The Last Goodbye

by Fiona Lucas

  “Yes,” she replied simply.

  “I can’t,” he said, his voice stretching so tight that Anna felt her heart begin to crack.

  “Can’t or won’t?” she prodded softly.

  Brody didn’t give her a reply.

  Chapter Fifty

  It was the last day of November, and the moors looked magical in the early morning sunshine. Brody had woken up with the urge to go for a long bracing walk, and instead of doing his usual route on the slopes and valleys near his cottage, he’d jumped in his Land Rover and had driven eight miles east to Haytor, a coarse granite outcrop on one of the highest points of Dartmoor. He was ready for a fresh route, a fresh challenge.

  He parked the car at the Dartmoor visitor center, took a moment to admire the ancient tor at the top of the hill, and set off, Lewis bounding beside him.

  Brody never wore headphones or took music with him when he went for a walk or run. He preferred to keep his senses alert, to take in the environment. The silence allowed his brain to produce its own noise when he needed to think about things.

  And since he’d told Anna about Lena almost a fortnight ago, he’d had a lot to think about, good and bad. He’d had a couple of nightmares right afterward, the same as those he’d had for years after Lena had died, but they’d eased off and he hadn’t had one in more than a week now. For some strange reason that made him feel optimistic.

  Maybe it was because Ibrahim had declared he’d had a bit of a breakthrough. After weeks and months of careful desensitization, teaching his body and mind that a town full of ordinary people was nothing to be terrified of, they’d finally started to agree with him. He’d managed a full trolley shop at the supermarket in Totnes. Not at peak time on a Saturday afternoon, but still. As well as his usual supplies, he’d bought lemongrass, coconut milk and jasmine rice. And, after smiling at the woman at the checkout counter, he’d gone home and cooked himself a Thai green curry. When he’d eaten it, he hadn’t been able to help wishing Anna had been sitting across the table from him, sharing not only his meal but his victory.

  That evening, he’d felt so invincible that he’d called her and told her he was going to be in London to meet her on New Year’s Eve. He’d considered asking her to make the location somewhere less public, somewhere less challenging, but he’d held back. He wasn’t ready to tell her about his agoraphobia yet, and he was worried she’d push for an explanation. If she knew what he struggled with, she might call the meeting off, and that was the last thing he wanted.

  He would tell her at some point. Maybe after Big Ben had chimed at midnight, announcing the New Year. By then his demons would surely have been soundly routed. There was nothing that was going to stop him getting up to the seventy-second floor of the Shard and meeting Anna, from having a proper conversation face-to-face. Absolutely nothing.

  Brody reached Haytor and stood, his hands on his hips. The rough grass had been glittering with frost further down the hill but right up here, just covering the rocks and the grassy space at their base, was a light dusting of snow. Brody turned and stared at the village down below. He wasn’t ready to go back yet, so he just kept on striding.

  And as he walked, his thoughts were not about imaginary characters or tales of faraway lands, but of his own story over the last year. He’d started January in the same dark, unforgiving place he’d been in for the past nine years, both mentally and emotionally. But he was no longer there. As he made his way along the ridge of a hill, miles of countryside stretched before him, he realized he felt lighter inside.

  Oh, he knew he still had a way to go, that further progress needed to be made, but for the first time in years, he could see that the prison door in front of him was wide open. All he had to do now was take a step and walk right through it.

  The lightness inside spurred him on, and when he reached a small rocky outcrop, he clambered on top of it and yelled for all the world to hear. At first, it was just noise, but then words started forming in his head, and he let them out too. “I’m out of the pit!” he yelled to no one in particular. “I’m freeeee . . .”

  More words came into his head, and he had to let those ones out too. “I love her,” he shouted into the wind, then absorbed the sound of those syllables, their weight and substance, let the certainty come back to him and sink into his bones. And then he turned toward the east, toward the sun—and London—and shouted again. “I love you, Anna Barry!” Lewis barked and ran around madly below him.

  It had felt good to say it out loud, even though he didn’t know what good it would do him. But letting the words free, so they were no longer trapped inside his head and heart, had seemed like the right thing to do. He could imagine them as a white dove that had been released from the pinnacle of the moors, now rising on thermals and disappearing beyond the horizon. He stood there for a few minutes, watching the sky, before exhaling heavily and making his way off the rocks. Suddenly, he was really hungry.

  “I think a massive fry-up is in order,” he said to Lewis, who barked his agreement as they set off back in the direction of the Land Rover.

  But it seemed his subconscious wasn’t finished with him yet. As he navigated through the gorse and jumped over peaty streams, a little voice began to whisper in his ear. A voice he hadn’t heard for years.

  What about me? she said. You left me in a dark place too.

  Pip.

  Once, he’d heard that little girl speak so clearly that she’d felt real to him. He’d written a handful of books before he’d stumbled across Pip, but she’d definitely been his favorite character: small and thoughtful, bold and resourceful. She’d appeared in his imagination one day, fully formed, with her short, tomboyish blond hair and a determined look in her clear blue eyes. She’d almost felt like another daughter at times.

  The resemblance between her and Lena, when she’d come along, had been both unsettling and magical, as if, in some cosmic way, he’d already known his child, the person she would become. For a long time, he’d refused to let himself think about Pip, but he did so now, imagining what the expression on her face would be as she reminded him of her predicament.

  Sorry, girl, he replied silently. I left you camping in that Vale of Shadows, didn’t I? I didn’t mean to. It was only ever supposed to be a pit stop, but then . . . I just didn’t know how to get you out again. I didn’t know how to get either of us out.

  Pip tilted her head to one side and raised an eyebrow. Do you think you could try?

  Brody pondered her question as he turned to come back down the hill toward the parking lot.

  Maybe.

  Maybe he could.

  He’d done a lot of things in the last few months that he’d never thought he’d be able to do again. Maybe there was room for one more impossible thing in his life.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Anna’s flight got into Halifax airport just after lunchtime on the fifteenth of December. She’d been up since six a.m., and awake for three hours before that, so when she finally collected her suitcase and dragged it blearily through to Arrivals, it took a couple of seconds before she saw her father waiting for her.

  “Dad!” she yelled, and almost left her luggage where it was and ran to meet him, but that probably wouldn’t have made her popular with airport security, or the passengers groggily following her, so she made herself stay patient and waited until she’d pulled her suitcase through the barriers and could greet him properly. He smiled the whole time he waited for her to make the short journey and wrapped her in a strong, silent male hug the moment she was close enough. Oh, it was good to see him again.

  “Where’s Mum?” she asked, after kissing him on the cheek.

  “Oh, you know,” he said. “Cooking . . . Fussing . . . I hope you didn’t eat for a least a month before you came because she’s determined to fill you up while you’re here.” He looked her up and down. “You look well.”

  Anna smiled back at her Dad. She’d learned from an early age that he wasn’t one for empty compliments,
or empty words of any kind, so when he said something as seemingly throwaway as this, she knew not to dismiss it as small talk. He really meant it. “Thank you,” she said, agreeing to his gesture to take her case as she did so. “I feel well.”

  Her mother was indeed cooking (and fussing) when they arrived at their pretty clapboard house in Chester, only an hour’s drive away from the airport. After hugging the life out of her and instructing Anna’s dad to deposit the luggage in the spare room, she sat Anna down in the kitchen and plied her with tea and lemon cake while they caught up on each other’s news and plans for the Christmas period.

  “What about the Barrys?” Anna’s mother asked, helping Anna to a second slice of cake. “Have you seen anything of them recently?”

  “Well, that’s the funny thing,” Anna said, her mouth still partly full of crumbs, which couldn’t be helped because her mother’s lemon cake was notoriously gooey and lovely. “Richard turned up on my doorstep a few days ago.”

  “He did? What did he have to say for himself?” Anna’s mother folded her arms. “I’m surprised that woman let him out of the house! He seems to need her permission to do anything. Talk about henpecked . . . I don’t know how he stands it.”

  Ever since Anna had told her mother about the incident at Teresa’s party, Gayle had become “that woman.” Anna couldn’t help loving her mother for her unswerving loyalty. Her father had returned to the room while they’d been talking, and when he heard the word “henpecked” he winked at Anna, causing her to almost choke on the remaining cake crumbs.

  “What did Richard say?” he asked, swiping a slice of cake before her mother could bat his hand away. He was supposed to be watching his cholesterol.

  “It was all a bit awkward, but, basically, he said that they’d missed seeing me.”

  Anna’s mother arched her eyebrows. “They?”

  “That’s what I said to him. I asked why, if both of them wanted to see me, why both of them weren’t standing on my doorstep.”

  “Anna! You didn’t leave him standing on the doorstep, did you?”

  Anna found herself rolling her eyes like a teenager. “No, Mum. I asked him in, gave him a cup of tea—it’s okay, your reputation as a parent who raised me well is still intact.”

  “Good,” she replied, and Anna’s father hid a smile.

  “He said he knew what Gayle had said to me at the party—Teresa told Scott, and Scott told his dad, I gather—and that he wanted me to know that he didn’t agree with what she said and had told her as much.”

  “Wow,” her mother said. “And he’s still breathing?”

  Anna chuckled. “Looked like it to me. He said he hoped we could—what were his words?—put it all behind us.”

  “And how did you react to that?”

  “I said I missed him too, that I missed being part of the Barry family—because that’s true—but I also said that I couldn’t just come back and pretend it had never happened, that I wasn’t prepared to sweep it all under the rug like I normally do and kowtow to Gayle. He didn’t look happy about that, but I think he understood.”

  “Good girl,” her mother said. “You’ve been far too patient with that woman. So . . . what happens next?”

  “I don’t know,” Anna said, staring out of the window to the pine trees across the road. “I guess I’ll work it out when I get back. And talking of work . . . I’ve decided to take Vijay and Rhys up on their offer to go back to BlockTime. That’s another thing I’ll have to figure out as I go along, but I’m excited about it. I never really saw myself as a creative person, not compared to Spencer, but the guys made me see that there are different ways of being creative. I’m looking forward to finding out how that applies to me.”

  Her dad walked past and kissed the top of her head. “I think this is going to be brilliant for you, Anna.”

  Her mother’s eyes sparkled. “I’m so pleased!”

  “Thanks for giving me a little nudge in the right direction, Mum.”

  Her mother looked horrified. “I didn’t push, did I?”

  “No,” Anna said, smiling. Not technically. Her father gave her another wink.

  THANKFULLY, ANNA’S MOTHER had been able to schedule quite a few days off work in the lead-up to Christmas, and Anna spent some much-needed time with her parents, allowing them to share some of their favorite haunts in their new neighborhood with her, going out for lovely lunches and long walks, reading books by the fire and eating far too much of her mother’s baking. It was just what she needed.

  On Christmas morning, Anna woke at five a.m., just as she always had done when she was small, and discovered that Father Christmas (well, actually, just her father) had left a brightly decorated stocking at the foot of her bed. She refrained from rushing into her parents’ room and bouncing on their bed as she might have done in earlier years and instead made good headway into the chocolate orange she found inside whilst she read a magazine and waited for them to stir.

  As was their family tradition, they had a breakfast of thick bacon sandwiches with a huge pot of tea in the kitchen, then moved to the living room to hand around presents.

  Anna perched on a footstool, sipping her large mug of tea. Her mother passed her a large box wrapped in red and silver paper. “Happy Christmas, darling,” she said. Anna’s eyebrows rose. She had no idea what this was.

  She unwrapped it carefully, then lifted the lid of the expensive-looking box. “Oh, my goodness, Mum . . . Dad . . . It’s gorgeous!” Inside lay a soft brown leather briefcase, elegant but with the hint of an old-fashioned school satchel about it. She lifted it out of the box and slung it over her shoulder. It was gloriously smooth to the touch and reminded her of the color of chestnuts.

  Anna stood up and went and hugged her mother and then her father, bag still swinging at her side. “I love it,” she said, stroking it some more. “I’d been looking for something for when I start at BlockTime, but I didn’t want a traditional hard briefcase or a messenger bag. How did you know?”

  “I saw you eyeing it up when we went to the shopping mall,” her mother said, looking very pleased with herself, “and I thought what better present than a smart but very individual bag for a smart but very individual woman about to start a new phase in her career.”

  Anna hugged the bag to herself without squishing it. Her mother had always been great at her job, always the perfect female role model, and the fact she felt Anna had the potential to follow in her footsteps meant a lot.

  She pulled the bag off her shoulder, arranged it at an angle at the bottom of the Christmas tree, and snapped a photo of it, which she then sent straight to Brody, with the caption, From my Mum and Dad. I’m going to be a proper businesswoman!

  A few minutes later, her phone buzzed in her dressing gown pocket and she pulled it out to find a reply: a picture of a particularly ugly pair of Christmas socks, adorned with a Rudolph with a light-up red nose. From MY Mum and Dad, his accompanying message read. I’m going to look a right plonker! Anna laughed out loud.

  “What’s so funny?” her mother asked.

  Anna leaned over and showed her the photo. “It’s from Brody,” she explained, and went on to outline how she’d recently encouraged him to get in touch with his parents after years of a strained relationship. He’d been hesitant but had finally listened to her, and they’d invited him up to Keswick for Christmas. “I hope it’s going okay,” she said. “This is a huge step for him.”

  Her mother nodded. “It sounds as if you’re as much good for him as he’s been for you.”

  “I’m beginning to think so too. Did I tell you we’re meeting on New Year’s Eve?”

  “At least twice already,” her mother said, laughing. “You talk about this Brody a lot. Much more than you ever did that Jeremy fellow.”

  “Do I?” Anna said. “I hadn’t realized.”

  Her mother gave her a knowing look. “And you don’t think there might be a spark there between you when you finally meet?”

  “Mum . . . Y
ou’re as bad as Gabi! I’ve already told you I don’t think of him that way.” She pulled a brightly wrapped package from underneath the tree and handed it to her mother, shaking her head.

  Her mother was planning on serving up a traditional English Christmas lunch, which meant there was plenty of work to be done before the select handful of friends they’d invited turned up later, so as soon as they’d finished dishing out presents and clearing away the wrapping paper, all three of them headed into the kitchen.

  Anna began to chop onions for her mother’s favorite stuffing recipe—pork with fresh chestnuts—and as her knife hit the chopping board in a repetitive motion, she couldn’t help thinking about what her mother had said about Brody, and each time she did, there was a worrying fluttering in her stomach, a tickling she recognized but quickly decided she’d really rather not label.

  ANNA WOKE ON Boxing Day to a most spectacular view. Her parents had the large back garden her father had always dreamed about, with woodland beyond, and that morning it was covered in five inches of snow. Unlike London, nowhere near the amount to faze the locals or stop them going about their business, but just enough to make it look as if the whole world was a clumsily iced Christmas cake.

  There was a soft knock at her bedroom door, and her mother appeared, carrying a tray. “Thought you might like breakfast in bed,” she said as she laid it on the mattress.

  Anna pushed herself up to sitting. “Oh, Mum . . . You shouldn’t have. Not after all the work you did yesterday.”

  Her mother shrugged as she poured tea from a teapot. “I don’t get the chance to spoil you much, so just let me, okay?”

  Anna smiled at her. “Okay,” she said, then settled down to eat her breakfast while her mum sat in the armchair near the window. When she was finished, Anna stretched again and prepared to swing her legs around and place her feet on the floor. “I could stay in bed all day if I put my mind to it.”

  Her mother picked the tray up. “Then why don’t you?”