Page 46 of All Summer Long

Indescribable relief washed through Alice’s body at the sight of the horse grazing unharmed near to the stable Robinson had built for him.

She gasped for air, her hands on her knees as she bent double to try to get her breath back.

Niamh was right behind her, her hand resting on Alice’s back as she breathed heavily.

‘He’s fine, he’s fine, he’s fine,’ she soothed, repeating it over and over to reassure both Alice and herself. And then she gasped and took off across the grass towards the gypsy caravan at full pelt as Alice straightened to see what had Niamh running again.

There was someone there.

A figure dressed in dark jeans and a hoody ran away from the caravan towards the cover of the woods, back towards Alice because there was no way out from the other end of the meadow.

Acting purely on instinct, Alice gave chase too as the figure spotted her too late and tried to veer away.

Her fingers were within inches of the intruder’s hood when her bare foot caught in a branch and she went down hard, still grabbing out for an ankle, a shoe, anything to stop whoever it was that hated her so much that they’d do this.

‘No!’ she yelled, the sound wrenching from her body as the dark figure put more space between them. Niamh faltered beside her, caught in the agony of indecision between helping her friend or catching the intruder.

‘Go!’ Alice yelled, half dragging herself up despite the pain that shot through her ribs.

Niamh glanced down once and then hurled herself off again, determined.

Whoever it was was almost at the house now; if they made it round to the front and into the street there was every chance they’d melt away into the spider’s web of old alleys and gardens that made up the village.

Niamh knew she had two minutes at best and gave it her all, her chest on fire, and then someone else came striding up the driveway directly into a collision path with the intruder, way too late for them to do anything else but smash straight into each other and both hit the ground hard.

‘Catch them!’ Niamh yelled at Brad, who looked up in dazed confusion as the intruder scrabbled away from him across the gravel.

He reached out and managed to grab hold of a leg, and a second later in a show of surprising strength he dragged the person on their back and managed to sit himself astride their middle.

Alice stumbled across the gravel, bleeding from a gash near her hairline, her feet cut to ribbons and clutching her ribs, and Niamh dropped down beside Brad and his wriggling catch.

All three of them stared down in horror as the hood on the intruder’s jumper fell back to reveal who had felt such a level of hatred for Alice as to wreak such destruction and horror.

Brad blanched.

‘Felicity?’ he said, staring in shock at the woman bucking furiously beneath him.

‘Oooh, this is just too much!’ Niamh said, and launched herself at the woman on the floor.

Brad managed to pull her off, at the same time as dragging his ex-lover to her feet and staring at her accusingly.

‘You’re supposed to be in America,’ he spat out. ‘Doing my job, remember?’

Even the prettiest of faces could be ugly in anger, and in that moment Felicity Shaw was hideous.

‘I got fired,’ she hissed. ‘Because of you!’ She jabbed him in the chest, catching the spot that was still tender from Lena doing the same thing.

‘Me?’ he said, rubbing his chest and scowling.

Felicity had the dangerous glint in her eye of someone with nothing left to lose.

‘I took too much time off, they said. Wasn’t sparkly enough for them, and it was all your fault.

You reduced me to this because you never loved me enough, it was always Alice this, Alice that, Alice the fucking other. ’

Felicity shot daggers at Alice, who would later see the irony of the woman who’d wrecked her life accusing her of doing the very same thing.

‘And where are you when I come back to England? Exactly where I knew you’d be, sniffing around her again like a diseased bastard dog.’

Brad’s eyes flickered wildly between his ex-wife and his ex-lover, wary and clearly trying to work out what the hell was going on.

‘She’s ruined everything,’ Niamh said hotly to Brad.

‘You should see the damage she’s caused to all of Alice’s hard work.

She’s a goddamn crazy cow!’ Niamh went for Felicity again, and this time Felicity was more than ready to fight back.

Once more Brad stepped into the breach, casting himself as the hero in the latest edition of the soap opera that was his life.

‘Ladies, please,’ he said, pushing them apart and holding them at arm’s length.

Alice wanted to do something. She wanted to tear a strip off Felicity, to hold Niamh safely back, to give her ex-husband the dressing down he deserved for bringing all of this down on their heads in the first place.

She wanted to do all of those things but she did none of them, because the pain in her ribs was so excruciating that she passed out.

‘Don’t you ever do that again, Alice McBride, you scared me bloody stupid!’

Alice squinted up at Niamh and then smiled weakly. She was lying down on the huge, comfortable sofa in the manor lounge, her favourite blanket pulled up to her shoulders and her best friend hovering close by looking as if she’d aged ten years.

‘The doctor gave you something to help you sleep,’ Niamh explained, kneeling beside the sofa and smoothing Alice’s hair back from her face. ‘How do you feel now?’

The honest answer was that she didn’t know. She pushed herself awkwardly up on her elbows and pulled herself up into a sitting position, wincing a little. The pain was still there, but thankfully nowhere near as amplified as it had been earlier on.

‘Did the doctor give me pain killers, too?’

Niamh nodded. ‘Pokey ones. He left you a supply in the kitchen, said he thinks you’ve bruised a rib rather than broken it and it should ease over the next few days, as long as you take it easy.’

Memories of the destruction outside flooded back in and Alice slumped against the cushions and closed her eyes again.

‘That’s that then,’ she said, resigned. ‘It’s over.’

Niamh rubbed her hand. ‘Don’t say that. I know it looks bad today, but I’ll help you put it right. We all will. Me, Stewie, Hazel, Ewan, Dessy, Jase … I bet even Davina will lend a hand if we ask. You’re not on your own.’

Alice smiled, sad and tearfully grateful, her eyes still closed. She was so incredibly tired, and despite being bolstered by the love and friendship of her neighbours, she was ultimately a girl who knew when to walk away.

Enough was enough. It was time to let Borne Manor go.

At The Siren, Dessy and Jase packed up Brad’s things and flung them out on the car park in a heap.

‘And don’t come back!’ Jase shouted, as they stood shoulder to shoulder in the doorway and watched Brad load up his car in the gathering dusk.

‘God, I almost feel sorry for him,’ Dessy whispered. It was true that the mighty had indeed fallen, his dejected shoulders slumped, his trademark glossy hair flattened beneath a baseball cap. ‘He has had a shocker of a day.’

‘What comes around goes around. Karma at its best,’ Jase said, unmoved, his arms crossed over his broad chest.

‘That Felicity turned out to be a proper fruitcake, didn’t she?’ Dessy stage whispered, always one for a good gossip even if it did involve Alice. ‘You’d never have guessed it from the look of her.’

Jase shook his head and huffed regretfully. ‘I just wish we’d sussed her out beforehand. She must have been living in number four for a good couple of months and none of us even noticed.’

It had come as a shock to everyone to hear that Felicity had been the mystery buyer of the end cottage.

It seemed that she’d always half expected Brad to do the dirty on her and move back to Borne, so seeing the cottage come up for sale had been a gift dropped in her lap.

She’d bought it with the intention of making his life as difficult as possible if the need arose, and she’d spent the last few weeks observing the comings and goings in the village with increasing frustration.

Bloody Alice McBride was like a flower filled with nectar, the rest of the village worker bees gathered constantly around her and protecting her.

All of this had spilled out of her like hot, furious venom as she’d been bundled into the back of the police car on the drive of Borne Manor and repeated verbatim from person to person ever since.

Brad shot them a long, baleful look as he slammed the boot and they both pushed their chests out in a firm ‘no room at the inn’ message.

‘I hope they throw the book at her, silly little cow,’ Dessy said. The screaming police sirens had ensured that word had spread like wild fire of what had happened up at the manor. ‘Poor old Alice, she doesn’t seem to have had a minute’s peace since she bought that place, does she?’

The exact same thought weighed heavily on Alice’s mind as she walked slowly along the upstairs corridor to sink into the bath that Niamh had filled for her.

She trailed her fingers lovingly over the door handles as she passed them, and she knew each creak in the old oak floorboards as she stepped.

Much as she truly adored the house and would have done anything to keep it, she couldn’t think of a day since she’d owned it that she’d known true peace.

She’d known from the moment she and Brad moved in that his heart wasn’t in it and she’d spent all of her days trying to over compensate and force him to love it as much as she did.

And then he left, and all she could think of was how to cling on to it by her fingernails, carried along by desperation and longing and emotion.

No more. Tomorrow she’d call the estate agent who they’d bought the house from and get the wheels in motion to put it back on the market.

No doubt Brad wouldn’t be interested in buying it once he knew that she’d conceded defeat anyway.

Stepping out of her clothes, she sank gratefully into the warm, scented bubbles.

She was tired. Really, really tired, and it was almost a relief to just let it all go.

As Alice wallowed in the bath, below her in the kitchen Niamh answered the home phone and listened to the long-distance clicks as the call connected across the Atlantic.

Seconds later, Marsh’s voice blasted out across the kitchen, every bit as loud as if the tiny American whirlwind was in the same room rather than four thousand miles away.

‘Now you look here, blondie! There’s nothing to be gained from ignoring my calls to your cell, you hear me?

Because I can and I will keep on calling, every minute of every dang day until I get an answer.

Duff’s going to hell in a handcart here and you’re just about the only thing that stands between him and total annihil-fuckin’-ation when he gets on that stage next week.

Are you even listening to me? Unless you want to see it all over the internet that Robinson Duff is a washed-up has been good for the scrap heap nobody you’ll get your bony ass on the next plane out here and put right what you made wrong, you hear me?

I’ll pay for the goddamn ticket. Hell, I’ll pay for the entire population of freakin’ Toy Town to come over here, if that’s what it’s gonna take. Speak, for God’s sake, woman! Speak!’

By the time he reached the end of his speech he was yelling so loud that Niamh had the phone held at arm’s length as her brain scrambled to keep up with Marsh’s rant. Throwing caution to the wind, she cleared her throat.

‘Okay, okay,’ she said calmly, knowing full well that Marsh wouldn’t have a clue he wasn’t speaking to Alice. ‘Okay, Marsh. I’ll come. We all will. I’ll send you a list of names for the tickets, we can come just as soon as you can make the arrangements.’

Marsh fell silent, clearly expecting Alice to put up more of a battle.

‘Dandy,’ he barked after a pause, rattling off his email address to send the information to.

‘Umm, what’s the weather like over there at the moment?’ Niamh asked, wondering what she should pack.

‘What do you think I am, the goddamn weather channel? Ask Siri!’

And with that, the line went dead, leaving Niamh standing alone in Alice’s kitchen. Fetching Alice’s flashing mobile from the table in the hall, she listened to Marsh’s messages and then pressed delete, hoping like hell that she hadn’t just made the biggest mistake of her life.