seen it like that before when he’d confronted her on their return from St Cecile. When he’d closed himself to her, shut and locked the door, thrown away the key.
‘I see,’ he said. His voice was terse. Clipped. ‘Well, you’ve made yourself very clear. So, yes, I’ll go.’
Yet for a moment—a moment that seemed to hang in the air like a weight—he remained motionless. She stood frozen, behind the table that divided her from him—behind everything that divided her from him and always would.
Always.
Then, ‘I wish you well, Marisa. It would be … ungenerous of me to do less,’ he said. His voice had no emotion, no depth. Nothing. Nothing at all.
His face still blank, still closed, he turned and walked out of the room.
She couldn’t move. Could only wait while she heard his footsteps in the narrow corridor to the front door, and then the creaking door open and close behind him. For a few moments longer she waited. Only the crackling of the logs in the range was audible. Then another sound penetrated. A car engine gunning. Louder, then fading.
Fading completely.
He had gone.
Marisa went on standing there, quite motionless. Her eyes started to blink. Slowly, and then faster, tears began to run down her cheeks.
Along the narrow lane Athan drove—dangerously, recklessly fast. He had to. Had to gain as much distance from her as possible. He had arrived here a bare hour ago, driven by a demon he could not shake off his back. By the fear that she had succumbed to Ian Randall’s forbidden blandishments, his begging to resume their affair. A demon had bitten him with the venom of savage jealousy.
Now a different demon drove him. Worse, much worse, than the first.
He wanted her—and she would not come to him.
I’ve lost her.
The words fell into his head like stones. Stones he could not shift. Stones that sat there crushing his thoughts, his emotions, everything.
All around him, pressing on the glass of the car windows, was darkness.
Darkness outside him.
Inside him.
He drove on into the winter’s night.
MARISA dug carefully with the trowel. The garden her mother had loved so much had become overgrown, and she was trying to clear away the weeds from the new shoots sprouting up all over the flowerbeds. Spring had finally arrived, and as she knelt she could feel the sun warm on her back. It seemed like a blessing.
She was in need of blessings. Working hard to count them. To keep them in the forefront of her mind. Keep buried in the depths of her mind all remembrances of Athan Teodarkis—buried deep, buried safe.
She was humming to herself intermittently—some tune she’d heard on the radio. She listened to the radio a lot these days. It was companionship. Comforting. The cottage was so isolated she could play the radio out here in the garden knowing no one would be disturbed by it.
A robin was hopping around at the back of the flowerbed, tilting its head sideways and eyeing her hopefully. A small worm coiled itself under a clod of earth and she kept it buried. Fond as she was of the robin, who was a cheery visitor to the garden, she didn’t feel up to deliberately feeding it a worm who was only trying to have a quiet life.
The way she was.
A quiet life. That was all she wanted right now. One that, like the tiny earthworm could be spent buried deeply and safely. Sheltered and out of the way.
Where she belonged.
It had been weeks since Athan had been and gone. Weeks and weeks. How many, precisely, she hadn’t counted. Hadn’t wanted to. The days drifted by, one after another, marked only by the burgeoning spring. That followed a calendar that had its own schedule. One day it was a clump of primroses, unfurling their pale blossoms, another day the catkins showering her with golden pollen. Another the first flush of green on the once bare branches of the trees.
It was all she wanted right now.
She kept herself almost entirely to herself. She had set up a grocery delivery service with a supermarket in a large market town, and it suited her not to have to go there in person. The weekly delivery was good enough. Sometimes the local farmer’s tractor rumbled past the cottage, but when she heard it coming she made sure she was not visible. She wasn’t being deliberately stand-offish. She just didn’t want to see anyone. Anyone at all. Whether local or stranger.
It was as if she was hibernating. Tucking herself away. Shutting down. Trying not to think. Trying not to feel. Trying to keep busy in the garden. While she worked she could feel her mother’s presence, approving of her for what she was doing. Glad her daughter was back here again, safe in the haven she had found for herself—her refuge from a world that had rejected her, a man who had not wanted her.
Marisa’s face twisted. Athan had wanted her.
That was the bitter, poisoned irony of it. After what he’d done to her, he wanted her.
Did he really think I would just totally ignore what he’d done? Why he’d done it? Just act like it had never happened?
But he had—obviously. That was what he’d assumed—that he could just pick her up again, carry on with her again. Take her back to his bed again …
No! She mustn’t think like that—they were dangerous thoughts. Bringing in their wake memories that were even more dangerous. Lethal.
She dug deeper with the trowel, wrestling with a long, tenacious dandelion tap root to extract the last fragment. It wasn’t the kind of root you could leave in the soil—a new weed would sprout even from the tiniest portion, seeking the air and the sun, thrusting up to grow and flourish.
Thoughts about Athan were like that. So were memories. She must get every last fragment of them out lest they seek to flourish once again.
She paused in her work, lifting her eyes to the hedge that bordered the garden, to the slope behind that led up onto open moorland. She would go for a walk later—blow away the cobwebs. Blow away the dangerous thoughts and memories that tried to get out.
Questions went through her mind and she wished she could have an answer to them, but knew she could not. Questions she had never asked but wished now she had. Questions of her mother.
How long did it take you to get over my father? To get him out of your head, your mind, your heart? To be free of him—free of what he’d done to you?
And the question that was most fearful of all: Did you ever get over him?
That was what she feared the most. That the wound was too deep, the scarring too brutal.
Because the problem was that despite all she was doing not
