The Minute I Saw You
Page 31
If you loved The Minute I Saw You, then you’ll love one of Paige Toon’s most breathtaking romantic novels . . .
HOW DO YOU FIND WHERE YOU’RE GOING, IF YOU DON’T KNOW WHERE YOU’RE FROM?
Angie has always wanted to travel. But at twenty-seven, she has barely stepped outside the small mining town where she was born. Instead, she discovers the world through stories told to her by passing travellers, dreaming that one day she’ll see it all for herself.
When her grandmother passes away, leaving Angie with no remaining family, she is ready to start her own adventures. Then she finds a letter revealing the address of the father she never knew, and realises instantly where her journey must begin: Italy.
As Angie sets out to find the truth – about her family, her past and who she really is – will mysterious and reckless Italian Alessandro help guide the way?
AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK, EBOOK AND AUDIO NOW
Read on for an exciting extract . . .
Prologue
And then I see him, a black shape against the stormy sky.
Hope blasts away the cold grip of fear, but the feeling is fleeting: he’s standing near the edge and I know he’s com- mitted to jumping.
‘Wait!’ I scream, but the sound is snatched away by the wind. I lose my footing and stumble to my knees. Gripping hold of the slippery rock with ice-cold fingers, I push myself back up.
I’ve come so far: from the driest, flattest of lands to the soaring peaks of windswept mountains. I’d go to the ends of the earth for him – and beyond.
I still don’t know if I stand a hope in hell of changing this tortured man’s mind, but I had to try, whatever the cost, whatever the consequences.
God knows how I’ll make it down from here alone.
Drawing as much air into my lungs as I can, I open my mouth and give it everything I’ve got . . .
Chapter 1
If you could go anywhere, where would you go?
I was thirteen years old, the first time I asked that question. School had just broken up for the summer and my best friend Louise and I were lying in the cargo tray of her dad’s ute, staring up at an ink-black sky glittering with stars.
‘I dunno,’ Louise replied with a shrug. ‘Adelaide?’
‘You’re always going there!’ I exclaimed. ‘And it’s not even out of the state.’
‘I like it,’ she grumbled. ‘It’s “green”.’
When you lived in a part of the country that resembled Mars and the moon, colour was everything.
‘Come on,’ I urged. ‘If you could go anywhere? Anywhere at all? Use your imagination.’
‘I told you, I don’t know. Where would you go?’
Now that she’d asked . . . ‘France, Holland, Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria, Italy and Spain.’ I reeled off the list I’d memorised, glad I hadn’t stumbled.
It was only later that I learned I’d been mispronouncing ‘Czech’. Kerzetch.
‘You’re just repeating the countries stamped on your mum’s passport,’ Louise sniped. ‘How is that “using your imagination”?’
‘I’d go anywhere,’ I stated, piqued that she’d caught me out. ‘Anywhere but here.’
‘Why would you want to leave Coober Pedy? It’s the opal mining capital of the world,’ she parroted.
This much was true. It was also in the middle of nowhere.
If you type Coober Pedy into Google Maps, all you will see is a vast mass of orangey-beige land in the middle of South Australia, riddled with the cream-coloured wiggly lines of empty creeks, gullies and ridges. It looks like a slab of marble or a medical diagram of blood vessels in the human body.
Click to zoom out once and you’ll see more of the same. It’s only when you zoom out twice that the names of other towns begin to appear.
There’s Oodnadatta to the north, William Creek to the east and Tarcoola to the south. Tallaringa Conservation Park is to the west and that’s it. Of the towns, William Creek looks the closest, but it’s actually a six-and-a-half-hour drive away. It had a population of ten the last time I checked.
All these years later, Coober Pedy is still the opal capital of the world. According to the 2016 census, almost 1,800 people live here, but Louise isn’t one of them. She and her family moved to Adelaide when she was seventeen, but she’s long since given up asking me to visit.
And I’ve long since given up asking the question:
If you could go anywhere, where would you go?
It repeats now on a loop inside my head. I must’ve asked it a hundred times as a teenager and been given a hundred different responses in return.
I had planned to see the world, travel the same tracks as my mother and make new tracks of my own. But I’m twenty-seven and I’ve never been anywhere; never so much as stepped out of the state in which I was born.
All that is about to change and I’m not quite sure how I feel about it.
Nan’s hand is cold in mine. I used to be able to transfer my warmth to her, but nothing helps now. Her skin is unbearably fragile, paper-thin and peppered with liver spots, and her white hair has thinned to such an extent that each and every follicle stands alone. She has shrunken away into a different person altogether, a pale imitation of the mighty woman who raised me.
If you could go anywhere . . .
Stop thinking about it! I don’t know where I’d go! I don’t know anything anymore! I’ve been anchored to this place since the day I was born and soon I’ll be cut loose, but all I feel is numb.
A hand covers my shoulder. ‘She’s gone, Angie,’ Cathy, Nan’s nurse and now my friend, says gently. ‘I’m sorry.’
I lean forward and rest my forehead against my grandmother’s brittle hand. Relief swells inside my chest, squashing the grief I know I’m supposed to feel. It’s like a bubble, expanding and expanding, until, POP! A needle of guilt stabs me through the heart, exploding my relief and filling me with shame.
I can go anywhere now. I’ve never felt more lost.
Continue Reading…
If You Could Go Anywhere
Paige Toon
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First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2020
Copyright © Paige Toon, 2020
The right of Paige Toon to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4711-7948-8
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4711-7949-5
Audio ISBN: 978-1-4711-8496-3
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Typeset in Bembo by M Rules
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 1
2
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
‘If You Could Go Anywhere’ Excerpt
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Acknowledgements
Copyright