A Secret Escape

1. Milly

Why had she said yes?

Milly sat in her car outside the railway station, although it seemed generous to call it that, given that it was in the middle of nowhere and consisted of nothing more than a single platform and a shelter. There was no ticket office. No buzz of waiting people. Just one train an hour.

It was the last place on earth you’d expect to encounter a movie star, which was presumably why Nicole had chosen it.

Milly understood the need for discretion and privacy, but still, this felt like overkill.

There was one other car parked along the narrow country road, but other than that there were no signs of life and she sat in the darkness, trying not to be spooked as she waited for the last train of the day. She’d opened the car windows, but even at this late hour it was stifling and there was no sign of the weather breaking. Back in March when it had rained every day, Milly had dreamed of sunshine, but June had brought with it sunshine and a smothering heat that made her dream of rain.

The makeup she’d so carefully applied before leaving had already melted away, but she didn’t bother renewing it because what was the point? It was dark and there was no one to see her anyway. It didn’t matter how she looked. But when you were meeting someone many considered to be one of the most beautiful women in the world, it was hard to resist the urge to make an effort.

Not that anyone noticed her when Nicole was around. They never had.

She sighed and checked the time.

Maybe Nicole had changed her mind. Please let her have changed her mind.

She’d heard nothing since that single phone call the night before. Was she wasting her time sitting here? She thought about her child, safely asleep in her grandmother’s house. Milly hated asking her mother for help, and this time she hadn’t even been able to explain why she needed Zoe to do an impromptu sleepover because Nicole had sworn her to secrecy. Zoe herself had protested that at thirteen she was able to stay on her own, but after all the upheaval in their lives Milly wasn’t ready to consider that. Zoe was the most important thing in her life. What if there was a fire? An intruder? Having lost so much, Milly was clinging tightly to what she had left. Also she had a niggling feeling that something wasn’t quite right with Zoe, but whenever she asked she was given the I’m fine response. Milly had cycled through the obvious things: Was it school? The divorce? Moving to a new home? Whatever it was, Zoe clearly didn’t want to worry her with it, which simply increased Milly’s anxiety levels.

She needed to spend more time alone with her daughter, but when you were a single working mother, time was a scarce resource.

And now she had Nicole to deal with. Friendships were supposed to make you feel better, not worse. At what point did you say enough ?

She felt guilty because her mother had assumed Milly was finally going on a date and hadn’t been able to hide her delight. “Good,” she’d said. “It’s been eighteen months since Richard walked out, and the divorce has been final for six months. I’m pleased you’ve finally moved on.”

Moved on?

Milly hadn’t moved on. If she’d admitted that the last thing she wanted was another romantic entanglement when she was still tied up in knots about the last one, she would have caused her mother even more worry, and she didn’t want to do that. She kept those thoughts to herself, but the effort required to pretend she was coping well was exhausting.

All she really wanted now was to be the best mother possible to Zoe, but she was pretty sure she was failing at that too. She’d read so many books and articles on how to make divorce easier on kids the advice swirled around in her head. She was trying hard to put everything into practice. She’d been careful not to say a bad word about Richard in front of Zoe (although she used plenty of bad words when she was alone in the shower), and she tried to keep everything around them as normal as possible. She forced herself to get up in the morning and smile and pretend to be fine when she really wasn’t fine at all and would gladly have spent the whole day in bed. She told herself that she was modeling coping strategies for her child, and that was what mattered, wasn’t it? It didn’t matter that inside her head she was a mess.

Between lying to her mother, putting on a brave face for her child and forcing herself to be polite to Richard even when he was being frustratingly unreasonable and uncaring and nothing like the man she’d married, she’d forgotten what it felt like to actually express her true feelings.

There had been a time when the prospect of Nicole coming to stay would have lifted her mood, because if there was one person in the world she could be honest with, it was Nicole. But not anymore.

What was she doing here when the last thing she needed was more emotional stress? She didn’t know if she was a fool or if this was the very definition of friendship: showing up no matter what.

Promises made when you were fifteen didn’t seem to make as much sense when you were thirty-five. They certainly hadn’t meant anything to Nicole.

Hurt and tired, she reached for her phone and sent a message.

Are you on the train?

A flash of headlights caught her attention and she froze in her seat as another car approached. It drove past without stopping, and she let out the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. She wasn’t built for subterfuge.

When Nicole had called her asking for help, she should have said no.

She was particularly frustrated with herself because she’d recently done an online course on assertiveness, thanks to a twenty-minute wait at the hairdresser, where she’d foolishly fallen into the trap of doing one of those magazine questionnaires.

If you answer yes to more than three questions, you may have a problem with being assertive.

Milly had answered yes to all ten questions and had decided right then and there that she needed to do something about it. Her tendency to say yes was the reason she felt pressured all the time. It was the reason she lay awake at night, stressed and hyperventilating with her to-do list racing around her brain. Her inability to be assertive was the reason she never felt able to call out Richard’s unreasonable behavior. (He’d already humiliated and divorced her, so really what more could he do?) She didn’t know if the way he behaved was a hallmark of ex-husbands generally, but she knew she wasn’t handling it well. It had to stop. She had to change.

She was too busy to take a class in person, largely because of her inability to say no, so she’d enrolled for an online course and for two weeks had spent an hour every evening exploring ways to be more assertive. She’d learned about boundaries, about the importance of standing up for her rights and respecting other people’s, she’d filled out worksheets where she’d tried out different ways of saying no. Assertive, but not aggressive. Use the I word, not you . When you do (fill in particular behavioral aberration here) . . . I feel (describe, without swearing, how it makes you feel) . . .

She’d passed with top marks and thought that maybe this would be a new beginning. And then her phone had rung.

The name that flashed up was Sister .

Milly had stared at it for so long it had stopped ringing. But it had immediately started again, and this time she’d answered it, even though part of her didn’t want to.

It wasn’t her sister, of course. She didn’t have a sister, but when Nicole’s career had taken off, she’d insisted that Milly store her number under a different name. It had felt exciting at the time. Clandestine. It had made her feel special, because all of a sudden everyone wanted a piece of Nicole, and Milly had her number in her phone.

They’d been in their early twenties, but even at that tender age their lives couldn’t have been more different. Milly was married to Richard and had just discovered she was pregnant. She spent her days helping her mother run the family business, a small but exclusive resort of lakeside cabins nestled close to the water in the beautiful Lake District.

Nicole, on the other hand, had dropped out of college to pursue acting seriously, and by the age of twenty-one had achieved global fame after starring in a movie about a teenager who traveled back in time to save the planet from destruction. It had broken all box office records. Milly had seen the film and agreed with the critics that Nicole had been captivating in the role, but that wasn’t the point where she’d recognized just how talented her friend was. That moment had come a few months later, when Nicole had all but floated onto the stage to accept the most coveted award in acting wearing a custom-made gown that somehow managed to make her look both innocent and alluring. Her speech had been heartfelt and moving, and many of the people in the audience had cried.

Milly had cried too, and that was when she’d realized that her friend wasn’t just going to be big, she was going to be huge. Because the speech was all lies, and Milly knew it was lies. She was, quite possibly, one of only two people who knew it was lies, the other being Nicole’s mother, who was unlikely to be watching.

But still Nicole had made her believe every word.

Nicole had called her afterward.

“Did you hear my speech?”

“Yes, I heard your speech.”

“You know the truth. People would pay you to tell my story.”

Milly had rolled her eyes. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“You have no idea how far people will go to get information on me and tear me down.”

“You’re sounding paranoid.”

But Nicole had said the same thing a few days later when Milly had met her in her suite in a London hotel where she was staying for a premiere of her latest movie.

She’d been escorted to the room by unsmiling security guards with earpieces and overdeveloped muscles, and she’d sat stiffly on one of the white sofas in the ridiculously opulent suite, feeling out of place and desperate to find common ground with her old friend.

She remembered ten-year-old Nicole saying One day I’m going to be famous , and here she was—famous.

And fame had changed everything.

“Seriously, Milly, you can’t have my name in your phone anymore. Someone might see it. We need to agree on a different name.” Nicole had been wired, nervous, talking too quickly, sipping a glass of wine even though it was three in the afternoon. Her hair fell in dark silky waves down her back, and those famous green eyes, eyes that made you lose your power of speech as one smitten critic had put it, were huge in her pale face. In real life she seemed thinner than ever, and Milly, almost eight months pregnant by then, had felt like a baby elephant next to her.

She’d shifted slightly, trying to get more comfortable, which was almost impossible with a baby stuck under your ribs. “Who is going to see it? And what are they going to do? Mug me and steal my phone? I live in the middle of nowhere, Nic. I’m surrounded by trees and mountains. When I open my windows I hear nothing.” That wasn’t quite true. She frequently slept with the windows open, and she lay in the darkness and listened to the plaintive call of the birds and the occasional hoot of an owl, thinking how much she liked her quiet, predictable life. Unlike Nicole, she’d never had a desire to be famous, and nothing about her friend’s life had given her reason to revise her opinion. “My home isn’t exactly Paparazzi Central.”

Nicole had looked at her with a mix of envy and pity, as if she was wondering how anyone as unworldly as Milly made it through the day.

“Indulge me.” She’d put down her wineglass and taken the phone from her friend. Her slim fingers had flown over the keys. “There. Fixed.”

Milly had stared at it. “Sister?”

“Why not? It’s what we are. It’s the way I feel about you. The way I’ll always feel about you.” Nicole had hugged her then, and Milly had hugged her back, and for that brief moment their old connection had flickered to life. This was the Nicole she’d grown up with, not the new glamorous Nicole who couldn’t walk down a street without being recognized. Still, she hadn’t been able to shake the uneasy feeling that their relationship was about to change in a big way, and it made her sad because nothing was more important to her than their friendship.

“You’re going to forget about me.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Nicole had said exactly what Milly had hoped she’d say. “You’re my best friend. You’ll always be my best friend, and when we’re both old, you’re going to come and spend winters with me in California and we’ll sit on the deck and watch the sunsets and talk about that time I drank half a bottle of vodka and dyed your hair purple. You were so upset you threw my favorite bag in the lake.”

Milly knew those weren’t the moments she’d remember when she looked back on their friendship. She’d be thinking of all the times Nicole had walked into a room first because Milly had been too shy to enter on her own. She’d remember the patience Nicole had shown when teaching Milly how to project confidence even when she was quaking inside. She’d think about the nights Nicole had stayed over at her place after Milly’s dad had walked out. The hours they’d lain awake talking about the future and what they both wanted.

And despite Milly’s fears, their friendship had endured. There were frequent phone calls and messages where Nicole would send photos of herself being transformed by hair and makeup into an assassin, an FBI agent, an art thief, a superhero.

Milly had sent back photos of Zoe. Zoe at six months. Zoe taking her first steps. Zoe’s first day at school. She’d sent photos of the four new luxury cabins they’d built by the lake and then felt embarrassed because Nicole owned properties around the world and Milly’s cabins, modest by comparison, were probably of little interest to her.

But despite their very different lives, they’d been in regular contact until eighteen months ago when Nicole had suddenly ghosted her.

Thinking about that brought her back to the present.

Milly checked the time again. The place felt so dead it was hard to believe a train was due to arrive any minute. But even if it did, there was no guarantee that her friend would be on it. Maybe Nicole was going to ghost her again. Maybe she wasn’t going to show up, and Milly would drive back home alone feeling more of a fool than she already did.

And if Nicole did happen to arrive, what was Milly going to say?

Why have you ignored me for the past eighteen months?

Where were you when I needed you?

It had happened right after Milly, Richard and Zoe had visited her in LA. Milly assumed there was a connection and had spent hours going over the holiday in her mind but couldn’t identify a reason. Initially she hadn’t worried because she knew how busy Nicole was, but a few weeks later when Milly had left a message telling her that Richard was having an affair and divorcing her and there was still no response, she’d started to worry. More than worry. Her friend’s silence had hurt. It had been a bitter blow, coming so soon after Richard’s betrayal.

The one person she’d always thought she could depend on, her safety net in life, had let her down.

Milly still couldn’t believe Nicole had ignored something so life-shattering. When had they ever not supported each other? Some long-term friendships continued out of habit, but theirs was real. Theirs was rare and special. Until it wasn’t.

Nicole’s silence hurt more than it should have because not only had Milly been dumped by her husband but it seemed she’d been dumped by her best friend too, and in some ways that felt worse. It had been the lowest moment of her life. So bad that she tried not to think about it because she’d dragged herself back from the edge and didn’t want to risk staring into the blackness again.

She’d survived, mostly thanks to the support of her mother and grandmother, but it had changed things. There was no more believing that Nicole would be there for her in a crisis. No more pretending that the word Sister in her phone was anything more than a way of disguising Nicole’s identity.

Even now, so many months later, that reality hurt.

“Maybe it’s me.” She spoke aloud, as she sometimes did when she was alone in the car. It was the one time she felt able to speak her mind. “Maybe I’m just the kind of person people leave.”

First her father, then Richard and then Nicole.

She’d assumed that was the end of it, and then the night before Nicole had finally called.

The call should have woken Milly up, but she had been lying awake stewing about Richard, having conversations in her head that she knew she’d never have in real life despite the assertiveness course because she was determined to keep things civil for her daughter.

She’d answered partly because it was Nicole and Milly had never not answered a call from Nicole, and partly because a small hurt part of her hoped that maybe Nicole was finally getting in touch to apologize or at least explain.

But there had been no apology or explanation, just a plea.

I need your help.

Nothing for eighteen months, not a squeak, and now she was expecting Milly to help.

During the conversation, admittedly short, not once had she asked how Milly was doing. She hadn’t mentioned Richard’s affair or the divorce or acknowledged how hard it must be for Milly to be going through exactly what her mother had gone through. She proffered neither explanation nor apology for not being there for Milly. It was all about her.

I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important. Please, Milly. I’m desperate.

Desperate? What did desperate look like when your life was pretty much perfect? Just how desperate could you be when you were rich, beautiful and the toast of the movie-going public?

Nicole didn’t know the meaning of the word, but Milly did, although she worked hard not to show it. She’d been determined not to put that extra pressure on Zoe.

She was just about holding it together, which was another reason she should have said no to Nicole. She should have put into practice everything she’d learned from her assertiveness course. She should have said No, sorry, I’m struggling enough with my own life as you’d know if you read your emails or, better still (as she’d been taught that it wasn’t necessary to give lengthy explanations), Sorry, I can’t help .

But she hadn’t said any of those things. She’d said yes.

Yes, she’d pick her up. Yes, she’d drive at night to lessen the chances of being seen. Yes, Nicole could stay with Milly. Yes, she’d find a way to hide her.

Which was why she was now, against her better judgment, sitting in the middle of nowhere waiting for a train that was late and a friend she wasn’t sure she wanted to see.

The assertiveness course clearly hadn’t worked. If she was more assertive, she’d demand a refund.

A sound cut through her thoughts, and she saw the train approaching. Finally.