‘You would? Because that’s why I’m calling. I’ve bought you a ticket to LA. You’ll fly out on Saturday.’
She blinked. But Arlo wasn’t in LA.
‘Frankie! Are you still there? Did you hear what I said?’
‘Yes, I did. That’s amazing.’ She forced a note of excitement into her voice. ‘But you shouldn’t have—’
‘Yes, I should,’ he said firmly. ‘And Arlo thinks so too.’
‘He does?’ Her heart began hammering inside her chest.
‘Yeah, he thinks you need a proper holiday. And besides, he’s going to be in Svalbard at the end of the month.’
Her stomach felt as if it was filled with ice. She felt stunned, stupid, small.
Turning her head, she stared across the room to where Arlo was gazing at the sea. There was tension in his body and she knew he was seeing a different blue sea—one dotted with sharp-toothed icebergs.
‘It’s addictive,’ he’d said.
She’d thought he’d been talking figuratively. But how could she compete with such beauty and majesty?
‘Look, I know it’s short notice, Frankie, but I also know I let you down.’
Johnny’s voice broke into her thoughts and she gazed down into her cooling cup of coffee. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said quietly.
‘It does to me. So please let me make it up to you. Come to LA.’
She sucked in a steadying breath. ‘I’d love to.’
As she hung up Arlo turned to face her, and the cool distance in his eyes left her in no doubt as to how he was really feeling.
In his head, he was already there on the ice. Maybe he’d never left. No wonder he couldn’t promise anything in the way of commitment.
‘So you’re off to LA.’
It was a statement, not a question, but she still nodded.
‘It’s for the best, Frankie.’
‘For whom?’ She stood up abruptly and walked towards him.
‘For you, of course. You’re twenty-one. You have your whole life ahead of you, and that life isn’t going to start here—’
With me.
He didn’t say those words, but they both heard them. But he hadn’t heard what she had to say. What she needed him to hear...to know.
She was done with hiding the truth. It hadn’t stopped her losing everyone she loved and needed before, but it might stop her losing the man she loved and needed now.
She moved to his side. ‘But what if I told you I loved you? Would that change anything?’
Only even before he shook his head, she knew that it wouldn’t. That he already knew, and it didn’t matter.
And knowing that he knew, and that it hadn’t changed anything, gave her the strength to pull back and not leap unthinkingly with her eyes wide open.
It was over.
She couldn’t do what she suspected Harriet had done—just hope that this difficult, conflicted man would change over time, for her. Maybe she might have done before the accident, but not now. Not knowing what she did about the agony of loss.
It was just so hard to let it go—to let him go.
‘I don’t want your love. And I don’t want to hurt you. I want to be honest with you.’ He glanced away from her. ‘This...what we had...was amazing. You’re amazing.’
Had. There had been no moment of decision but already he was talking in the past tense, as if the choice had been made.
She stared at him in silence. ‘Just not amazing enough,’ she said slowly. She felt as if someone had punched her in the stomach, and her fingers curved protectively against the ache.
‘No, that’s not true.’ His eyes narrowed on her face. ‘This isn’t about you.’
She stared at him, her heart breaking. ‘You’re right. It is about us. And I think you’re not giving us a chance.’
Say something, she willed him. Ask me not to go to LA.
But a distance had opened between them now that seemed impossible to bridge and he said nothing.
Disbelief thudded inside her head.
After everything that had happened, surely it couldn’t end like this?
As the silence lengthened, grew weighty, she could bear it no more. ‘I don’t think there’s any point in me staying, so I’m going to go upstairs and pack. Can you call me a cab?’
‘I’ll take you to the station.’ His voice was hard and flat.
Turning, she walked back across the kitchen, stopping in the doorway. ‘You know, you saved me, Arlo—not just on the causeway, but here.’ She touched her head. ‘And here.’ She touched her heart. ‘You made me trust myself and I’ll always be grateful.’
Her heart was aching, as if it had been torn in two, but she was going to leave nothing unsaid.
‘I know that if anyone can save the world it’s you. But I just hope that one day you meet someone who can rescue you.’ She took a breath, pushing back against the pain of imagining that scenario. ‘Someone who can make you trust in love again...make you trust yourself. Someone who will make you see that love is a risk worth taking and that a life without risks that aren’t to do with cold and ice and danger is no life at all.’
There was nothing more to say. The weight of misery pressing against her heart was unbearable and, turning, she walked swiftly out of the room.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE TRAIN BURST out of the tunnel with a rush of warm air and a high-pitched squeal of brakes that filled the platform at Covent Garden underground station.
Frankie joined the crowd of commuters and shoppers jostling one another into the carriage. There was nowhere to sit so she grabbed hold of a hanging strap, leaning her head wearily into the crook of her elbow. She felt exhausted, although there was no real reason why she should. She’d hardly left the flat since getting back to London.
In fact, today was the first day she’d actually bothered to change out of her pyjamas, and it was a shock seeing herself reflected in the grimy window. A lot of the time over the last three days she had felt as if she was slowly being erased.
As the train started to judder forward she mechanically tightened her grip, shrinking into her coat. Her shoulders tensed. Even the thought that she might accidentally be thrown against someone made her feel queasy.
It wasn’t personal.
Except it was.
She just couldn’t bear the idea of touching someone who wasn’t Arlo.
Or maybe it was the knowledge that she would never touch Arlo again that was making her feel so unsteady.
The train rumbled into the next station and she watched numbly as people got on and off, remembering those final few minutes they’d shared.
It had been almost a second-by-second replay of the first time he’d put her on a train. He had lifted her bag up onto the luggage rack and told her to have a good trip, and then turned and walked away.
Gazing at the window, she let her reflection blur. The difference was that Arlo hadn’t come back for her. She had sat in the empty carriage, waiting, hoping, praying... But two minutes later the train had pulled out of the station.
In many ways it had been unremarkable—just a train leaving a station. To her, though, it had been as if day had turned into night.
Her eyes burned. She hadn’t cried then. She still hadn’t cried. The tears were there, but for some reason they wouldn’t fall.
It was raining as she walked out of the tube station. It had been raining ever since she’d left Northumberland—a steady grey drizzle that made people hurry home.
Home.
Her throat tightened. It made no sense to think of the Hall as home, and yet it felt to her more like home than the flat.
Turning into the street where she lived, she plodded through the puddles uncaringly.
But, of course, home was where the heart was—and her heart was with Arlo...would always be with Arlo.
&
nbsp; Only he didn’t want her heart.
He couldn’t have made that any plainer, but it had taken her until this morning to finally accept that as one of the unchangeable, absolute truths that Arlo so loved.
Her heart contracted. How long was this going to last? Her every thought beginning and ending with Arlo?
Glancing up, she felt her breath catch. A tall man was standing by her front door, face lowered, shoulders hunched against the rain.
Her feet stuttered and then she was stumbling forward, breaking into a run, a trace of hope working its way through her blood, flaring into the light.
‘Arlo—’
He turned, and disappointment punched her in the diaphragm. It wasn’t him.
‘Thank goodness. I was worried you’d already left.’
It was her neighbour Graham. Beside him was a huge cardboard box.
‘They tried to deliver this earlier, but you were out.’
She forced a smile. ‘That’s so kind of you, Gray, thank you.’
‘No worries. Do you need me to take it inside?’
‘No, it’s fine. Honestly.’
He looked relieved. ‘I’ll see you when you get back, then. Have a good time.’
Upstairs in the flat, she dried her hair with a towel and frowned at the box. It was probably just some designer, sending her stuff to promote.
But when she tore off the parcel tape and stared down at the suitcase a lump built in her throat. She replayed the moment on the causeway when the wheel on her old suitcase had broken, snapping the thought off before she got to the part where Arlo had scooped her into his arms.
Because, of course, Arlo had sent the parcel. He had a pile of exactly the same suitcases in his bedroom.
There was an envelope with her name written on the front, and heart pounding, she opened it. Inside was a plain correspondence card, and written in Arlo’s familiar slanting handwriting was a message.
I’m sorry.
The pain made breathing impossible. She curled over, clutching the card, and finally did what she had been unable to do for the last three days.
She wept.
* * *
‘Come on, then.’
Patting the sofa, beside him, Arlo breathed out unevenly as Nero jumped up onto the velvet cushions. He didn’t normally let the lurcher up on the furniture, but there was something comforting about the dog’s warm fur against his hand.
His throat tightened. Not that he deserved to be comforted after how he’d acted.
Picturing Frankie’s stunned, pale face, he tensed his fingers against Nero’s head. He had been so blazingly certain, so smugly convinced that he was in control...that he had got it all worked out.
Now all his assumptions seemed at best naive and at worst inhuman.
She had told him she loved him and the stark honesty of her words had unmanned him. Coward that he was, he had thought she would leave that unspoken, so that he could keep on pretending that he didn’t know how she felt.
How he felt.
He gritted his teeth.
So many times out on the ice he had been faced with a crossroads—a moment in his journey when a decision had to be made. A choice that could mean either life or death. And each time he’d made a choice.
It was what he did. He spoke about it at schools. In lecture theatres at universities. The great explorer Arlo Milburn, talking about risk...about how every step in any direction was ultimately a leap of faith.
But he hadn’t made that leap for Frankie. He loved her and he had let her leave, and this time tomorrow she would be on her way to LA.
And in a week’s time he would be out on the ice, living the life he’d told her he wanted. A life he had chosen over her. A life that suited someone like him—someone who found the prospect of having a woman who loved him too risky. A life where risk was confined to sub-zero temperatures and blizzards.
In other words, not a life worth living.
* * *
There. It was done. Finally she was packed.
Letting out a breath, Frankie got to her feet and stared down at her plush new suitcase. She had dithered about taking it, but in the end it had seemed churlish not to—and anyway her old suitcase was ruined.
She glanced at the clock by her bed. The taxi would be here in a minute, but that was fine. She just had to get her coat and then she would be ready to go.
She was going to get to the airport hours before she needed to, but that was what she’d decided to do last night, after she’d finally finished crying. She had cried a lot. About the accident and her family and about Arlo. At one point she had thought she might never stop crying, but at one minute past midnight she had run out of tears.
And that was when she’d made up her mind that today was going to be the first day of her new life.
Obviously, she wasn’t going to just forget all her problems. But there was no future in living in the past and she wanted to start living again.
That was what Arlo had given her. He had helped her take that first step. More than anything she had wanted him to join her on the rest of her journey, only that wasn’t to be.
But she wasn’t just going to mark time and blog, like she had after the accident. She was going to go out into the world and live her life. Do some travelling. Make some new friends—real friends. Reconnect with old ones. Learn a new skill.
The intercom buzzed and, shrugging on her coat, she took the handle of her suitcase and glanced slowly around the flat. Maybe when she came back she would finally make this into a home.
She always used the famous black London cabs for work. The cabbies were always fun to talk to, and it looked cool arriving at events in one. Now, she found the familiar beetle shape of the car comforting.
As she buckled up, the cabbie turned round. ‘It’s Heathrow, isn’t it?’
Frankie nodded. ‘Yes, please.’
‘Going somewhere nice, are you?’
‘Los Angeles.’
‘Lovely. Me and the wife went there last year. Then we did a road trip to New York.’ He laughed. ‘I know! I spend all day in the cab and then I do three weeks driving across America for my holidays. But I loved it. Every day felt like an adventure.’
Frankie smiled. ‘This is a bit of an adventure for me too. My friend moved out there a few weeks ago and out of the blue he called up and invited me to stay.’
‘Already? He’s keen!’
‘Oh, it’s nothing like that. We’re just friends.’
‘Course you are.’
Looking up, she could see the cabbie grinning in the rear-view mirror.
‘Just so you know, I’m going to shoot right at the traffic lights. I wouldn’t normally, but there’s roadworks on Woodley Road.’
She nodded. ‘Okay.’ Frowning, she pulled out her phone. ‘Or you can try Mercer Street and then Warwick Park—’
Her voice stalled in her throat. The phone in her hand felt suddenly leaden. Or maybe that was her limbs.
Heart thumping, she stared down at the screen. She had been planning to check the route, but instead she was looking at the last journey she’d searched.
To Northumberland.
She’d thought she couldn’t cry any more. But now tears started to roll down her cheeks.
Turning her head towards the window, she took a breath. The rows of terraced houses had given way to shops and banks and cafés. Already the streets were starting to buzz with life.
LA would be bigger, brighter, busier.
But it would still seem empty to her.
Everywhere would always be empty if Arlo wasn’t there.
‘No, no, no... Now, don’t you go getting upset.’
Glancing into the mirror, Frankie saw that the cabbie was looking at her in horror.
‘You don’t need to worry,’ he said. ‘I kn
ow a detour that’ll get you to the airport in plenty of time. You’ll have your adventure, I promise.’
She felt her heartbeat accelerate.
Not if she went to the airport, she wouldn’t.
Wiping her eyes, she leaned forward. ‘Actually, we’re going to have to take a slightly bigger detour...’
* * *
Arlo woke late on Saturday morning. He had been awake for most of the night, willing the morning to come so that he could get the day over and done.
He’d expected it to be grey and dull, but the weather forecasters had got it spectacularly wrong and after days of rain the skies had cleared and the sun was beaming above the horizon.
But it wasn’t the sudden upturn in the weather that had got him out of bed.
It was Frankie.
His mouth twisted.
Only not quite Frankie.
She had been there in his dreams, and just as he’d begun to wake her soft body had pressed tightly against his. He had felt her warmth, and relief had spread through his limbs. And then he had woken properly, and her absence had been like a crushing weight on his chest, so that he’d had to get up and move about.
He should be packing. But that would mean going into his bedroom, and he had been avoiding it for days, choosing instead to sleep in one of the spare rooms.
Downstairs, the house was silent and still, and he made his way into the kitchen, Nero padding lightly after him. It would all be over soon. Just this last day to get through and then she would be gone. In a week he would join the expedition at Svalbard and lose himself in the fathomless expanse of the Arctic.
His phone rang, the noise jolting him, and he felt a sudden rush of raw, unfiltered hope. But as he glanced down at the screen it swiftly drained away.
He hesitated, debating how to swipe, and then he made up his mind. ‘Davey. How are you?’
‘Oh, I’m fine. But apparently you have lost your mind.’
Arlo frowned. He could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he and Davey had fallen out, but on those rare occasions his cousin had always been placatory—apologetic, almost.
Now, though, his cousin’s voice was shaking with either anger or frustration or both.
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