Chapter 80
Helena strode out in front, hiking boots beating a clean route on the cliff-top trail. The sun glimmered off a flat sea, the ground soft and covered with the purple tips of heather.
A light sheen of sweat cloaked her forehead, and she hooked her thumbs beneath the straps of her pack, adjusting them to release the full weight for a moment.
She reached a widening in the trail and paused, waiting for the others. She took a moment to drink in the view. The South West Coast Path had none of the mountainous peaks of Norway, but there was a wild beauty to the rolling hills and soaring cliffs, the sea always at her shoulder.
She’d discovered an uncomplicated pleasure in walking. It took her out of her own head, made her look up from a screen, and in the weeks after losing Joni, it was the only thing that seemed to make any sense.
Liz had tried explaining the science of why walking healed—something to do with decreasing activity in the part of the brain responsible for negative thoughts and rumination, instead activating a rest-and-digest mode—but Helena didn’t need to understand the science. She just needed to walk.
So that’s what they did. The three of them. They met whenever they could, and walk by walk, they were weaving their way along the South West Coast Path. It seemed fitting—a tribute to Joni—that they would do this together, step-by-step.
The media had gone crazy when the news of Joni’s death broke.
All over the world, Joni Gold fans mourned.
There was a shrine at her favorite concert hall in London.
People posted tributes across social media.
Her face seemed to be on every other magazine cover.
Her latest album stayed at number one for seven weeks.
Kai, her manager, who’d conveniently forgotten about his vengeful attitude toward Joni, told the world that she was the love of his life.
The video that Helena had recorded at the lodge was the final live recording of Joni and now had over twenty million views.
For a time, Helena didn’t turn on the news or radio or buy a magazine—everything too much of a trigger.
She stayed home from work. She kept herself closed off, experiencing a cruel double slam of grief as she mourned Joni’s death and her mother’s death afresh, like one grief had unearthed the other.
It had been hard for all of them leaving Joni’s body behind on Blafjell.
With Maggie supported between her and Liz, they’d struggled down the mountain, Runa following at their heels.
They’d barely spoken on the descent, the horror too fresh, or the words too many to know which to reach for first. She recalled her relief as the mountain finally softened into forest, and then came the first glimpse of the lake—wide and still, a blue gem in a clasp of trees—with the lodge waiting at its end.
Now Liz and Maggie reached her side. Liz looked brighter this weekend, a little fuller in the face. She’d taken Joni’s death the hardest, her grief wrapped so tightly around Patrick and Joni’s betrayal that it was hard to separate one from the other.
Helena asked, “What’s Patrick up to this weekend?”
“Planting fruit trees with the twins.”
“Course he is,” she said with warmth. “You two still doing your date walks?”
Liz nodded. “It’s easier to talk when we’re out of the house. Moving.” She had explained before that date walks were like date nights, except on foot: a bottle of wine shared as they meandered along the banks of the Stour, or a moonlit hike across the hills around their village.
“How are things?” Helena asked.
Liz lifted and dropped her shoulders. “There are rough days when I still feel so mad at him. But we have good days, too, when we’re happy, really happy—like we know how close we came to losing each other and it’s made everything more present.
Anyway,” she said, rolling back her shoulders to signal a subject change, “how’s your new backpack? ”
“Best one I’ve ever carried,” Helena answered with a grin, reaching a hand behind her and feeling along the base of the pack until her fingers met with a tiny, warm foot. “Still sleeping?”
Maggie, who was wearing red leggings with sunflower-yellow socks pulled above her boots, pushed onto her tiptoes to peer into the backpack carrier. “Yup, he is.”
Freddie was seven months old now, a placid little being born with a shock of dark hair and bright green eyes that were a gift from his grandmother.
There was a calming, quiet wisdom about his features, and some days Helena would lie beside him, staring into those glittering eyes like he held the answer to every question she’d ever had.
Other days there wasn’t much lying down at all.
There was sterilizing bottles, lugging car seats, pureeing food, and trying to remember to eat something herself.
And somewhere—skirting the edges of her days as a mother—there was her work.
She was still adjusting to the rhythm and demands of motherhood and this new version of herself, but she was enjoying the journey.
She remembered waking in the mountain cabin all those months ago, nauseous and grief-stricken, consumed by the knowledge that she’d never again be loved the way her mother had once loved her.
Now she understood that her mother’s love didn’t end with her death.
She felt the evidence each day—when she sang to Freddie, discovering the words of a lullaby she didn’t realize she knew, or the way she’d cradle him to her body, making a low shushing sound, like her mother must have once done to her.
Losing her mother—and then Joni—forced Helena to see that life was short. As she stood beside Liz and Maggie, the warm weight of her son on her back, she knew it was time to start living.