by Fiona Lucas
There weren’t many people wanting to descend the tower before midnight struck, but a handful were waiting for the next available lift. The doors opened just as he spotted Anna at the back of the group, desperately trying to work her way further forward, and she slid past the bodies and into the lift.
He reached the doors just as they began to slide closed. Their eyes met. She looked as panicked as he felt. Maybe more so. His chest tightened further.
“I’m so sorry, Brody. I—”
The doors cut off whatever she’d been about to say, and Brody was left standing alone in a spartan corridor of polished steel and bare white surfaces.
That was it. He’d been cut free. His anchor was gone. The full storm surge he’d been trying to hold back all evening finally hit him.
Gasping for breath, he clutched at his chest as he stumbled back against the wall and began to slide toward the floor. His vision went blurry and breathing became impossible. He closed his eyes as he heard the lift attendant shout, “Hey! Someone call an ambulance! I think this guy’s having a heart attack!”
Chapter Fifty-Four
The lift sped downward, causing Anna’s ears to pop, but she hardly took in the journey at all. It was only when a blast of cold air hit her as she stumbled out onto the street that she had any sense of where she was. She was unable to process a single thought, and the adrenaline flooding through her system propelled her forward and away. Fight or flight, they said, and just like last New Year’s Eve, flight seemed to be Anna’s thing. She was such a coward.
What are you afraid of, then?
The question curled its way into her consciousness but only served to spur her on. She pointed herself toward the crowds and busy traffic of London Bridge Street and staggered along in her heels.
She couldn’t think about that. She couldn’t think about why she was running or what she had just done. Better to just lurch along numbly in this insulating haze.
She turned the corner onto the main road and was swept along with a group of people at the crossing. She found herself in one of the outlying areas of Borough Market, a kind of glassed-in picnic area on most days, but tonight it had been transformed. People ten years her junior mingled, drinking, talking, laughing.
Anna entered and pushed her way through them until she reached the solid structure of a bar and clung onto it with both hands. “Gin! Double!” she yelled at the bartender. The gin arrived in what looked like a goldfish bowl on a thin glass stalk, but Anna didn’t care what kind of glass it was in; it wasn’t going to be staying in there long anyway. She downed it and shoved the glass back in the direction of the bartender, who nodded and refilled it as nonchalantly as if she’d been politely asking for a vanilla latte.
She bumped up against something, realized it was a barstool and slid onto it.
No, this was not happening again.
Damn that man for waking her up, for changing her from a sleepwalker into . . . this. This person who could think and feel, who had so much more to lose than a semiconscious zombie. It was all his fault.
For a moment, she managed to cobble just enough anger together to justify her actions. But only for a moment. After that, it all began to slide, down and down into a vast black pit that was opening up inside her.
Anna only knew one way to deal with these kinds of feelings. She needed to return to that state, that place—calm and blank and peaceful. But since there were no soft white sheets here, no duvets to be seen, Anna picked up her gin and began to drink.
BRODY CLOSED THE bathroom door, walked over to the toilet and put the lid down. He sat on top of it, resting his elbows on his knees, and his head in his hands. Oh, God. That had been humiliating and embarrassing and terrifying. Basically, his worst fears about a panic attack come to life.
All those people looking at him . . . And he’d had no way to get away from them, paralyzed by his own mind and body.
Thankfully, he’d managed to convince the paramedics he was fine, quietly outlining to them his history as the lift attendant had shooed the gathering crowd back around the corner and out of view. After a few tests and checks, the medical professionals had reluctantly agreed. They’d been really nice about it, actually. Which had only made him feel even more stupid and helpless.
But whatever he’d felt in that moment, it was nothing compared to the stabbing in his chest when he thought of the look in Anna’s eyes as the lift doors had closed.
He pulled his phone out of his pocket and rang her number. And then he rang it again, and again, and again. When that failed, he resorted to texting.
Where are you?
Are you okay?
I’m worried about you.
Please call back.
He was behaving like a clingy teenage girl. Also humiliating. But he didn’t care. He had to know she was all right. What he felt didn’t matter.
He growled with frustration at his blank and silent phone, and was almost tempted to hurl it across the room, but he didn’t want to be charged for the fancy TV hidden inside the bathroom mirror, so he stuffed it back in his pocket and strode into his suite.
He kept walking until he reached the corner of the dining area that looked over both the Thames and the city of London. She was out there somewhere amidst all those winking lights, possibly ill, possibly . . . something. He couldn’t get his head round it.
Why, after being so insistent that they meet, had she turned tail the moment she’d set eyes on him? It didn’t make any sense.
He had to go and find her.
Brody turned and headed across the living area to the glitzy hallway, but the closer he got to the door of his hotel suite, the more the tingling in his fingers and feet got worse. Ibrahim had warned him not to put himself in a panic-inducing situation when his symptoms were already threatening to tip him over the edge.
He made it as far as the door, laid his palm against the polished wood and his heart hiccupped, skipping a beat then doubling up. The air around him began to get fuzzy.
He’d do it, if it were just a case of getting through these symptoms and sensations, if it were just a case of walking through the terror and letting it engulf him. He’d walk a thousand miles in that state to find her, but that was the problem—he didn’t think he’d make it a thousand miles. He didn’t even think he’d make it fifty feet before his traitorous body hijacked him.
He was useless. Weak.
He dropped his hand and his shoulder sagged as he turned and walked back toward the floor-to-ceiling windows that made up almost half the walls of his suite. He rested his forehead against the glass.
A muffled bang came from somewhere upriver, and from behind the buildings to the west, fireworks began to explode. He could just about make out the curve of the top of the London Eye, lighting up with blasts of color. The river below glowed with the reflection of rockets shooting skyward, marking the passage of one year into the next. The city began to celebrate.
Brody didn’t think he’d ever felt more lonely.
THE GINS KEPT on coming, causing the bar to grow pleasantly hazy around Anna. Everyone got noisy at some point, counting loudly then cheering and hugging and kissing each other. Anna ignored them all, too intent on shoehorning herself into a state of oblivion. Someone shoved a pint of water her way—possibly the bartender—which she drank enthusiastically, and after that the gins didn’t come quite so frequently. And when they did come in the goldfish-bowl glass, they tasted suspiciously like tap water.
The nice bartender with the beard tried to ask her what her name was and if she was all right once or twice, but she rested her forehead on the bar so she didn’t have to look at him and waved him away with her hand. That made her giggle. She felt like the Queen. All she needed was a pair of white gloves and she’d be golden.
“Do you have any gloves?” she said, lifting her head and squinting at Mr. Nice Beard.
He shrugged, but then he crouched behind the bar and returned a moment later with a pair. Anna put them on. They weren�
�t quite the long, white, satin ones she’d been expecting, more a kind of knitted mulberry, but they certainly were gloves, so she couldn’t complain too much. Why had she wanted them again? Had her hands been cold? She laid her head back down on the bar and tried to remember.
She didn’t know how long she stayed like that before a crushing headache began to creep up on her. Keeping her right temple in contact with the bar, she flapped a mulberry hand at Nice Beard. “More gin,” she mumbled, then giggled again, wondering if the Queen ever said the same thing to the nice, bearded footmen at the palace.
But before the gin came, the headache began to spoil everything, sharpening her thoughts, bringing her closer to consciousness. Dammit.
Without warning, a memory from earlier in the evening assaulted her—the moment Brody had turned and looked at her. The sensation of sprinting into something solid repeated itself, the impact so powerful that Anna nearly toppled off her stool. “No,” she whimpered to somebody (she wasn’t sure who), “Brody is a friend, that’s all. A very good friend.”
The someone laughed. They clearly didn’t believe her.
“Shut up,” she said, opening her eyes and swiveling her head to look around. The laughter only got louder. Harder. But there was no one looking at her, no one taunting her. Only the voice inside her skull. The room began to spin.
She pushed herself up and stared at the bartender. “I don’t love him!” she declared emphatically. “I don’t.”
It didn’t matter how much the feelings had whipped and whirled inside her when she’d seen him. It didn’t matter how everything she knew about him—his quiet strength, his beautiful imagination, his rough laughter—wound themselves together and stabbed her straight through the heart. She just didn’t, and that was that.
Nice Beard raised his eyebrows as he filled another pint glass with water and placed it in front of her.
“I don’t,” she said again.
He shrugged. “You’re not the first person to cry on my bar and say that,” he said. “But in my experience, they inevitably do.”
Anna shook her head, but it made it hurt all the more. She closed her eyes. “I can’t love him like that,” she whispered. “He’s not Spencer.”
She waited for her little alarm to chime in, backing her up, but it was mysteriously silent. “Traitor,” she whispered.
“I beg your pardon?” Mr. Nice Beard said.
I beg your pardon.
Anna sat up straight. “Those exact words are what got me into this mess in the first place!” she said vehemently, waving an arm so hard that she started to wobble and had to hold on to her stool.
“I’m calling you a cab,” he said.
“Don’t need one,” Anna said, fumbling around for her handbag, which was still slung across her body. “I have my Oyster. Oh. Where is it?”
“I’m calling you a cab,” he said again. “Drink your water.”
And that is how Anna found herself in the back of a minicab. The driver—a woman, surprisingly—had to go around the block twice before Anna managed to tell her where she wanted to go.
“I’ve been appalling,” she wailed at the woman. “I’ve been awful to him!”
The driver just chuckled. “When it comes to men, that sounds like tit for tat.”
“But I need to apologize!”
The woman gave her a look via the rearview mirror. “Happy to oblige,” she said drily. “You just need to give me a postcode.”
Anna frowned. Where was she going again? What was she supposed to be doing?
Oh, yes. She took a deep breath and told the driver the address.
THE CAB SLOWED and came to a halt. Anna stared out the window. Everything seemed blurry. On automatic, she pulled a wad of notes from her purse and handed them to the driver, and she only partly registered the smile on the woman’s face. Tomorrow, she’d probably regret what must have been a ridiculous tip, but right at this moment, all she cared about was getting to her destination, about saying what she needed to say to him.
Anna weaved her way up the path to her front door and, after a couple of attempts, she managed to get the key and lock to cooperate with each other. Once inside, she dumped her bag and coat on the hall floor, then she ran upstairs to her bedroom.
Her breathing was fast and shallow as she opened Spencer’s wardrobe. The bottom was filled with black plastic bags and she tore a slit in one at the top of the pile and pulled out a shirt, then buried her face in it and began to cry in loud, juddering sobs.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered when she managed to catch her breath. “I’m so sorry, Spencer. I didn’t mean to do it. I didn’t mean to fall—” She stopped then, refusing to say the words that came next. She would never say them. Instead, she cleared her throat and took a different path, one that led away from that dangerous place.
She started pulling off her dress, all the while saying, “I love you and only you, Spencer. It was always supposed to be that way and it always will be. I promise you that.” And then she pulled the shirt over her head and smoothed it down around her torso. “I promise,” she whispered again.
Chapter Fifty-Five
Brody startled awake. He was lying fully dressed, facedown on top of the duvet on the hotel bed. He rolled over and ran a hand through his hair. He must have fallen asleep waiting for Anna to respond last night.
Since his room had no curtains, only wall-to-wall glass, it was easy to see it was still dark outside. Something buzzed beneath him on the bed. His phone. It must be what had woken him. He grunted and shifted, extracting it from under his left hip, and checked the phone screen. It was—
In an instant, he was sitting on the edge of the bed, his brain suddenly cleared of sleep. Anna! With clumsy fingers, he swiped at his screen and held the phone up to his ear.
“Brody?”
“Anna! Where have you been? I’ve been trying to get in contact all night. Are you okay? What happened?” Stop, he told himself. She can’t answer your questions if you won’t stop asking them. He closed his mouth and let her get a word in edgewise.
“Brody . . . About last night . . . I’m so sorry. I just . . .” She let out a heavy breath.
“Are you okay?” Brody asked again. “You’re not ill or hurt?”
He heard her swallow. “No.”
Was it his imagination, or did he hear a hint of guilt in her tone? “Then what happened?”
“That’s just it . . . I don’t really know. I just kind of . . . freaked. I don’t know why, and I can’t even explain it.” She paused and let out a nervous laugh. “I mean, you and I both know I can get a little bit . . . weird . . . about New Year’s Eve.”
Brody didn’t say anything. The way she was talking . . . Something wasn’t sitting right with him.
“I . . . I would have phoned earlier, but I got a little drunk, and I must have fallen asleep and . . .” She trailed off forlornly and then added quietly, “I just found your messages. I’m so sorry.”
“You got drunk?” Brody echoed. “Where? At a bar?”
“Yes, and . . . yes,” Anna said, and he could picture her covering her eyes in shame. He wasn’t unsympathetic—he knew all about freaking out, after all—but something wasn’t adding up here.
“After seeing me? After running away?”
“Yes . . . I don’t know what to say, how to explain it . . .” There was a tremble in her voice when she spoke again. “Please, Brody. I know what I did was awful but . . . but can we put it behind us?”
Brody frowned and walked over to the vast windows of his suite’s bedroom. She was out there somewhere, and he didn’t know where. Why? Why didn’t he know that? What was going on with her? “In my experience,” he said calmly, “it doesn’t work to just sweep everything under the carpet. There was a reason you left last night, Anna. You need to work out what that is and, to be honest, I’d like to know what the reason is too.”
Silence.
While he waited for her to answer, his mind went back to that mom
ent when he’d first seen her the night before. The expression on her face—both at that moment and in the lift—haunted him. When he’d finally drifted off to sleep sometime before dawn, it was all he’d been able to dream about. And now it was etched on his memory like the ghost of an image left on an old photographic plate.
That expression told him all he needed to know, he realized. Because he recognized it. He knew the emotion that lay beneath it intimately.
Fear.
But what was she afraid of? He began pacing up along the glass panels that made up one wall of the bedroom, eyes fixed on the city lights outside. Not heights or crowded spaces, otherwise she’d never have suggested this as a location. The only other possible answer he could think of was that she’d been afraid of him. Logically, that fit but it didn’t mean it made any sense. Did he look like an axe-murdering psychopath after all? He didn’t think so. He’d actually shaved, for God’s sake. It was the most presentable he’d been in years. But then an idea began to creep up on him . . .
“What can I do, Brody?” Anna finally said. “To make things better. I want to make things better. I want things to go back to the way they were.”
It didn’t escape him that she hadn’t answered his question, but maybe it was his turn to lead the way. Over the last year, she’d inspired him to be brave, to work through his fears; maybe he could do the same for her—and there was only one way he could think of. He was going to have to be courageous enough to be honest, like she usually was, right here, in this moment. He stopped pacing, planted his feet and tried to imagine her standing there in the room with him. “I’m not sure I want things to go back to the way they were before, Anna.”
She gave a little shocked sob. “Why not? Did I . . . Did I ruin it? Please don’t say I did. Brody, you’ve got to forgive me!”