Chapter Eleven
Josh had a retro, battery-operated radio in his kitchen, the kind I hadn’t seen in years, and I spent a long time twiddling the dials until I finally landed on a music station that wasn’t a mass of distorted crackles. I’d been hoping to find a news report or at least a weather forecast, which I grudgingly admitted would have been a useful plan twelve hours earlier. But the only station I could find among the static was a country music channel.
‘ Really? ’ I asked out loud. Country music wasn’t a genre I’d listened to before meeting Adam. In the early days of us I’d teased him endlessly for his love of all things ‘country’, but over the years he’d whittled away my resistance, until I found my toes unconsciously tapping along to the beat of his favourite songs. In the past twelve months I’d determinedly not listened to a single country tune, because I wasn’t sure my fragile heart could do so without hearing Adam’s slightly off-key voice singing along in my head.
Out of all the radio stations I could have stumbled across, what were the chances that I’d find one playing my late husband’s favourite songs? I stared with unseeing eyes out into the storm and wondered how many more ‘signs’ it would take before I acknowledged there were things at play here over which I had no control.
As the music played quietly in the background, I found my eyes continually drawn back to the clock. An hour, Josh had said. It didn’t sound long enough to travel from ‘concern’ to ‘panic’, but I could see myself heading that way as we crossed the forty-five-minute marker.
Picking up on my nerves, Fletcher followed me anxiously around the shadowy kitchen until I eventually found a bowl and shook a sizeable amount of kibble into it. Thankfully I’d thrown a full-size bag into the holdall, but it wouldn’t last forever. I wasn’t sure if you were supposed to feed dogs rice pudding or tinned tomatoes, and I really hoped I wouldn’t be here long enough to find out.
Josh’s kitchen was surprisingly well stocked for a man who seemed to rely largely on canned goods to survive. I found a heavy cast-iron pan and tipped three tins of stew into it, stirring it with my eyes on the clock and my heart in my mouth. Seventy-five minutes after he’d left, the fear that mine wouldn’t be the only accident the forest saw that day had crystalised into a horrible certainty.
I wondered if I should set out to look for him, but how would I know where to start? Even so, I was on the point of lifting the heavy pan off the wood burner when headlight beams speared through the kitchen window.
By the time the storm had blown Josh back to the cabin, and he’d stamped a melting puddle of snow from his boots, my features were suitably rearranged as though they’d never given in to escalating panic.
Josh’s face looked pinched by the cold as he shrugged out of his outer clothes and lobbed them over the back of a chair. I stepped out of his way as he strode across the room to the wood burner.
‘You made it back then.’
‘Did you doubt that I would?’ Josh asked, turning his face towards me. His hands were extended as close to the stove as he could get them.
I gave what I hoped was a nonchalant shrug. ‘How did you get on?’
‘Your car’s out of the ditch,’ he said succinctly. Before I could ask anything further, I caught sight of the raw cuts and grazes criss-crossed over his knuckles. They hadn’t been there when he left.
‘Your hands!’ I exclaimed, unthinkingly reaching for the one nearest to me.
He jerked back from my touch as though I’d poured lemon juice on his wounds.
‘It’s nothing,’ he said, determinedly ramming both hands into the pockets of his jeans.
‘You should put something on those . . . they could get infected.’
Josh stared at me for a long moment. ‘I do worse than this in the workshop every day of the week. I don’t need you fussing over me.’
Even though I shouldn’t care, didn’t care , the sharpness of his tone cut like a blade. It wasn’t the way someone who cared about you would ever speak. It was a timely reminder – if one was needed – that it was a very long time since this man had loved me.
Fletcher inserted himself between us, like some sort of canine referee. He made a big show of sniffing the air, which provided a much welcome diversion.
I nodded towards the stove. ‘I’ve heated up some canned stew. As per instructions.’
Josh chose to ignore the irritation in my voice. ‘Great. I’m starving,’ he said, crossing to the sink and plunging his wounded hands beneath the jet from the tap.
While he washed the forest from his hands, I reached for the bowls I’d found earlier and began ladling piping-hot stew into them. It was no wonder Fletcher’s nose had been twitching, it really did smell good.
Josh delved in the fridge and emerged with two bottles of beer. He cracked them both open, without bothering to ask if I wanted one.
‘Not for me, thanks,’ I said, halting the bottle he slid towards me.
‘I’ve got some wine somewhere if you prefer. Merlot, I think.’
The air was suddenly charged with old memories. Was he thinking back to that night of the university party when a bottle of Merlot had been partly responsible for how everything had nearly changed? I truly hoped he wasn’t, because I made a point of never thinking of that evening at all.
‘I’d just prefer to keep a clear head,’ I said, which even I had to admit sounded unnecessarily prissy. Josh lifted his bottle in a silent toast before bringing it to his lips. I turned my attention to the bowl in front of me, moving the stew from one side to the other as though forensically examining it for evidence, but the scratch of a match made me look up. Josh was lighting two candles, and as the flame touched the first wick, I fought an irrational impulse to blow it out. Candlelight brought an unwelcome date-like atmosphere to the meal that didn’t sit comfortably with me. Never had I missed harsh electrical lighting as much as I did in that moment.
The stew was surprisingly delicious, although having eaten nothing since leaving the B&B that morning, even Fletcher’s kibble had smelled worryingly appetising. For several minutes the only sound in the kitchen was the scrape of cutlery on bowls and the howl of the wind outside. Then, as though we’d received a silent prompt, Josh and I both spoke at once. We gave the kind of nervous laugh that strangers exchange. It was yet another reminder that we really didn’t know each other very well anymore.
‘After you,’ Josh said politely.
‘I was just going to say this is really weird. Me and you here . . . eating dinner like this. It’s not anything I imagined we’d do again. How about you? What were you going to say?’
‘I was just going to say you make good stew.’
My laughter sounded more canned than our dinner. Five days of this walking-on-eggshells atmosphere would be excruciating. ‘I think Heinz did most of the hard work.’
‘I guess it’s very different from the things you make at Cupcakes and Rainbows.’
I was so completely taken aback that he knew the name of my company, that I didn’t know how to respond. I reached for the beer I’d claimed not to want and took a large swig. Did Josh have any idea, I wondered, that he’d been the one responsible for the name of my business? That I’d chosen it from a throwaway remark he’d made a million years ago? Curiously, it was something I’d never told anyone, not even Adam. And it was only now, all these years later, that I stopped to wonder why.
I told myself all evidence of my teenage crush on my next-door neighbour had long since been erased, but there he was, sign-written in cursive script on the side of my company van and at the top of every invoice I sent out. Some threads run so deep in your tapestry, perhaps it’s impossible to ever unpick them all.
‘Your business, it’s doing well?’ Josh asked, as though we were strangers making polite conversation.
‘Really well, thank you. How about you? I never knew you wanted to make furniture.’
He stared at me for a long moment, and it became a silent contest of who would look away first. ‘I guess there’s a lot about me you didn’t know,’ he said eventually.
It was a thrown-down gauntlet that I ought to simply ignore, but I couldn’t.
‘Ditto.’
He nodded slowly in agreement. When I felt sure the topic had run its course, Josh unexpectedly returned to it. ‘I’ve always enjoyed tinkering around with wood, and when I was travelling through Scandinavia I spent some time working with a guy who had his own furniture workshop. I enjoyed the creativity, didn’t exactly suck at it, so thought I’d give it a try.’
He paused for a moment and then gave a small, humourless laugh. ‘That’s the answer I always give . . . but there’s more to it than that.’ There was something in his eyes that held me and dragged me with him as he looked into his past. ‘Maybe growing up in a place where crockery was smashed, chairs were broken, and doors got slammed so often they never properly closed made me want to cancel out the past by creating rather than destroying.’ He shook off the memory and seemed to regret lifting the curtain on a childhood he’d rarely spoken of. ‘Or maybe I just like playing around with power tools.’
‘Well, whatever the reason, you’re very good at it. I’ve seen one of your pieces in real life.’
It was totally the wrong thing to say, and destroyed the moment of surprising honesty, because my words flagged up the route I’d taken to get here today, and the members of his family I’d involved in my pursuit of answers.
Josh’s lips tightened, so I already knew I wasn’t going to like what came out of them. ‘You shouldn’t have gone to see Gordon. Claire was furious about that.’
‘Claire’s always furious about something,’ I mumbled, unfortunately not quietly enough for it to escape him.
‘She says it upsets him, talking about the past,’ Josh said, not altogether unreasonably.
‘I’m sorry. That certainly hadn’t been my intention. But for what it’s worth, he didn’t seem distressed, just a little confused.’
I found it strange how Claire referred to their foster parent as her father, but Josh still called him by his first name. It prompted my next question.
‘Do you see much of Gordon these days?’
Guilt spasmed across Josh’s face in the candlelight.
‘Not as much as I should. Every couple of months or so, whenever I leave the forest to make deliveries, I check in on him.’
‘Oh, so you do get away from here sometimes?’
His eyebrows rose as though my question amused him.
‘Did you think I’d become some sort of hermit who’d shut himself off from the outside world?’
I flushed uncomfortably because that was exactly what I had feared, but the last thing I wanted was for him to realise that.
‘To be honest, Josh, I’ve scarcely thought of you at all in the last six years.’ It was the biggest lie I’d told in a very long time.
‘Ditto,’ he said, parroting my own earlier response.
The heat in my cheeks went from a flame to an inferno. I felt suddenly wrong-footed and fought back for solid ground the only way I could.
‘Why did Adam send me here?’
I wanted to shock him, and I had.
Josh rocked back in his chair as though from a blow he hadn’t seen coming.
‘You already asked me that, Lily. And I already told you I have no idea.’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t believe you.’
He gave a shrug that was meant to look casual, except it missed the mark by miles.
‘I don’t know what else to tell you. I have no secret that I’m keeping from you.’
I wanted to believe him. I really did. I wanted to believe I’d travelled all this way on a wild goose chase. But I wasn’t convinced. If Josh had proved nothing else, he’d shown that he was actually very good at keeping secrets from me. Huge ones. The biggest of which had threatened to blow my entire world apart. Josh might have conveniently forgotten that he’d hidden the fact that he was in love with me until the very worst moment that he could ever have revealed it. But I hadn’t.
His pillows were much firmer than mine. But that wasn’t the reason I couldn’t sleep.
Despite changing the sheets, the bed still smelled of Josh. And even that wasn’t the reason I was still wide awake hours after I’d eventually given in and agreed to sleep in Josh’s bed – words I’d never imagined I would find in my vocabulary again.
I was exhausted from the events of the day. I ought to be comatose by now, and yet hours after I’d extinguished the storm lantern’s flickering flame, I still couldn’t sleep. Fletcher, on the other hand, had no such problems, and was quietly snoring away by the foot of the bed.
I’d tussled with Josh over who would sleep on the settee and who would take the bed, knowing all the while that I was wasting my breath. It had been the same with the shower.
‘The water in the tank will be cold by morning. If you want a warm shower, it’s now or never.’
There were many reasons to have passed on that one. The most pressing was tangled up in my reluctance to get naked in the place where Josh got naked. I had intended to decline the offer, but I could feel the grime of the day sticking to me like a second skin. I also had a sneaking suspicion that I no longer smelled great. It made saying ‘no’ impossible.
I took the quickest shower in recorded history, grateful that Josh had volunteered to take Fletcher outside for his late-night toilet trip while he checked the workshop was weathering the storm.
I rinsed the suds from my body, aware that by the time I turned off the taps the temperature was considerably cooler than when I’d stepped beneath it.
‘I’m sorry. I think I’ve stolen all the hot water,’ I babbled as I exited the bathroom and unexpectedly bumped into Josh in the hallway. I’d dressed hurriedly in my pyjamas, and even though they were the button-up-to-the-neck type favoured by octogenarians, it felt wrong and uncomfortable to be having a conversation with him in my nightwear. I clutched the buttoned edges tightly together, terrified of displaying even an inch of skin, somehow forgetting that, long ago, his eyes, hands and tongue had travelled over most of it.
Josh shrugged. ‘I’m used to taking cold showers.’
I really hoped that was because of the unreliable power supply, because any other reason was strictly off limits.
‘Have you got everything you need?’ Josh asked, sounding for once almost as awkward as me.
‘Apart from electricity, phone signal and a way out of this forest, you mean?’
‘Maybe tomorrow,’ he said, sounding nowhere near as confident as I would have liked.
He turned to go, and later I really wished I’d said nothing more than ‘Goodnight’. But I didn’t.
‘Thank you, Josh.’
‘What for?’
There were almost too many options to pick. I went for the obvious one. ‘For giving us somewhere to stay.’
His dark brows drew closer together. ‘Did you really think I wouldn’t do that?’
Something in his tone made me shiver. I shrugged. ‘I guess we don’t know each other at all these days.’
Josh gave a small sound that was almost a laugh. ‘That’s generally what happens when you say you never want to see someone again.’
How did we get here again?
‘You said it first,’ I replied childishly.
‘And then you said it back,’ he reminded me quietly.
He was right. I had. Sometimes my mind erased that bit of the story.
Sleep might not have been able to find me, but the memory knew where I was. Like an antidote to the day, I eagerly returned to the night I’d met Adam, as though it was a film pressed on pause, just waiting to be played.