Chapter Eight
Realising I’d made a colossal mistake wasn’t something that occurred to me gradually after driving away from Josh’s home. I knew it was a bad decision before I’d even left the clearing. Despite the quality of its tyres, my car was under a double assault, skidding on the slippery surface of the track and being buffeted by strong winds whistling through the gaps in the trees. It was only mid-afternoon, but already it was as dark as dusk. When I entered the forest, the tall trees immediately stole the last of the daylight. Even on main beam I was struggling to see where the track ended and the undergrowth began.
The wind was vicious, tearing twigs and leaves from the trees and hurling them at my car. Some sounded as loud as bullets as they hit the metal panels. When a branch was suddenly ripped from a tree up ahead, I only just managed to swerve and avoid it – a manoeuvre I instantly regretted when the back of my car began to fantail into a skid.
‘Go into a skid, don’t fight it,’ I could remember my dad once telling me, but we’d been on a tarmacked road at the time, and I had no idea if the same rules applied on an unmade surface.
My attention was on regaining control of my car and keeping it away from the ominous-looking ditch that ran along one side of the road, so I missed the exact moment when I lost phone signal. One minute my mobile had been displaying a map to get out of the forest, and the next it was totally blank.
With more luck than skill I brought the car to a standstill. ‘Nooo,’ I cried, plucking my phone from its mount and staring at it desperately, in case sheer force of will might make it light up again. On its screen were the two words no one ever wants to see on their mobile: No Signal.
Fletcher gave a fearful whimper from the back seat, clearly picking up on my panic. The sensible thing to do would be to return to Josh’s cabin. The really sensible thing would have been to never have embarked on this journey in the first place. I peered through the sweep of the wiper blades. The snow was falling thicker and faster, settling in wind-driven drifts on either side of the lane. The track was too narrow for me to turn the car around, so as much as I hated to admit it, my safest option was to keep going.
Without your phone?
Without knowing in which direction you should be heading?
They were very good questions, but I chose to ignore them.
‘We’ll be fine,’ I told my anxious back-seat companion. But somehow, I didn’t think even my dog believed the lie.
I drove on slowly for a further fifteen minutes, trying to remember how long the inward journey had taken. It was getting much harder to ignore the niggling feeling that I ought to have been back on the lane by now. Were there other tracks running through these woods? Had I taken the wrong one and got myself lost in the forest? As a child, ‘Hansel and Gretel’ had been my favourite fairy tale, but it was far less appealing to find myself living it out in real life.
My hands were white-knuckled and starting to cramp from gripping the steering wheel. I removed one to hurriedly wipe my eyes, which were watering from the effort of staring into the blizzard. I refused to accept those tears had anything to do with Josh and how he’d reacted to seeing me again. From now on, he was as dead to me as I clearly was to him.
It was an unfortunate last thought to have in my head before a bad situation got significantly worse.
Above the banshee screech of the wind came a noise that my town-dweller brain couldn’t identify. It sounded like a thundering locomotive. Beneath my tyres I felt the ground shudder. Stupidly, I was still thinking, Earthquake? when the view through my windscreen was suddenly filled with the terrifying sight of an enormous tree crashing down less than thirty feet ahead of me.
Instinctively I stamped on the brakes. From that moment everything seemed to slow down, all except for my heart rate which was currently cramming more beats into a minute than it had ever achieved before.
I seemed to have all the time in the world to realise that braking hard had been the worst thing I could have done, as my wheels locked and I lost control of the car. It skidded forward on the ice, the fallen tree growing larger and larger in my windscreen as we careened towards it. I braced myself for the inevitable impact, only to see a new danger up ahead. The car was no longer travelling in a straight line but was veering towards the edge of the track . . . and the ditch.
It was a graceful accident, if such a thing existed. One minute we were on the track, and the next we were at a forty-five-degree angle in the ditch. However elegant it might have looked, the car had still jerked and bumped roughly when we’d come off the track. My right shoulder collided with the driver’s door and the side of my head connected painfully with the window.
But the ditch had achieved what the brakes could not: it had stopped the car. We weren’t a crumpled concertina of metal, pretzelled around the tree. Ignoring the pain in my head and shoulder, I scrambled around in my seat, desperate to check on Fletcher. Please, not Adam’s dog. Please, don’t let anything have happened to him. With one arm braced on the dashboard I swivelled around to check. Fletcher was huddled in one corner of the tilted seat, wide-eyed and trembling. I reached over and gently touched his face and was rewarded with a swift and tentative lick. Some of my fear subsided, as I quickly ran my hands over him and he didn’t flinch at my touch. I sent up a silent thank you that we’d bought the top-of-the-range dog safety harness, which I’d joked at the time looked more like a Kevlar vest. ‘You never know,’ Adam had said. And remembering his words was all that it took. The sobs that followed were gut-wrenching, like the ones I’d cried over a year ago in this same car, when I’d left the hospice knowing nothing would ever be the same again.
But you didn’t hit the tree, Lily. You’re shaken up, but neither of you are hurt. You’re alright. Even in the worst of times, I could always rely on Adam’s voice to reassure me. And he didn’t fail me now.
Gradually my sobs subsided, and that’s when the cold terror slid home. We were in the middle of a forest, in a raging blizzard, with no car and no phone signal.
Fletcher and I were in big, big trouble. And I had no idea how to get us out of it.
I saw the headlights first, dazzling me in the rear-view mirror as I struggled to release myself from the imprisoning seat belt. They grew brighter, slicing through the falling snow and lighting up the forest around us. The vehicle came to a stop, and even above the shrieking wind I heard the pounding of feet on compacted snow and a voice calling my name. The door on the passenger side, which was now curiously above me, was wrenched open, and a flashlight beam, as bright as a search light, raked the interior of my car. I winced as it hit my eyes.
‘Lily.’ I’d heard Josh say my name a thousand times – in amusement, in disbelief, even in anger – but I’d never heard that particular thread of desperation running through it before. ‘Are you alright?’
I opened my mouth, but shock and relief had stolen my voice. I managed a shaky nod.
‘Thank God,’ he muttered. ‘When I saw the tree, and the tracks in the snow . . .’ His voice trailed away and I glanced at the fallen oak, realising how easily my car could have been beneath it when it came crashing down.
‘Are you hurt?’ Josh asked, this time running the torch slowly down my body.
‘No, I’m just shaken up,’ I said in a quivering whisper.
‘That makes two of us,’ he said, not far enough beneath his breath for me not to have heard. ‘I never meant to let you get so far ahead, but I had to stop twice to haul fallen branches off the track.’
‘But I told you not to follow me,’ I said.
‘Yeah, well, luckily for you I’m crap at taking orders.’ He finished his visual assessment and seemed satisfied that all my limbs were intact and still functioning. ‘Next time you say something dumb I’m not even going to pretend to listen to you.’
‘What makes you think there’ll be a next time?’
For the first time I caught a glimpse of the smile I remembered. ‘We’ve known each other for twenty years, Lily. Sooner or later one of us always says something dumb. This time it was you.’
I was still struggling with how to respond when Josh leant further into the car and released the seat belt which my trembling fingers had been struggling to undo.
‘Let’s continue this discussion back at the cabin,’ he said, extending his hand towards me. A kaleidoscope of memories of Josh reaching down through leaves and branches to haul me up time-travelled from the Bakers’ back garden to the present.
‘I thought I wasn’t welcome there.’
He sighed heavily. ‘You’re not. I still don’t want you under my roof, but you’ve left me with no choice.’
There were at least a dozen snarky retorts all jostling for pole position on the tip of my tongue, but I silenced them all. I might have been obstinate, but I wasn’t stupid. This wasn’t the time to bite the hand that was attempting to rescue me, albeit reluctantly.
‘Okay. But can we get Fletcher out first, please? He’s really scared.’
Josh reached into the back seat and gently ruffled Fletcher’s floppy ears, as though in apology.
‘Those with two legs get out first,’ he said, his voice deceptively calm . . . unless you knew him well enough to know when he was worried about something. Surprisingly, it appeared that I still did. I saw him glance upwards at the surrounding trees as though in casual interest, and the way he instantly stiffened when a long, creaking groan was heard. This time , even I was able to identify the sound.
We were still in danger. If one tree could come crashing down in the storm, so could others.
‘Give me your hand, Lily,’ Josh instructed, his voice tight with concern.
I did as he asked, placing my palm against his, a position that felt both familiar and totally strange. Josh must have removed his heavy coat to drive, and in his haste to reach my car, hadn’t put it back on. The t-shirt he was wearing was plastered to his body. He must have been freezing, because I felt tremors running through his forearm as his muscles contracted. The tendons stood out like cords as he hauled me out of the car. My feet skidded on the icy track as he set me back down on them, and if his hands hadn’t been fastened about my wrists I would certainly have fallen.
Josh’s arm came around my shoulders as he attempted to steer me towards his waiting Land Rover.
‘No,’ I insisted, digging my feet in metaphorically, because doing so physically was frankly impossible. ‘You have to get Fletcher.’ I’d seen the look on my dog’s face when he’d thought I was abandoning him.
‘After you’re safely inside the car,’ Josh said, propelling me towards the vehicle which he’d leapt from so rapidly, the door was still wide open and the engine running. ‘I promise I’ll go back for him, Lily.’
After a tortured moment of hesitation, I allowed myself to be bundled into the front seat of the Land Rover, my hands reaching eagerly towards the warm air spilling from its vents. Through the parallel beams of Josh’s headlights, I watched him run back to my car and climb inside. He disappeared long enough for me to run through several new catastrophes, all of which involved more falling trees and serious crush injuries.
It could only have been a minute or two before Josh reappeared, carrying Fletcher tightly in his arms. He strode through the snow towards me, cradling the terrified animal against his chest, and I knew that for this alone it was going to be much harder to keep hating him for cutting me out of his life.
Fletcher was hardly a lap-size dog, but the need to hold him close outweighed the discomfort. I buried my face in his thick dark fur, breathing in the smell of him and something altogether more precious. There was a unique bond that Fletcher and I shared. We were the only ones who could remember with total recall the touch of a hand that was no longer here to caress us.
I expected Josh to jump straight back into the driver’s seat, but he surprised me with a question. ‘Do you have a bag with you?’
‘You mean like a handbag?’ I asked stupidly, wondering if I might have hit my head harder than I realised.
‘I was thinking more along the lines of a suitcase.’
‘Why do I need that?’
‘Because no one is getting out of this forest for a while. Not until someone with a tractor can get here to move that tree.’ The furrows on Josh’s brow told me he was almost as unhappy with this situation as I was. ‘Bag?’ he prompted.
‘There are two in the boot,’ I said, my thoughts spinning like tyres on ice.
I waited until he returned and had tossed the holdalls on to the back seat.
‘I can’t stay at the cabin with you, Josh.’
‘Why not?’ he asked, shutting the driver’s door with a little more force than was required.
‘Because we don’t like each other anymore and . . . and it wouldn’t . . . it wouldn’t be right.’ And because this definitely wasn’t what my late husband had in mind when he sent me on this mission.
‘Believe me, Lily, it’s not exactly what I’d call ideal either.’
The Josh who’d angrily told me to leave seemed to be waging an inner battle with the one who’d just rescued me.
‘How long would I have to stay? Are you sure there’s no alternative?’
‘Well, there’s a Premier Inn about two hundred metres from my place. I suppose you could try there.’
I was out of practice. Adam had been quietly funny, but Josh’s style of humour had always leant more towards rapier-sharp quips. There’d been a time – long ago – when we’d been evenly matched, but not anymore.
‘Funny,’ I deadpanned.
Josh had fastened his seat belt and then infuriatingly glanced down to check on mine, as though I was some stupid idiot who was likely to forget. Or the kind of person who’d head out into the worst storm in years without bothering to check the forecast. Okay, maybe he had a point.
‘I realise the idea of staying with me is abhorrent, Lily. But that’s the risk you take when you decide to drop in on someone unexpectedly during a blizzard.’
I gave him a long, careful look.
‘I won’t do it again,’ I promised.
He inclined his head. ‘Glad to hear it.’
‘It wouldn’t hurt you to be a little more civil,’ I muttered.
I swear I heard him growl in response. ‘You need to stop talking now, so I can concentrate on driving, or you’re going to end up in another accident.’
It wasn’t the harshness of his words or the set of his jaw. It wasn’t even the frosty atmosphere inside his car, which was colder than the temperature outside. That wasn’t what brought the sting of tears to my eyes.
It was the contrast. Always the contrast.
The memory was right there; it had been since the moment my wheels had locked. Holding Adam’s dog in my arms, adrenaline from the crash still pumping through my veins, how could I not be thrown back into the past and another near miss.