way around. Not ideal, obviously, but you’d have thought from the fuss they made that raw sewage was pumping through their otherwise perfectly installed new bathroom.

  Her mobile buzzed on the desk, a message from Gabi. Meet me outside the Book Corner at noon.

  Hmm. That was a bit cryptic. And not the sort of message she’d become used to receiving from her best friend since the split with Lee. They usually alternated between ranting about Lee or crying about Lee and who he might be seeing now (there were rumors about Miss Ponytail, apparently).

  Ok, Anna had texted back, ready for anything to get her out of the office for a bit. Why?

  I will tell you when you get here had been Gabi’s mysterious reply.

  Which is why Anna took an early lunch break and found herself standing outside a bookshop in Bromley High Street one drizzly October day.

  “Please don’t be angry with me,” Gabi said when she arrived and opened the door so they could both go inside out of the rain.

  “Why would I be angry with you?” Anna asked as she folded up her umbrella.

  Gabi glanced around the shop then motioned for Anna to join her behind one of the bookshelves further to the back of the shop. “I have been digging,” she said, looking very serious.

  “Digging?”

  Gabi nodded. “Concerning your mystery man.”

  “My mystery . . . ?” Anna stopped. She frowned. “Brody?”

  “Sorry,” Gabi replied, looking torn. “I wasn’t going to, but once I got the idea, I couldn’t stop myself. I have too much free time now—especially early in the morning, when I can’t sleep.”

  Anna looked back at Gabi and then she sighed and nodded. Gabi seemed to have two states of being since she’d split up with Lee—sad and floppy, or intense and hyper. “And?”

  Gabi led Anna even further into the depths of the shop, where they were surrounded by the bright colors and illustrated characters of the children’s section, and pulled a book from the shelf. “Here,” she said, handing it to Anna. “This is him.”

  Anna looked at the hardback titled The Moon Dragon. “Gabi,” she said slowly, starting to fear for her friend’s sanity. “This is not Brody. It’s a book.”

  “By him,” Gabi said, her eyes boring into Anna’s, waiting for Anna to catch her meaning.

  Anna laughed. “No,” she said. “No, it really isn’t.” She handed the book back to Gabi. “Brody Alexander,” she said. “Not Brody Smith. The same results clogged up the page when I Googled too. It’s not him.”

  “It’s the same person. His full name is Brody Alexander Smith.”

  Anna shook her head gently. “But I looked at his website. It said he lives in London. He’s married . . .”

  Gabi looked at her meaningfully, then opened the cover and flipped to the copyright page. She tapped the creamy paper with a fingernail. “This was published in 2008.
Maybe the website has not been updated? Maybe he did live in London at one time—and you said he’d lost his . . .”

  “Wife,” Anna finished for her. She tugged the book back out of Gabi’s fingers. There was that same black-and-white author photo she’d seen on the internet inside the jacket. Her heart stuttered. This was Brody?

  “That’s why Brody Alexander was high up when we Googled Brody Smith,” Gabi explained, her eyes shining with triumph and accomplishment. She’d always fancied herself as a bit of an amateur detective. “I read some online articles about him. One of them said what his real name was, and that he uses a different one for his books.”

  Anna was still staring at the photo. It wasn’t at all what she imagined when she’d pictured him. Not at all. But in a strange way, the face was right—perfect—for the voice on the other end of the phone line, a voice she was so familiar with she could replay snatches of their conversations in her head, should she wish to.

  “Maybe I should say ‘used’ a different name,” Gabi added. “He hasn’t written for a very long time. His fans are still waiting for the sixth and final book in this series.”

  Anna looked up at Gabi. None of this made any sense. Brody had never talked about writing, about doing anything much creative, apart from the woodworking he did, which had seemed to Anna like a bit of an old man’s hobby. But what had he said once . . . ? Something about having made enough money from a career he’d walked away from to have bought his cottage . . . ? Anna’s skin began to tingle.

  This was his secret? Why had he kept this from her?

  “There is something else . . .” Gabi said hesitantly. “One website also said why he has not written a new book for almost ten years, about why he may have disappeared. There was an accident—”

  “I don’t want to know!” Anna blurted out so loudly that a couple of other customers turned around and frowned at her. “I don’t want to know,” she repeated more quietly, making sure Gabi met her gaze and knew how serious she was about this. She’d decided not to snoop and, despite the fact she was suddenly desperate to know all the things Brody hadn’t told her, she couldn’t quite bring herself to go there. If he wanted her to know, he’d tell her. And he’d do that one day soon, surely.