Chapter Seventeen #2
she could do for him professionally. Otherwise, what would an absolutely stunning and talented human being like him be doing
with a pseudo-goth, career-failed basket case like her? Petra stared, unseeing, at the glorious view, unblinking for so long
her eyes started streaming with tears.
Also, she tortured herself, there had to be a good reason why he was no longer with his previous agent. Was he unrepresentable? A raging despot? He must be . . .
Perhaps she was the only person in the industry not to know it. That would be it . . .
But—no—she knew him. He was funny, fallible, kind, and insightful—a good friend. Of course, if she refused him, he would no longer be a friend
anyhow. She would have let him down in his moment of greatest need. How could they possibly be friends after that? He would—quite
rightly—want nothing more to do with her.
And that was the whole thing, wasn’t it? She had a stark choice, if you could even call it that. The friendship was at an
end whichever way she turned. Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes. And it wasn’t from not blinking enough this time.
The friendship was done.
If she cared about him at all—if she had ever been a true friend to him—then helping him now would be her last act of love
for him. It was the only decision a true friend could come to.
And if representing him—returning to that world—felt too unbearable to contemplate, then she would simply do her best. She
would try. In any case, she told herself, all she really had to do was agree to help but then gently offload him onto Alistair.
What writer wouldn’t want a real, proper, experienced agent like Alistair—an agent who carried a little weight within the
industry. Unlike her.
So really, although the situation was terrible for her, in order to show her care for him—which was what mattered most—she could only do one thing.
Say yes.
Petra gave a shaky sigh, her shoulders dropping a little at last. It was horrible. It was bleak. But at least she had decided . . .
How long had she been there, staring unseeing at the view? Longer than she should have been, she realized with a flicker of
unease. The sun was gone. The horizon was invisible now. A paler patch of sky showed where the moon was attempting to shine,
but the stars were absent, swallowed up and swaddled in a dense layer of clouds, descending so low they had blotted out the
town below. It was as if the mountaintop were an island protruding from a sea of fog.
Without her phone, she had no idea what time it was, but the temperature had dropped several degrees.
It was definitely late.
She made two attempts to stand before she succeeded.
Her limbs felt stiff with cold and fatigue.
She longed for her bed, with her electric blanket and a cup of tea, and desperately wished she wasn’t separated from those things by a dark, chilly, and lonely walk.
Despite the looming depression, Petra also felt hungry for the first time that day.
She would distract herself from her current discomfort by planning what she would eat that was hot and comforting on her return.
Channeling Flo’s no-nonsense pragmatism, she set off.
She and Ross had climbed this hill so often together over the past few months. These had been, she realized more keenly in
retrospect, happy, optimistic times—times she would never have anticipated having after her crestfallen exit from her life
in London. “You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone,” Joni Mitchell had always told her.
If only she had listened.
The first bit of the descent from the peak was always the easy bit of the walk, jolty, sure, but easier on the thigh muscles than the walk up.
At night, in the mist, the jolts seemed a bit more—well—jolty, thought Petra, but she was making good progress until a misstep took her feet from under her and deposited her hard onto her backside.
Getting up and brushing off her hands, she reached for her phone to use the flashlight, but—of course—she realized it was sitting uselessly on the kitchen table at home.
Not a problem, she told herself, it was just this steep bit and then the path leveled out a little.
God, it was cold though. No wonder she had fallen.
Her feet were completely numb now, and she could no longer feel her face either.
Cold as it was with no gloves, she needed to keep her hands out of her pockets in case she fell again.
She cursed herself for not taking the time to put on warmer clothes.
Going slower now, she was puzzled more than shocked when she fell again, harder this time, hearing a clatter of dislodged stones skittering a long way down the hillside after she landed.
Uh-oh.
She was in trouble, she thought, her heart accelerating. Somehow, in her preoccupied state and in the darkness, she had deviated
from the steep, narrow path, not much more than a rabbit run, really. She made herself sit for a moment, assessing her options.
Her thought processes felt dull and slow. There were some sheer drops on the steeper side of the hill, she thought groggily,
and somehow, she realized now, this was where she had ended up in the dark, while preoccupied. Time passed as she assimilated.
Bemused, she then realized she had lost track of how long she had been sitting there, not moving. It was as if time were simultaneously
slowing down and sliding away from her.
Grasping at fleeing thoughts, Petra understood that staying there was not an option. She was thoroughly chilled to the bone
now. Continuing down, in the dark, with the cliffs ever present and loose material under her feet would be suicide. She took
some deep breaths, willing herself to think clearly. So sleepy. It must be late.
What would Ross do? Funny and silly although he could be, in a crisis he became stern and authoritative.
Hadn’t that been the first thing she had seen about him, in that ridiculous first meeting on the station platform?
She smiled hazily at the thought. In this situation she had to “be more Ross” she told herself, feeling momentarily more focused.
Okay, she had to get off the mountain, or she would freeze.
The mist was still dense, and the visibility almost zero, but her safest plan was to turn around and go up again.
Somewhere along the journey she would almost certainly find herself back on the path.
At worst, she would get back up to the bench at the top.
Then she could carefully descend again with greater concentration.
Hot toast and a steaming cup of tea were even farther away now, she thought with dull-witted dismay.
On the seemingly endless journey back up the hill, the universe contracted: There was only the dark, the rocky path, and the
cold, all seemingly stretching on for eternity. She fell often, and her hands were soon bruised and scraped, but they were
so numb she barely felt it. Vaguely she wondered whether she had become even more lost, the journey seemed so interminable,
but she no longer trusted her judgment of time, and she was still going upward . . . When I get to our bench, she kept telling
herself, I’ll be safe.