Page 4 of A Scottish Lighthouse Escape (Scottish Escapes #9)

Chapter Three

M ia had volunteered to stay, but I’d insisted I would be fine alone.

Travelling up in the glass and chrome lift with Bronte on her lead after her afternoon walk, I fought not to look at my reflection.

My navy-blue eyes were red-rimmed and my hair was spilling past my shoulders in a static, unwashed bush.

Was I asleep? Was this one of those horrendous nightmares where, when you wake up, the bedsheets are all tangled around you and you’re gulping with relief that it wasn’t real?

My eyes forced themselves to look back at my reflection again.

I felt consumed by everything that was happening.

My head echoed with the contents of Greta Vincent’s letter.

I remembered I still had Joe’s gold St Christopher glistening around my neck.

I reached up a hand to hold it in my palm. He never used to take it off. His grandparents had bought it for him when he was seventeen and about to set off interrailing with a couple of friends for a few months around Europe before starting his law degree at Durham University.

As I stood there, eyeing my image staring back at me, I recalled slipping it around my neck days after he’d died, feeling the coolness of it nestling against my skin. It was as though I was still clinging to a tiny, physical part of him.

I fiddled with the chain and with one shaky hand, unclipped the St Christopher. I stuffed it in my jeans pocket. The thought of keeping it on a moment longer deadened my heart.

Bronte gazed up, her amber eyes wide and imploring. The lift eased to a halt with both of us inside. I stepped out and clung to her pink leather lead, as though it were my security blanket. We were in the fragranced, carpeted hallway.

Part of me wanted to turn tail and run, to flee and never look back, squeeze myself into a black hole and close the lid.

I hesitated at our apartment door, a polished, cherry wood affair with the number twelve in gold digits and the obligatory spy hole.

My hand thrashed around inside my back jeans pocket to locate my door key. My head and stomach were spinning. I was going back in there with Bronte, to surround myself with the ghost of Joe. The cheating, lying one.

I crouched down and buried my face in her fuzzy coat. She lashed me with frantic licks of her tongue.

I wanted to howl like she sometimes did. I wanted to let it all out and make everyone realise that the spectacular husband Joe had been was just a cheap facade. His death had opened up the truth and it was ugly.

I slowly rose up from the floor and kept my coat on. I felt wrung out and spent.

With dread gripping me, I unlocked the door, unclipped Bronte’s lead and watched her gaze around herself for a few moments. She was looking for him. Her tail dropped and after another few seconds of confusion, she trotted off into the sitting room to play with her squeaky ball.

I recoiled from the familiar sight of the oval, gilt-edged hallway mirror and of the lavish, red and yellow rug we’d bought in Mexico on our honeymoon. I wrapped my arms around myself, like a protective shield.

I couldn’t contain the heartbreak and resentment that were erupting out of me like hot lava.

I didn’t want to be like this or sound like this.

My usually soft London accent had twisted into something unrecognisable and bitter.

I could hear myself biting and snapping when I had to speak to someone like the bank, to have Joe’s name removed from our joint account.

The apartment spotlights were like dimmed eyes peering down at me.

My breath came out in a series of desperate, ragged gasps.

My attention fell on the polished, blond wood hallway floorboards and on the painting my grandmother had given me, her depiction of a tangerine-and-hot-pink Rowan Bay sunset.

How much longer could I stay here, not venturing out? Ever since he’d died, I had been trying not to look for traces of Joe. His fingerprints on the TV remote, the scent of Sauvage, his favourite cologne, on his work shirts, the trace of his cedar-smelling shampoo on his pillow.

My eyes settled on our stone-coloured, vintage Mario Bellini sofa in the sitting room. I was hugging myself even tighter now, so tight, it was almost as if I were being embraced by a boa constrictor. I took in a long, low breath.

I had realised why Joe hadn’t left me for Greta. He had been a solicitor. He knew what he would lose financially, if we’d divorced. He had wanted the best of both worlds; one foot in each and hopping from one to the other whenever it suited him.

Bronte, on hearing my raised breathing, poked her head round the sitting room door. She waggled her tail at me. That small gesture of love made me want to crumple again.

My life was tumbling down around me like a stack of playing cards.

This apartment. Our holiday photos dotted around. The beautiful memories we’d made together. The accessories and furniture we’d chosen. My books. My feel-good romances. Everything we’d built together out of nothing had been ripped apart. It wasn’t worth anything anymore.

My writing muse, I’d sighed in interviews.

Christ, what an embarrassment now, when I looked back.

Nathan, Grey, Riley, all my literary heroes had been based on Joe Hutton in one way or another.

If it wasn’t his looks or his love of squash and running, they’d shared his dimpled smile or his career.

Joe had been part of the character jigsaw that I’d created for each of them, elements of him living and shining through them and dancing onto the pages.

I found myself drifting down the hallway and into our sitting room like a lost ghost, gazing at its panoramic views over Hampstead Heath.

The trees would soon begin to look like black twiglets in the starry sky.

My six published novels so far were propped side by side on the bookcase by the back wall, their colourful, embossed spines grinning out at me.

Bronte trotted over and I dropped down to pat her.

Racking sobs were stuck in my throat. I raised my head and glanced at the sixty-inch plasma TV on the facing wall and at the splashes of expensive landscape paintings in their heavy frames.

Then there was the Murano hand-blown glass lamp on the coffee table in the corner.

This was such a far cry from my hometown of Ealing.

Working in the library, admiring all the books that stood to attention on the shelves, dreaming that one day my books might sit there too.

Then I’d slave over my ideas in the evenings, trying to write novels that I ended up cringing over, travelling home on the bus, listening to snippets of conversation to try and get ideas, scrawling plot lines in cheap notebooks.

God, how I wished Mum was here , I thought with another painful pang of grief. We were like Thelma and Louise. She would’ve known what to say, what to do.

I didn’t want to be here. The thought of staying in this apartment a moment longer made my heart wither. My attention fell on our designer sofa again and the sumptuous rugs.

I had to get away. Even the smell of the autumnal potpourri I’d placed in the hallway was making me gag.

I shoved my hands in my coat pockets and strode out of the sitting room. Joe was everywhere and I didn’t want to be near the echoes of him.

I drew up at the doorway of our bedroom at the end of the hall.

I would pack, go somewhere, and take Bronte with me.

Where were we going to go? I’d no idea. I certainly wasn’t going to go near the Peak District cottage I had booked for me and Joe to spend Christmas in– Mia had kindly cancelled it, as I couldn’t face it.

But as I stood there in our hallway, there was one thing I did know: I couldn’t stay here anymore.