Kate grinned back. ‘Where I will naturally whip him into shape?’
‘Naturally,’ the woman laughed.
‘Sadly,’ Kate answered, ‘I’m just going to be working.’
She wasn’t sure why she’d accepted the job, really. Possibly to prove something to herself? She would really rather not have realised that every flight she took of late seemed to bring her closer to England. And this was the first trip back to La Rochelle where she wouldn’t grab a taxi and whiz through the port’s busy harbour streets to meet Marco. There would be no falling into bed with him. No late-night stroll down the Rue Saint Pierre afterwards, holding hands and chatting about their latest work assignments before stopping in at his favourite bar and, after a drink or four, going back to his tiny apartment to fall back into bed again.
She tested a breath and found that it wasn’t lodged too deeply in her throat after all. The last few months had eased the ego-crushing aftershock of her last visit, when Marco had sat her down and gently told her that he’d met someone. Someone who wanted to be with him. Wanted to live with him.
Wanted to commit to him.
She’d been stunned. He’d never once intimated he’d wanted more and hot on the heels of the shock had been an automatic need to tell him she was sure she could commit to him too – especially now that she knew that was what he was looking for.
Big mistake.
Huge.
The realisation that the gravel-laced reverence in his voice when he talked about Clara was definitely not, and indeed, had never been, present in his voice when he’d talked to her, coupled with the excruciatingly gentle manner he’d used to explain why it was never going to be her, had had her salvaging her pride and high-tailing it out of there.
She’d gone down the tried-and-tested route when she’d left on that jet plane, completely certain she wouldn’t be back again. Throwing herself into work she’d crossed so many time zones she hadn’t even bothered unpacking. Not that she usually unpacked. That was her ultimate life-hack, but Kate knew that didn’t look great, so she kept it to herself.
‘Work?’ said the woman disappointedly. ‘So the doodling…?’
‘Was for someone else.’ Another her. A different her. A lifetime ago. ‘My job involves travelling and reviewing for airlines, tourist boards, resort owners, etc. It’s a tough job…’
‘But somebody has to do it,’ her new friend replied, with a generous smile. ‘You get to travel. Experience new things. Share them with others. I like it.’
‘Exactly.’
‘You’re probably too young to settle down anyway.’
Exactly.
‘So where is home for you?’ the woman asked.
Kate’s heart missed a beat. ‘Oh, you won’t have heard of it. It’s a small village in West Sussex.’ Determinedly she reached out in front of her, opened up her laptop and, with only a moment’s hesitation, hit the delete key on the logos she’d been tinkering with.
Home was where the other her had lived. The different her. A lifetime ago.
Opening up the blog article, she took a deep breath and glad to have this lovely person sitting next to her, a person more than capable of distracting her from pipedreams, Kate put her fingers on the keyboard and asked, ‘Hey, what’s your top tip for travelling?’
Kate
Kate sat cross-legged staring out to sea, Juliet’s latest postcard tucked away in her over-the-shoulder bag. Out of sight. And weighing on her mind and tempting her as if it was gold and ring-shaped and called ‘The Precious’.
No matter how she turned it all in her head, she couldn’t come up with a way of getting her mindset to return to life before the postcards.
The third postcard, a.k.a, The Precious, was succinct, to say the least:
She had read between the lines. She’d read above the lines and below the lines and the actual lines themselves.
Over and over and over.
And now her head was so full of possibility she could barely breathe.
She tried to remember exactly when had been the last time she’d felt this wealth of ideas rushing forward, this sense of future slotting quietly into place?
Her fingers flexed involuntarily as her heart clutched against the memory.
It had been the 9th October 2013.
Kate squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head helplessly.
She wasn’t going there.
And yet if she did this, if she went home and looked into buying The Clock House, she was definitely going to have to ‘go there’.
Be there.
Back in Whispers Wood.
Without Bea.
The sister who’d dreamed up that future right alongside her.
Kate stared hard at the wide ocean in front of her.
Bea was gone and was never coming back and Kate missed her every blessed day.
And every day she tried to get okay with missing her.
If she returned to Whispers Wood, Kate would be saying that she could deal with being back without Bea.
Or, at the very least, she would be saying she was going to try.
Again.
Because it wasn’t like she hadn’t gone home before. Over the years since Bea’s death, she’d made plenty of duty visits to see her mum. Visits where the only view was that of watching her mum exist silently on the fringes of life – not ready to re-engage – not able to re-engage. Well, not with Kate, anyway.
‘Okay. Not plenty of visits,’ Kate admitted, imagining Bea’s snort of laughter floating to her on the sea breeze. ‘But I’ve been back a few times. Enough times,’ she ended with.
But each visit she’d avoided the village green and The Clock House.
She was too fanciful. Too sentimental. Too scared that in looking up at it she’d imagine it winking back at her – stirring everything up.
Dazzling her.
Kate blew out a breath.
It was silly to be even considering returning to Whispers Wood on a more permanent basis and yet all she’d done since she’d received the latest postcard from Juliet was consider just that.
How could what she had always thought of as her last option, suddenly seem like her only true option?
‘What do you think, Bea?’ Kate whispered into the sea breeze. ‘Should I go back?’
Silence.
Kate’s ears strained past the sound of the ocean waves lapping against the shore and past the odd cry from a seagull. Not one sound that could magically be made into her sister’s voice giving her approval.
A tear rolled down her cheek.
As much as she still