A Secret Escape

2. Nicole

Chapter 2 Nicole

She’d made a mess of things. How could she be so good at playing a part and so bad at real life? She needed a script. She needed to be told who to be .

She shivered and huddled deeper into her coat. Milly had the air-conditioning running in the car and Nicole was frozen, but she said nothing because she was pathetically grateful to Milly for picking her up and didn’t dare ask for anything more.

She shouldn’t even have asked her to do this. She didn’t deserve it. She didn’t deserve Milly. She’d been a terrible friend to her. She’d let her down, and the fact that Milly had still shown up for her made her feel even worse.

Her younger self had naively thought that fame and fortune would be the answer to everything. It had come as a shock and disappointment to discover that being a movie star insulated you from many things, but not human emotion. You could buy a big house with walls of glass and a view of the ocean, but that didn’t ease the agony of heartbreak. A healthy savings account didn’t protect you from mortifying shame or nerve-shredding fear. All it really did was make you even more alone because everyone around you thought you had no reason to feel anything but lucky and permanently joyful.

Her eyes stung, and she blinked several times and tried to focus on her surroundings.

“Where are we?” She’d been expecting to go directly to Milly’s house in the village, but they’d driven straight through and were now heading toward the lake and Forest Nest, the exclusive resort owned and run by Milly and her family. The headlights picked out stone walls and fields, and she could just about make out the looming slope of the mountains to the right of her. It felt a long way from California, which was a relief, but still she felt a lurch of panic at the thought of being alone in one of the lakeside cabins. “I’m not staying with you in your home?”

“This is my home now.” Milly slowed down as they reached a sharp bend in the road. “Richard insisted on selling the cottage.” She didn’t look at Nicole, not even a glance, which could have been because it was dark and she was concentrating on the driving or, more likely, because she didn’t want to talk about it. It was a delivery of facts and no more.

Hurt hovered around Milly like an aura. Nicole could feel it, and she understood it.

Milly hadn’t just lost her husband, she’d lost her home and Nicole hadn’t been there to support her. That lapse, that total dereliction of her responsibilities as best friend, had formed a huge chasm between them. The only way of breaching that chasm was to tell the truth, try to explain, but given that there was a good chance the truth would make things worse, Nicole was delaying the moment. Did that make her a coward? Probably, but Milly had an idealistic view of relationships. Despite the fact her father had walked out when she was twelve, or maybe because of it, she expected a lot from people.

Nicole had let her down.

She wished she could put the clock back and do things differently, but it was too late for that. You made one bad decision and suddenly you were trapped on a path and there was no turning back. All she could do now was keep moving forward and make the best of things.

The divorce had shocked Nicole. She’d thought that Milly and Richard were the perfect couple. Yes, he was twelve years older than Milly, but he was handsome, charming and kind. He was also sure of himself, which was a draw to someone like Milly, who was rarely sure of anything. Being with Richard had given her more confidence. She’d blossomed. Richard had discovered what Nicole had always known: that Milly was one in a million. She was generous and genuine and had a quick sense of humor. Kindness shone from every pore in her body (although, the look she’d given Nicole when she’d described herself as a home-wrecker hadn’t been that kind, so maybe the last eighteen months had knocked that out of her). Milly listened carefully when you talked and paid attention, rather than treating conversation as a game of tennis where someone was always trying to win a point.

If Nicole was casting her in a role (something she did without thinking when she met people), it would have been Girl Next Door. Freckles. Warm smile. Always there to offer a cup of tea and a hug in times of trouble.

She’d originally cast Richard in the role of Romantic Lead, but then he’d had an affair and left Milly, so now she had him placed firmly in Bad Guy territory. The one to avoid. The guy guaranteed to let you down.

And it turned out that not only had he left Milly but he’d forced her to sell her home. Nicole knew how much Milly had loved that cottage, and not for the first time in her life she felt a surge of fury toward Richard. She already had plenty of reasons to be angry with him, and now she had another one.

She hadn’t intended to ask, but she couldn’t help herself. “You couldn’t have found a way to keep the cottage?”

“No. I couldn’t afford it by myself, and we needed somewhere to live.”

Guilt niggled. If she’d known, she would have given Milly the money. She would have found a way to make sure she could stay in her home. But it was too late for regrets.

It was too late for a lot of things. Her therapist had told her to remember that the past was gone, and that the future was ahead, and what she really needed to focus on was the present. Unfortunately, she’d had no advice on what to do if your present was crap and you didn’t want to focus on that either.

“So where are you living now?”

Milly adjusted her grip on the wheel. “Remember the old boathouse? Our den?”

Their den. Scraped knees. Hide-and-seek. A buried time capsule. Childish promises.

Happy times.

“Of course. I also remember having to rush to the emergency department because you stood on a rotten plank and fell through the floor. So much blood.” She remembered it as if it had happened yesterday. “Are you about to tell me you’re living there?”

“Zoe and I moved in three months ago.”

“I assume you swept the floor and did something about the spiders?” She was relieved to see Milly smile. It gave her hope that something might still be salvaged from the wreck of their friendship.

“We tried to make it a bit more comfortable, yes.”

Nicole stared into the darkness, absorbing the changes in her friend’s life. “So now you live by the lake. You always loved the place.”

“I still do.”

“Is it hard living where you work? Do people bother you?”

“No. We have a good team of staff. And the boathouse is a little way away from the rest of the cabins, so that helps. If guests have a problem, they contact the team at Reception. I don’t advertise that this is my home.”

Milly drove over the cattle grid and into a densely forested area that Nicole remembered well from their childhood. A carved wooden sign stood at the side of the narrow road.

Forest Nest.

Instantly she felt some of the tension drain away. Milly wasn’t the only one who loved this place. She loved it too. It was geared toward outdoor life, and people staying here spent their time swimming, kayaking and having fun on the lake, hiking the fells, and cycling up steep mountain passes. Milly’s mother believed in active holidays where you had fun and got muddy, and Forest Nest provided the perfect base for those experiences.

Nicole’s mother, by contrast, had considered every holiday to be an opportunity for intellectual improvement, and Nicole had spent numerous sweaty summer weeks pounding the streets of Rome, Florence and Paris bored out of her mind as her mother lectured her on art and architecture. A talented vascular surgeon, Alexandra Walker (she’d drawn the line at taking her husband’s name) had forgone a career in London in order to accommodate her husband’s wish to live in rural Cumbria. A passionate conservationist, he was the one who had wanted children, and she’d agreed on the understanding that he would take responsibility for childcare. Unfortunately he’d reneged on that promise by dying two years after the move, leaving Alexandra with a lesser career and a parental role that was both unfamiliar and unwanted. Consigned to a life of disappointing compromise, she had spent her time trying to push her daughter to heights she herself had failed to achieve. She believed that every moment of the day should have a purpose and that time was wasted if it wasn’t spent on self-improvement. Fortunately for Nicole that meant that her mother saw the long summer holidays as an inconvenience rather than an opportunity to spend time with her only daughter, so apart from their compulsory art appreciation week, Nicole had been allowed to stay with Milly for the rest of the time, providing she met certain study goals.

The summers she’d spent at Forest Nest were the happiest of her life. She and Milly had been expected to help out and do chores, but once they were done, their time was their own. She’d learned to swim and kayak. She’d headed into the fells with Milly and her mother and learned to rock climb, and she’d felt guilty for lying awake at night wishing she’d been born into a different family. A family where individuality was encouraged. Where you were loved for who you were rather than what you did.

Nicole had spent most of her life trying to make her mother proud, but so far it hadn’t happened. Thanks to the lurid headlines of the last few days, she was resigned to the fact that it never would.

What must her mother be thinking now?

Nicole could almost hear her sigh of disappointment.

“Remember when my mother was encouraging me to be a doctor? She set up all those visits to medical schools.”

Milly kept her eyes on the narrow track ahead. “You would have made a terrible doctor.”

“I know. She arranged for me to watch her operating, and I passed out and bashed my skull on the floor.” It seemed a strange thing to be talking about in the circumstances, but anything was better than focusing on the present.

There was a pause. “You’re an incredible actor, so I think we can agree you made the right choice.”

There was a time when praise like that from her closest friend would have given her a high. She’d been chasing validation for most of her life. Now she was numb.

“But I don’t save lives, do I? No one needs what I do.” Her mother had once asked her what she contributed to the world, and Nicole didn’t have an answer. No matter how many awards she won or box office records her movies broke, her mother always made her feel like a spectacular failure.

“Not true,” Milly said. “You enhance the lives of millions, and that’s important. There are ways of making a contribution that don’t involve being up to your elbows in someone else’s blood.”

“That’s gross.”

But the support, that tiny hint of their old relationship, made her feel a little better until she realized that their old relationship was dead and gone and that things would never be the same again because now Nicole had secrets. One particular secret that she wasn’t sure she could ever tell Milly. And that secret was a barrier to the intimacy that had made their friendship so rare and special.

They’d reached the end of the track, and Milly took a turn to the left, and there, perched on the water and surrounded by trees, was the boathouse. She pulled up outside and switched off the engine.

“We’re here.” Lights glowed on the deck, which stretched out over the lake.

Grateful for a distraction from her depressing thoughts, Nicole stared at the place that had been their forest hideout when they were young.

She hadn’t anticipated such a transformation. The dilapidated building of her childhood had been replaced by an architectural dream of wood and local stone.

“This is incredible.” She almost said that it was romantic and then realized that would be tactless. “Who did this?”

“Mostly Joel.”

“Who is Joel?”

“Joel is our everything guy.” Milly undid her seat belt. “By which I mean, he does a bit of everything. Plumbing, electrics, carpentry—whatever goes wrong in the cabins, Joel handles it. He’s a miracle, to be honest. There’s nothing Joel can’t fix.”

Maybe Joel could fix her life.

“He built this?” Nicole couldn’t stop staring. “But you had an architect, surely?”

“Joel used to be an architect. A very successful one, I believe. Worked for a big firm. But then he had some family issues and turned up here looking for maintenance work, or anything really, and my mother gave him a job and let him use one of the older cabins that needed renovating. You know what she’s like.”

“Yes, I know what she’s like.” Generous. Warm. How many times had Nicole wished that Connie was her mother? She was the kindest person she’d ever met, with the exception of Milly herself.

Except that tonight, possibly for the first time ever, Milly had been impatient with her.

And Nicole had only herself to blame for that. She’d hurt Milly. And she hadn’t wanted to do that, obviously, but Nicole had found herself in a hideous, horrible situation and hadn’t known how to extract herself. When there were no good options, which one did you pick?

Milly was still talking. “Anyway, it turned out there was nothing Joel couldn’t fix. Which is why I call him our everything guy. I think he only intended his move here to be temporary, but he has been here ever since. He bought one of the original stone cottages that we just drove past. He loves the outdoors. When he’s not working he’s usually climbing. I’m hoping that will keep him here, because if he left I’d be lost. It’s great having him around. He’s one of the good guys.”

One of the good guys.

Were people that easily categorized? Nicole didn’t think so. Good people could do bad things and often did in the world she inhabited. That world seemed far away.

Milly glanced at her. “There’s no one to see you here. You can take the wig off. It must be uncomfortable.”

“You get used to it.” Nicole eased it off and ran her fingers through her flattened hair. “It did the job. You didn’t recognize me. If my best friend didn’t recognize me, then I’m doing okay.”

She said best friend and held her breath, waiting for Milly to refute that claim, but Milly said nothing, and Nicole was grateful for that. Silence was better than a denial.

She gazed at the lake, saw moonlight flit across the surface and felt something close to peace for the first time in weeks. The sky was velvet black and studded with stars, a sight you rarely saw when you lived in a city. She turned to Milly, wanting to thank her, but her friend was already out of the car and heading toward the boathouse.

Nicole stuffed the wig into her bag and followed her. They walked along a path illuminated by small solar lights and then up a set of steps that led to the front door.

The door was on the far side of the property and not overlooked, but still Nicole found herself glancing over her shoulder. It was a hard habit to break, even here in the middle of nowhere. She’d been watched for so long she couldn’t imagine not being watched.

She stepped inside the boathouse and waited while Milly touched a couple of switches.

Soft light flooded the space, and Nicole saw a comfortable living room with a vaulted ceiling and a wall of glass overlooking the lake.

“It’s stunning.”

“We wanted the structure to blend into the forest, and we made the most of the light. Wait until you see it in daylight. Uninterrupted views across the lake to the fells.” Milly locked the front door behind them and dropped her keys into a bowl on the side. “But let’s be honest, the entire place would fit into the living room of your house in LA.”

Nicole didn’t want to think about her house in LA. She didn’t want to think about her life at all.

She envied Milly, but she knew her friend would never believe her, so she didn’t say it.

People, even Milly she suspected, forgot that she was a real person. They saw her on the red carpet wearing a custom-made dress with her hair and makeup flawless, and they thought that was her life. But that part was no more real than the roles she played. Real was when she lay on the carpet in her bedroom having a panic attack. Real was having her heart broken with the whole world watching.

They thought her life was perfect, or maybe they just needed to believe that because the alternative was to accept that no one’s life was really perfect, and that was too depressing to contemplate.

She smiled at Milly. “I think it’s beautiful. Thank you for picking me up and for letting me stay with you.” For a moment she thought that perhaps Milly hadn’t heard her, but then her friend gave a brief nod as if acknowledging what they both knew: that it had been more than generous in the circumstances.

“Wait till you see the room where you’ll be sleeping before you thank me,” Milly said. “It’s small. A study with a sofa bed, but I’ve done my best to make it comfortable for you. You didn’t give me enough notice to do more than that.” Milly headed to the kitchen area and poured two glasses of water. “Do you want something to eat?”

“No, thank you. I’m not hungry.” She studied Milly closely. On the surface she hadn’t changed at all: same shoulder-length dark hair, same light dusting of freckles on her nose and the same light blue eyes. But she seemed more wary than usual. Reserved. “Where’s Zoe?”

“I arranged for her to sleep over with my mother.”

Nicole felt a wave of shame. She adored Milly’s mother, and the idea that she was reading all the negative press and probably thinking bad things about her made her feel slightly ill. Milly’s mother was everything her own was not. She offered praise and encouragement and a listening ear without judgment. She built you up instead of knocking you down. When Nicole had won her first award, Milly’s mother had sent flowers and a handwritten note. You have always been a star to us, but now the whole world knows.

“What did Connie say when you told her I was coming to stay?”

“She doesn’t know. You told me not to tell anyone.” Milly handed her a glass of water, and Nicole felt the emotion she’d been holding back almost overwhelm her.

Milly hadn’t told anyone. Not even her mother. Who else in her life was that thoughtful and discreet? No one.

“You’re an amazing friend, Milly.”

Milly didn’t respond to that. “This place isn’t visible from anywhere. You should be safe enough, providing you don’t leave the boathouse.”

“That won’t be an issue.” Leave the boathouse? She felt like crawling under the bedcovers and staying there for the rest of her life. “Were you sad to move out of the cottage?”

“It was difficult at the time but hard to separate my feelings about that from everything else. A lot of things have changed.”

Including their relationship.

Nicole felt a twinge of sadness and nostalgia for the days when friendship had seemed simple.

She knew she should be asking about Richard and about how Milly was coping, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She wasn’t brave enough to handle Milly’s pain.

She couldn’t deal with it. She couldn’t deal with anything right now.

She felt injured and tired. She’d considered checking herself in to one of those exclusive health retreats, but then her presence would have been noted, because even when a place claimed to protect the confidentiality of their guests, people had a way of finding out, and then she would have been dealing with more headlines.

“I’ll show you where you’ll be sleeping.” Milly walked through a door that led from the living room to the rear of the boathouse. Stairs curved upward, but Milly opened a door on the ground floor. “I’ve made up the bed.”

An enormous ginger cat sprang off the chair, making them both jump.

“How did you get in here?” Milly scooped up the cat gently and stroked his soft fur.

“You have a cat? Since when?” Nicole reached out her hand, but the cat wriggled out of Milly’s arms and stalked out of the room, affronted to have his rest disturbed.

Great. Even the cat was rejecting her.

“Since Richard left. He was a rescue. Zoe begged me to give him a home, and I couldn’t say no to her. Fortunately, Tiger loves Zoe. He tolerates the rest of us. Don’t expect affection.”

Nicole had reached the point where she didn’t expect anything from anyone, least of all affection.

She felt a pang of loneliness.

“I didn’t know what you’d be bringing with you,” Milly said, “so if there’s anything you need, let me know.”

What she needed was a hug, but she was afraid to ask. There had been a time when Milly would have held her, and she would have held Milly, and they would have taken comfort from the fact that no matter what happened they had each other, but that wasn’t the case anymore. And it was her fault.

She missed the unquestioning affection that had always existed between them. She missed the insulating quality of their friendship, and the intimacy and luxury of being with someone who knew you well but loved you anyway.

Did Milly still love her?

And did she even deserve it?

She put her bag down and surveyed her refuge. Milly was right that it was small, but small didn’t bother her. Small made her feel safer. At her home in LA with its walls of glass overlooking the sea, she made a point of never standing near the window because there was almost always a risk that someone was watching her. Inside these four walls, which she could almost reach out and touch, no threats could be lurking. And it was charming. Bookshelves covered one wall, and the stylish wooden desk tucked under the window overlooked the thickly wooded shoreline. There was a vase of fresh flowers on the table next to the sofa, which had been made up with fresh linens.

“I don’t need anything, but thanks.”

Milly opened the window a little wider. “There’s a bathroom opposite. I put out clean towels and a new T-shirt you can wear to bed if you want it.”

Nicole felt emotion thicken her throat. She hadn’t been there in Milly’s hour of need, but still Milly had shown up for her. More than that. She’d done everything she could to make Nicole comfortable.

“Thank you. Do I need to be careful walking around the boathouse at night? What if I need a glass of water? Do I need to turn off the alarm?”

“What alarm?”

“The intruder alarm.” Nicole’s palms felt sweaty. “You don’t have one?”

“No. There’s virtually no crime around here, so you can relax. And I don’t have air-conditioning either, sorry. There are only about three weeks in the year when we need it. It’s typical that you happen to be here during those three weeks, so I put a fan out. That’s the best I can do.” Milly walked to the door, and Nicole felt a sudden desperate need not to be left alone.

She didn’t care about air-conditioning. What she wanted was company. Friendship. She’d often felt isolated in her life, but never like this. She wanted to talk. She wanted to put everything right between them. She wasn’t willing or ready to accept that she’d killed what they had.

“Milly—”

“I hope you manage to sleep.” Milly paused with her hand on the door. “If you need anything, call me.”

Nicole knew that what she was offering was a glass of water, or an extra pillow. Not comfort. Not a hug.

Milly was shutting her down, which didn’t surprise her because Milly always avoided difficult conversations and this definitely met that description.

She waited while Milly closed the door between them.

The gesture felt symbolic.

Exhausted, Nicole followed Milly’s directions to the bathroom, scrubbed off her makeup, took a quick shower to remove the last of the persona she’d adopted to travel here safely and slipped on the T-shirt Milly had thoughtfully left out for her.

Then she headed back to the bedroom. She searched for a lock on the door, but there wasn’t one, so she dragged a chair up to it and wedged it under the handle. Then she closed the window. She didn’t care if it was stifling. She wasn’t sleeping with the window open.

After a last check of the room, she slid between the fresh-smelling sheets and closed her eyes.

She had no expectation of sleeping, but she must have slept because when she woke the first fingers of light were sliding through the blinds.

For a few blissful seconds she couldn’t remember where she was or why she was here, and then it all came back to her.

She sat up and checked the time. It was only four thirty. She’d been asleep for a few hours, no more. Still, that was more sleep than she’d had in a while.

She lay down and closed her eyes again but her mind, temporarily emptied during sleep, immediately refilled with the realities of her life. She knew she wouldn’t be going back to sleep anytime soon.

She felt numb and exhausted and had no idea how to put her life back together again.

But at least for now she was safe, and she had Milly to thank for that.

Was Milly regretting her generosity?

The moment Nicole had described herself as the other woman , she’d seen the change in her friend. She wished now that she hadn’t used those words because there was so much more to the story than that phrase suggested. She’d used flippancy to cover the depths of her pain, but she could see how it must have seemed to Milly. Why hadn’t she just told the truth?

Her heart started to beat faster, and she took a few slow breaths and tried to push him out of her head. She wasn’t going to think about Justin or the awful things he’d said to her. Not now. Not yet. She couldn’t handle it.

She wasn’t a bad person. Despite what everyone was saying about her, she was not a bad person .

And she definitely wasn’t a destroyer of marriages.

Or was she?

To distract herself she stood up and flicked on the light. She saw that papers and a couple of files had been hastily stacked in a pile on the floor and felt a stab of guilt because Milly had given up this room for her. If she was really a good friend she probably would have gone somewhere else because once they found her— and they would eventually find her—it would make Milly’s life difficult. But her plan was to leave before that happened. Just a few days, she’d told herself when she’d made her desperate call to Milly.

For now, she was where she needed to be. After everything that had happened she was emotionally and physically exhausted. It felt wrong that she was the one hiding while Justin was still living his life, his reputation apparently reinvigorated by the publicity, while hers had been trashed. Was he ashamed of himself? Did he feel at all guilty for what he’d done to her?

On the train she’d picked up an abandoned newspaper, and there he was on the front page.

We’re More in Love than Ever screamed the headline above a photo of Justin hand-in-hand with his wife, who stared unflinchingly at the camera. The injured look in her blue eyes would have pricked Nicole’s conscience had she not known it was fake.

The implication was that the affair was all Nicole’s fault. That she’d led him astray.

She’d dropped the paper as if it was infected.

The man was a hypocrite and also a coward, and at some point she’d need to deal with that. Right now she was too bruised by everything. He’d broken her, something she wouldn’t have thought possible because she never allowed people close enough to inflict that level of damage.

The press had some of it right, but most of it wrong. She could have told them the truth, but what good would it have done her? She’d been in the public eye for long enough to know that although some people were interested in the truth, most were more interested in a good story. Some people loved to gossip and judge, and they savored the misfortune of others.

She had to try to put Justin behind her, but in the circumstances that was almost impossible. The best she could do was make a plan, and maybe here, in this part of the world that was far removed from the one she normally occupied, she’d be able to do that.

Restless, she pulled a lightweight wrap from her suitcase and wrapped it around her shoulders before quietly moving the chair she’d wedged under the door handle.

She walked quietly to the kitchen, filled a glass with water and drank it quickly before venturing out onto the deck. The only access was from the house, so she felt relatively safe. As safe as she ever did these days.

The lake was still, patches of light shimmering on the surface and the trees casting dark shadows over the water.

She felt instantly calmer. The tightness in her spine eased, and her muscles relaxed.

Forest Nest had always had this effect on her.

She sat down on the porch swing and breathed. For now the heat wave had eased its relentless grip and allowed the air to cool.

The moment was all the more precious because she knew it would be short-lived. There were decisions to be made, and once they found out where she was she’d have to leave because it wasn’t fair to inflict the goldfish bowl of her life onto Milly, who had enough problems of her own.

But for now, she could rest. There was no role to play. No character to inhabit and no need to look over her shoulder. Not yet.

At this precise moment in time no one knew where she was. And because it was barely dawn, she could enjoy being outdoors undetected.

Letting that feeling wash over her, she closed her eyes.