A Solitary Heart

by Amanda Carpenter

  “No!” she cried, shrinking away as she felt his touch at the back of her head. “I’ve listened to you and your fine talk too much already! Just go back to your own life, and leave me to mine!”

  She whirled and rushed out of the room, and he raced after her, which so destroyed her sense of direction that she didn’t watch where she was going and blundered straight into Jane’s arms.

  Of course, neither she nor Matt had heeded the level of their voices in the heat of the moment, and as a consequence had roused the whole household. So much for privacy, she thought, shaking like a leaf in the shelter of her friend’s protective hold.

  “Leave her be! Whatever you’ve done, now’s not the time to correct it!” Jane said to Matt in a sharp, authoritative voice she had never heard before.

  But Sian had seen Joshua, in the doorway of the guest bedroom looking as if he was facing an executioner, and her own private demon dragged her out of Jane’s arms.

  She strode over to him, white-faced and beyond restraint. “What you did to me was bad enough. When you saw that things had changed between Matt and me, you should have come to me and we could have sorted it out. What you did to your own brother was unspeakable,” she said icily. “It went far beyond a prank, Joshua. It was an act of malice done to someone who loves you, and that I find unforgivable. I don’t know you. I thought I did, but I don’t.”

  Joshua looked stricken to his heart. Good, she thought in her own pain, good.

  Something tugged. She looked around, unseeing, and let Jane lead her into Matt’s bedroom. Then, fuelled by the glacier of ice that was crystallising over her bruised, overwrought emotions, she pulled away and stated flatly, “I’m all right.”

  “Well, you don’t look it,” said Jane with unflattering bluntness.

  Sian’s head turned from side to side, then she strode for the door. Jane sprang for her. “Where are you going?”

  “To pack,” she snarled. “I’m leaving as soon as I can get ready.”

  “But where would you go?” the other girl exclaimed. “What would you do?”

  “I don’t care!” she shouted, then leaned her elbows on the wall and put her head on her forearms. “I’ll go to the airport. I can take a bus from there to South Bend. I won’t ride back in Joshua’s car. I don’t want to see him or talk to him.”

  “Sian, it’s half past one in the morning. You don’t even know if the buses run at night. Could you just wait a minute and calm down, please?”

  Sian raised her head and looked at the other girl in sizzling silence; she was wild to get away and only just able to keep from swearing at Jane out of love for her. Her friend stared, wide-eyed, then said quietly, “Please. Five minutes. Then, if you insist, I’ll get dressed and come with you.”

  But she had halted in her impetuous path and reason had crept in. She closed her eyes; had she ever deserved such a friend as this? “No, you’re right,” she said, and sagged. “I won’t drag you out in the middle of the night. We can leave first thing in the morning.”

  Matt’s bed was quite big enough, so she shared it with Jane, and lay awake through what remained of the night, her head aching with the irony of it. Just after dawn, she rose and woke the other girl, then went to the study to drag on her last change of clothes. She slipped on a pair of sandals, stuffed her other things into her case, and felt the tears well up again.

  In an excess of bad temper, she kicked the case across the room. No more tears. She had to be strong and keep her anger cold and hard. To allow warmth to creep back in now was to weaken; she had crept out of her self-imposed shell and found the wide world a hurting place to be, so she’d just crawl back to where she came from. Never mind that the shell seemed a small and confining prison. She could learn all over again how to take pride in being alone. It was only what her father had taught her, after all.

  “Sian,” said Matthew from behind her.

  She gasped, and whirled around, and cried, “Get out!”

  “No,” he said, his eyes dark and shadowed with sleeplessness. In the clear light his face had settled into hard and haggard lines. “If I leave you now, you’ll retreat forever behind your barriers and never come out again. I told you yesterday that I wanted you so badly I could hardly see straight. Remember?”

  “Well,” she said with a bitter laugh, “didn’t we learn differently? You’re too quick to anger, and I’m the credulous fool. So what? Better to learn it now, than later. Now, where’s Jane? If she’s coming with me, she’d better do it fast, because I’m not waiting around for any more of this post-mortem.”

  With a muffled oath, he lifted his hands to rake through his hair distractedly, looking like a man who had come to the end of his tether. He said tightly, “I am trying to tell you that I’m sorry! I behaved like an utter fool. I was angry, and hurt too, and lost control at the thought of you in Joshua’s arms, or any other man’s for that matter—can’t you understand that?”

  By luck he had managed to say the one thing that provoked the memory from last night of her own instinctive whiplash of reaction at the thought of him involved with another woman. Her furious desire to get away from him faded somewhat, and she looked at him with pained, very sad eyes.

  “Oh, yes,” she sighed. “I can. But just because you’re ready for forgiveness, it doesn’t mean that I’m ready to forgive you. And even if I did, today only shows how destructive we can be to each other.”

  “But we weren’t destructive last night until the very end,” he said quietly as he raised his head. “We were good, and hopeful, and beginning to build something full of promise.”

  “And it blew up in our faces,” she muttered, her face averted.

  He replied, with pain and clarity, “Everything that’s ever been bad between us has been a misunderstanding; we seem to do pretty well at understanding. Don’t you remember that as well, or are you so determined to block out everything about me?”

  She shook her head helplessly at that, and he paused. She knew she was hurting him by her rejecting manner. He showed that transparently, but she didn’t know if she could let go of the hard knot that lay like a coiled snake in her breast.

  “Listen to reason for one moment,” he went on carefully, “and try to hear it in spite of the fact that it comes from me. Yesterday you felt an entire world away from what you feel today. Who’s to say that tomorrow you might not feel differently again? Let’s give each other time to calm down, and look around us. Maybe things will look better, maybe not. I know I need to do some heavy thinking about faith and courtesy. Can we at least promise to talk to each other in a few days, without anger? Can we at least make that one, small step, even if it is to say goodbye?”

  She closed her eyes, for she didn’t know where to look. Oh, didn’t she just warn herself a few minutes ago? To allow warmth to creep in was to weaken, and to hesitate was fatal.

  “Just one phone call?” she said doubtfully.

  “Hi, how are you? Have you been busy? I’ve missed you,” he responded immediately, with a tenderness in the words that looked fair to break her heart. It certainly cracked something, if only the brittle casing of an old, outworn shell. “You know the sort of thing. Just wait and see, it’ll be easy.”

  “I must be more of a fool than I thought,” she whispered, and looked up with wide, wet eyes.

  He turned away, so that she could not see his face. “Fine,” he said. How did he manage such calm? “I’ll call you Tuesday or Wednesday, all right?”

  “A-all right.”

  “I’m ready to go to the bus station whenever you are, Sian,” said Jane, her gaze very gentle as she looked at Matt’s expression. “Steven will go back to South Bend with Joshua.”

  She cleared her throat. “Then I guess we’d better go.”

  She left without a backward glance, unable to trust her own precarious control or to fully believe in the new fragile tendrils
of communication Matt had worked so hard to reestablish after their explosive confrontation.

  The very stability in Jane’s loyal, unquestioning friendship brought a hard lump to her throat as she stared out of the window on the bus ride back to South Bend. Jane talked, but in a soothing, placid voice about inessential matters that did not require a response, and after a time she could muster up enough energy to reply with some semblance of normality.

  But underneath the murmur of undemanding conversation she realised that at least one question had been raised and answered by the weekend. She knew without a doubt that she had indeed fallen in love with Matt, and had even, in the midst of her pain and anger, found the courage to confess as much to his face. Otherwise his judgemental accusations could not have hurt her so badly, and she would never have agreed to even talking to him over the phone afterwards; she would have just broken off all contact and counted herself well rid of the whole affair.

  As it was, she couldn’t. Even at the height of her most uncontrollably damaging fury, he had managed to reach past the red cloud of pain and anger and touch her again in her soft, sensitive core. That he could do as much so quickly after his own heedless outburst of temper spoke, if nothing else, of his immediate remorse, and his own deep-seated uncertainty, and the desperate speed of man working very hard to recover fast from an unexpected, terrible blow.

  Did that mean he loved her as well? She honestly couldn’t tell. It might mean merely that he had outraged his own sense of fair judgement, and was appalled enough to try to make amends. He might decide that he couldn’t bring himself to trust her as much as he thought he could, especially after learning of that stupid pretend engagement she had cooked up with Joshua, and his phone call in a few days would indeed be to say goodbye.

  All she could do was wait, helplessly, trapped by her own emotions, a victim of her own fears and the aftermath of stress. She couldn’t eat or sleep that Sunday evening, for fretting over what had happened, what she had said, what she should have said, and what might possibly come. She grieved for the breakdown of the beginning, yearned with an awesome loneliness for the comfort of his strong arms, and worried over what she would do or say to him when he phoned her.

  But even in her most wild imagining, she couldn’t have foreseen what would happen, or that the phone conversation that had assumed so much importance in her mind would never take place.

  Jane left Monday morning to go to work. Sian showered and washed her hair, and sat at the kitchen table listlessly combing through the tangles when the front doorbell rang and she went to answer it.

  Joshua stood on the doorstep, looking as drawn as she felt, and very much ashamed. Her mouth tightened as she stared at him, and her fingers clenched on the doorknob before she stepped back and gestured in abrupt silence for him to enter.

  He went to the living-room, then turned around to face her. “Sian, I’m sorry,” he said without preamble. “I’m just so sorry.”

  After all that had happened, and now this. It never rained, but it poured. She shook her head at the pleading in his face, sighed heavily and tightened the belt of her wrap. “Why did you do it, Joshua? Couldn’t you see that you would hurt us both? And Matt, especially Matt—he never explodes like he did, unless he’s thoroughly shaken and upset. I can see that, now that I’ve had a chance to calm down.”

  “You’re right,” he said miserably. “There’s no excuse for what I did. I can’t really even explain it very well. I was just so jealous. I saw you with him, and then everything went red. Matt always gets the best of everything, in career, lifestyle, friends, and it looked as if he would get you as well. I loved you.”

  “You didn’t love me,” she said quietly, turning back to face him. “You were just infatuated and we both knew it.”

  “No,” he said, just as quietly, with an honesty so painful it brought an ache to her already overburdened heart. “I did love you, and I still do. Maybe it isn’t quite the love I had imagined it was, but you were my friend first, and then he came along and seemed to take you away. Oh, I know it sounds possessive and ridiculous, but—Sian, you and the others have been some of the best things that ever happened to me. For the first time in my life I didn’t feel like I came second to my big brother, who was always better, stronger and more popular than I could ever be. Don’t you see? I thought I was losing you, and now, because of my own thoughtless, stupid actions, I probably have.”

  She was unable to speak. Weren’t they all to blame in some measure for what had happened? Didn’t she, too, bear the guilt of her own irresponsible actions, for if she hadn’t been so hell-bent on revenge she never would have taken things as far as they had gone.

  “Anyway,” he said heavily, misreading her silence. “I just thought I’d tell you—I’ve talked to Matt and explained everything. He’s still angry but at least he understands now. And I just want to say again how sorry I am. I can’t make it up to you, but I hope some day you can forgive me.”

  “Oh, Joshua,” she sighed, and stepped forward to hold open her arms. He came to her in a rush and hugged her tight, and she said into his shirt, “You fool. You silly fool, how could you think that our friendship would end just because I got involved with your brother?”

  “I told you it sounded stupid!” he said with self-directed anger. “Please, please don’t let what happened come between us. My friends are the best and most important part of me.”

  “I’ll be your friend,” she whispered. “Don’t you see? I need you too. Just don’t ever do anything like that to me again. I’m not big enough to forgive that much a second time.”

  “Never, I promise.”

  The moment was shattered as the doorbell rang again. Sian stepped away from Joshua and threw up her hands in disgust, while he wiped his face and found an unsteady laugh for the expression on her face. She went to answer it, smiling as she threw open the door, and, at the sight of the man standing on the porch step, everything stopped in her heart.

  Malcolm, her father’s friend and associate for over twenty years; Malcolm, whom she loved like an uncle and trusted implicitly. He was one of the few stolid anchors of stability in her young and changeable life. He never came to South Bend when her father visited her, to spare Sian the necessity of explaining Malcolm’s presence to her friends. For years, the three of them had kept up the pretence that Sian hadn’t guessed that Malcolm really worked as her father’s bodyguard.

  One look at his serious face, and she knew at once that something terrible had happened to her father.

  “Sian is everything all right?” Joshua came into the hall. Neither she nor the silent man on the doorstep paid any heed to him.

  She whispered, stricken, “Is it bad?”

  “Aye, lassie,” said Malcolm, and she moved like a sleep-walker into his great, bear-like arms. “Can you come right away?”

  “Of—of course. Let me throw some things into a bag and get my passport.”

  She turned away, and her face was so dreadful that Joshua bridled and said aggressively to the stranger who had done this to her, “Look here, who are you, and what do you want?”

  “That’s not for me to say, young man,” replied Malcolm quietly.

  “Leave him alone, Joshua,” said Sian sharply, as panic rushed in to fill the empty void in her mind. “Look—could you write a note to Jane for me? Tell her I’ll call just as soon as I can.”

  “Sure,” he agreed readily, but she was striding down the hall even as he said it. He came with her, asking in helpless concern, “Isn’t there anything else I can do?”

  She glanced at him as if from an immeasurable distance, this earnest and inexperienced young man who came from such a normal existence, and she said with quiet fatalism, “I doubt there’s anything anyone can do.”

  Chapter Ten

  After the heat of the American Midwest, London seemed chilly and comfortlessly damp, as a mammoth bank of st
orm clouds moved north from Europe and enshrouded Britain.

  The trip from South Bend to Heathrow was a nightmarish marathon. She and Malcolm took a flight from the Michigan Regional Airport to Chicago, then flew stand-by on the first available seats to London. Looking around her at the crowded, impersonal expanse of the O’Hare airport as they waited, Sian felt as though she had entered a world that was bleached of all colour and sound, as the quiet tired burr of Malcolm’s voice explained in her ear just what had happened to her father.

  That there had always been an element of risk to Devin’s life was something that she’d had to accept over the passing years. He travelled light and fast, often with huge sums of cash and leaving behind irate casino owners, some of whom were unscrupulous characters who operated illegal establishments in the shadowy half-light existence of a global black market.

  Despite Malcolm’s cautionary admonitions, Devin had gained entrance to one particular gambling den just a few weeks ago and walked out again with a cool half-million in English pounds sterling. He had played and won against the owner himself, who was a man notorious for his gambling addiction, among other vices, and it was this man who had engineered an ambush just two nights ago.

  Malcolm and Devin had managed to overcome the attackers, who had subsequently been arrested and were now in prison on charges of attempted murder, but in the process of the struggle Devin had been seriously injured.

  Reeling with exhaustion and distress, she nevertheless rejected Malcolm’s concerned suggestion that they go back to the hotel suite that he’d booked for her under an assumed name, and instead took a taxi straight from Heathrow for the private hospital where Devin was.

  A phone call had assured them that her father was still alive, but in a coma from the head wound he had sustained, and during the long ride in the taxi Sian had cause to recall the quiet conversation she’d had with Matthew only a week ago…

  “You must have been a beautiful little girl. If I had a daughter like that, it would break my heart to send her away.”