by Sara Foster
Come Back to Me
Sara Foster
Do you have to honour a promise you made in the past if it means losing all you have now?
When Mark introduces his date, Julia, to Chloe and her husband at a London restaurant, it's obvious that something is very, very wrong. Alex and Julia pretend not to know one another, but the shocked expressions on their faces tell another story.
As the mystery of Julia's identity unravels, a terrible tragedy from ten years ago gradually comes to light. While Chloe struggles with a secret of her own, Alex has to decide whether he should take Julia back to Australia to try to lay the past to rest, when doing so will risk all he has with the wife he loves.
And Julia must decide whether to finally confront Alex with the whole truth about what happened back then.
Set in London and Perth, Come Back to Me is a taut psychological drama that will keep you enthralled until the very last page
Sara Foster
Come Back to Me
© 2010
For Matt and Marian
Thank you for helping me touch my dreams
And for Hannah
My sunshine
PART ONE
HOLDING ON
1
London
November 2009
It was already dark outside, the wind working itself up into a frenzy against the bedroom window. Chloe sat at her dresser, staring at the mirror while absently fingering the latest gift from her husband – a dainty row of black beads dotted with brilliant red stones that shimmered in the lamplight. Distantly she could hear Alex getting ready in the adjacent bathroom – the sound of the shower turning on and off, water running in the basin, electric toothbrush whirring, then feet shuffling, getting louder as he re-entered their bedroom and walked over to her.
In the mirror, her eyes met his reflected ones, and she smiled.
‘You look distracted?’ he commented, his voice rising with the question.
‘Mmm,’ she murmured, fingering the beads. She wanted so much to tell him. To share the news that she herself had only just discovered. But now was not the time.
She lifted the beads. ‘Would you?’
He came close behind her as she pulled her shoulder-length bobbed hair out of the way, and she felt his fingers softly brush her neck as he clumsily manoeuvred the clasp. She watched in the mirror and saw a frown flicker across his face as he fumbled for a moment with the delicate links. As he let go, she whirled around and kissed him.
Alex stood back and looked at her, shaking his head. ‘Damn, you look gorgeous, Chloe. That dress is stunning on you.’
Chloe smiled as she ran her hands down the simple black wraparound dress she was wearing, as Alex added, ‘Although, what I’d really love would be to push you back on that bed and ravish you – and get you all messed up again!’ They grinned at one another, then Alex sighed. ‘However, I guess it wouldn’t be good to keep Mark waiting. I’m sure he’d happily get the evening off to a bad start given half a chance.’
Chloe smiled sympathetically. She knew Alex hated these get-togethers with her colleague Mark, not that there had been many of them. She went out of her way to avoid them too if possible, having realised that being with the two men together was akin to refereeing a verbal bout of boxing. Alex could probably just about have put up with the pompous, pontificating lawyer-Mark, but as he was also Chloe’s ex-boyfriend this steered them into even more uncomfortable territory. And in front of Alex, rather than being unnerved by the situation, Mark seemed to revel in it, and would preface as many comments as he could with, ‘When Chloe and I were together…’
She hoped that tonight would be different. Mark was bringing along a new girlfriend, and Chloe was optimistic that this dinner date might mark a fresh beginning for all of them; especially since Neil, one of the senior partners at work, had recently involved Chloe and Mark in one of the biggest cases the firm had ever had. It meant they would be working together quite a bit in the coming months.
Without thinking, she opened her mouth to tell Alex her news, despite her earlier good intentions, but as she did so he turned away, and something in the tense set of his back made her stop herself and suck in a breath instead. What if he didn’t like what she had to say? Could she be sure his reaction would be the one she wanted? She stood there for a second, faltering, unaccountably nervous.
Alex sensed her watching and turned back around, grinning at her as his fingers flew deftly upwards fastening buttons. And there, as always, his eyes, with their utter familiarity and lack of guile, reached through her inexplicable nerves like a caress, shooing away all irrational thought.
She shook her head at herself as she slipped on her shoes. She would wait until later to tell him, when they weren’t in such a rush, but she was sure it would be okay. Why, when life was on the up, was she worrying that it might slide away from her?
They ran along the pavement for the short distance between their parked car and the warm, welcoming lights of the restaurant, holding their jackets over their heads to try to shelter themselves from the sudden downpour. Chloe saw Mark as soon as they got inside Casa Bella. He was sitting in the corner opposite a brunette with her back to them, who appeared to be studying the menu intently while Mark gazed at her. The lighting around them was perfectly pitched to create romantic ambience, and something about the semi-darkness meant that everyone was talking in hushed and reverent tones. Mark looked like he had come straight from work – he was wearing the same suit Chloe had seen him in earlier, and she felt a moment of panic at the hours he put in compared to her. She imagined the senior partners’ expressions as they walked past her dark, empty office at 5.05 p.m.
Mark looked towards the door and Chloe raised a hand in greeting. He didn’t appear to see her, but ran his fingers through his short, thick brown hair, patting it to check it was in place before his gaze returned to the woman in front of him – who, Chloe assumed, must be Julia. From the entranceway she could make out long, dark, slightly wavy hair with a small flower pinned behind one ear. The hair shone with health, and the shape of her head, neck and shoulders made Chloe instantly sure that Mark hadn’t been lying when he’d said Julia was beautiful. She wished she’d done something more with her own hair, which had just been tucked neatly behind her ears and was now plastered messily against her head by the rain, but she seemed to have become more practical about her appearance of late and dressing up had begun to feel unnatural to her. Now she felt instantly plain and underdressed, aware of the slight protrusion of her stomach and the oblique width of her thighs.
Chloe and Alex made their way over to their seats, directed by a waiter. ‘There you are!’ Chloe said brightly as they neared.
‘Hi, Chloe.’ Mark reluctantly turned his gaze from Julia and kissed Chloe’s cheek formally as she sat down next to him. ‘This is Julia.’ He smiled proudly.
Julia half-turned in her seat and the two women exchanged handshakes and hellos. Chloe’s impression had been right – Julia had high-set cheekbones and enormous dark eyes. She smiled and said, ‘And this is my husband… Alex…’
Her voice trailed off.
She watched Alex’s eyes widen as he went to shake Julia’s hand. He took a tiny sharp breath and swayed slightly, then he quickly put his free hand on the back of his chair to steady himself, whilst the other one, although still held out, drooped like a flower in sudden wilt.
‘Nice to meet you… Julia?’ he said, in a broken, tremulous voice unlike anything Chloe had heard come from him before.
Mark looked up from his menu and he echoed Chloe’s startled expression as they glanced from Alex to Julia. They both saw Julia’s face – stricken and raw with pain for just a moment, still ashen as she reached out her hand.
&nb
sp; ‘Alex.’
She said his name gently, and soft intonations of unknown meanings reverberated around the table like an aftershock.
Chloe had never experienced the notion of time standing still until now. For long, sludgy seconds they were all transfixed within a silent, painful tableau. No one moved.
Then Alex recovered himself, straightening his back, and he and Julia shook hands. Chloe thought that the shake had looked more like a hold… that they’d held hands for a second.
As she watched, Alex folded himself into his seat, picked up his menu and hid his head behind it, but Julia’s back remained rigid. ‘Could you excuse me for a minute?’ she said, turning to look at Chloe and twisting her mouth into a smile. Her eyes were vacant and glassy, her skin pale. She looked entirely different from the composed woman who’d shaken Chloe’s hand a few moments earlier. She scraped her chair back jerkily, and the ugly noise echoed on the tiles. ‘I just need to go to the bathroom.’
‘Of course.’
They watched her go. Alex remained hidden behind his menu, pulling it as close to his face as he could. His shoulders rose and fell jerkily, as though he were breathing heavily, working on a ragged edge of self-control. Chloe and Mark made small-talk, mostly about work, and Mark regaled her with his frustrating meeting that evening, where his client seemed to be trying to put some kind of metaphorical arm-lock on him before they went to court.
After forty-five minutes they all finally admitted to themselves that Julia wouldn’t be coming back.
2
Alex navigated the route home on automatic pilot, painfully aware of Chloe watching him. He was grateful that she hadn’t asked any questions other than an ‘Are you okay?’, to which he’d nodded mutely with his eyes averted from hers. But he would need to explain, he knew that. Where the hell would he start?
Once home, they got ready for bed in silence, the ambience of their bedroom just a few hours before now replaced by an atmosphere tight-packed with tension. It felt like the room was holding its breath, ready for Alex to start talking.
He got into bed and felt the mattress give as Chloe got in beside him. He took a deep breath and turned to face her. ‘Chloe… I…’
Their eyes locked for a moment, and then the phone rang.
He thought maybe, just this once, she would leave it. But no – she sighed, turned away and pulled herself out of bed, padding into the hallway where he heard her resigned response, ‘Hello? Mum, are you okay?’
Alex sighed. They could always rely on Margaret to pick the most inopportune moment to call. He knew Chloe had been growing increasingly worried about her mother since her stepfather, Charlie, had died, but that was over a year ago now and the endless phone calls and regular trips up north were beginning to take their toll. If only Chloe’s brother, Anthony, hadn’t fallen out with the family and moved to America. It meant that Chloe was all Margaret had left.
Alex waited for a while, listening to his wife’s soothing murmurs, presumably during those times that his mother-in-law couldn’t help but pause for breath. Eventually he turned off the bedside light.
As he tried fruitlessly to summon sleep, he berated himself for not telling Chloe more from the beginning. There had been plenty of chances, and he had avoided them all with a determination to leave history behind him. But Chloe would have understood… wouldn’t she?
Of course she would; she would have told him there was no need to be ashamed, to blame himself. And that was exactly why he had kept quiet: because he still didn’t entirely believe he deserved to hear those words. Because if he could go back and have his chance again, then of course he would do it all differently.
Except, would he? At the start he had thought so, but now he had Chloe, and that meant everything had changed. He wanted to protect her from the miseries of the past. He had learned to live with it and come to accept that there was nothing he could do any more; never believing there would be a time when the whole nightmare would come full circle to fling itself at him again.
Eventually the bedroom door creaked open, and the mattress jolted as Chloe lay down. She kept her back to him, preventing him from touching her, from scooping her into the welcoming curve of his body, as he did most other nights.
As the hours dissolved, his mind began to race faster, the full realisation of what had happened hammering into him with every quickening beat of his pulse. My god, she was there, in the restaurant; she is alive. He kept replaying their brief hello until it became like listening to vinyl on half-speed, their voices chewed-up baritones. His thoughts churned over and over, more tumbled and chaotic each time, until he gave up on sleep and made his way downstairs. In the kitchen, he poured himself the first drink that came to hand – from a half-finished bottle of merlot – then went through to the lounge. He sat on the sofa in the darkness and slugged the wine back in two mouthfuls, feeling the bite of the liquid weaving its way down his throat.
The more he tried not to remember, the more his mind replayed the same scenes. The white van rounding the corner. The chaos at the roadside as their worlds, cut-glass prisms of possibilities, had shattered in the sunshine. His last view of her: just a shadow behind a window. Until the restaurant, that was.
How the hell was he going to live his life from this point forward, knowing that the woman who had meant the world to him, who he’d thought might be dead, was in fact alive and living somewhere nearby? That tonight, for a brief moment, he had held her hand and then let it go again – just as he had the last time.
Right then, surrounded by transfiguring darkness, he knew he desperately wanted to see her again. He needed to talk to her; to explain; to understand. And he had a thousand questions to ask, not least of all why she was calling herself Julia when that was not her real name.
3
Kara Abbott: fifteen years old; blonde; beautiful.
Dead.
Mark tried to focus on Kara as he walked towards the lifts, still in shorts and T-shirt from his early-morning squash game, but her blonde hair kept morphing into darker, more exotic locks, and her slightly chubby face kept thinning out to the beautiful, haunted one that seemed to be shadowing his thoughts.
He had been so mortified last night when Julia hadn’t come back. When Alex had turned to greet them, Mark had had the strange sensation of all his optimism fleeing his body with each deflating exhalation of breath. Worse still had been watching Chloe ramble on for half an hour trying to ignore the empty chair next to her. Tiny particles of her pity had floated across the table with every word she’d uttered and he’d breathed it in until he felt he might choke. And Alex, fucking Alex, who had so obviously upset Julia – who so obviously knew Julia, probably intimately – had said nothing. The least the man could have done was provide an explanation. Mark felt the muscles in his back constrict as he thought about it.
When they’d decided to call it a night – after one round of wine and no food, much to the chagrin of the waiter – Chloe had looked like she wanted to offer more crumbs of comfort, but by that time Mark had been so livid that he was having trouble keeping his voice down and staying civil. ‘I’ll get the bill,’ he’d rasped at her. ‘You two just go.’
She’d guided Alex quickly away and Mark had an absurd longing to head for the ladies’ toilets to see if Julia was still hiding in there. But he wasn’t going to be reduced to a laughing stock for any bloody woman.
Yesterday, as they’d walked into the restaurant he’d felt great, the best in a long time. He’d taken stock of his work, his recent promotion, his finances, and his impending date, and felt he was slowly building himself a concrete plinth. Every day he climbed a little higher. One day he would perch on top of it, looking down in contentment at all he had achieved. Now he felt as though he were halfway up that god-awful Jenga game his young nephews loved playing, and with one false move the whole thing could come tumbling down at any moment.
He had to stop thinking about her; if nothing else she didn’t deserve his attention after she h
ad humiliated him last night. He needed to get through some of the notes in his briefcase pronto, or he’d never get on top of the Kara Abbott case.
‘Get a grip,’ he muttered to himself as he strode along, causing the receptionist to look up in surprise, unused to any sign of a greeting from Mr Jameson.
He loved playing squash, but this morning had been less fun than usual because he was a lot better than Neil so had to hold back, while still playing well and casually enough to make his efforts look natural. It was a load of bull that events on the court wouldn’t impact on working relationships, especially with someone like his boss, who was fiercely competitive and used to winning. Problem was, Mark was just the same, so he had left the court distinctly frustrated.
Neil had made reference to the Abbott case a few times, and each time Mark had felt a small jolt in his stomach at how much he still had to do. Neil was friends with Kip Abbott, Kara’s father, but to Mark’s way of thinking, friendship and business should be kept firmly separate at all times. Neil would never have got away with this if Mark’s father had still been one of the helmsmen of the company. Now retired, Henry had got a whiff of the case on one of his frequent visits to Lewis & Marchant and had said nothing, but Mark could tell by his expression, eyebrows slightly up, jaw tight, that he thought it was a big mistake.
Kara Abbott was the sad end to the kind of bullying story Mark had heard umpteen times. It had started as cruel jibes about her supposed puppy fat. It escalated into pushes, trips, Chinese burns, on one occasion a pencil jabbed into her hand when she moved one of her tormentors’ bags out of her way. There were threats and jeers, which went on and on. When she’d died, Kara had bruises and penknife cuts to her inner thighs, which three perpetrators had enacted on her at the bottom of the long school field, in front of more than half a dozen onlookers. The diary that had been Kara’s only confidante, now tagged Exhibit D, was a slurry of scrawls about her desperation, her loathing of the girls in question, and her incomprehension at what she could have done to have brought all this on herself.