Chapter 2
Noa
U ndulating hills surrounded Noa in all directions. There was nothing but several shades of greenery as far as the eye could see, only broken up by skipping lambs and the occasional clusters of daffodils well within bloom—a sign that spring was underway.
Surely, there was no better time to start afresh than in the season known for its resurgence of new life. It was the season colour finally broke through from the gloom of winter, but Noa wasn’t feeling much of a sunny disposition right now.
At twenty-eight years old, she never thought that she would find herself newly single and driving back to her parents’ house.
She had a plan for her future but, funnily enough, this was not it.
She couldn’t help but think that life had a warped sense of humour and that she was currently the punchline in some sardonic joke.
Noa flexed her fingers on her steering wheel to release the pressure from her white-knuckle grip.
She tried to focus on her surroundings, grounding herself in the moment, to avoid the cascade of negative thoughts and worries that would only serve to overwhelm her. She already couldn’t shake the feeling that she was making a mistake and would regret not fighting harder for her relationship.
The winding country roads came to an end as the sign welcoming her to Freymoor gave way to a mix of paved and cobbled streets.
She had always felt like the hills protected her sleepy hometown, cocooning it at the foot of their slopes.
A far cry from the chaotic city streets of London, where she had spent the last eight years.
Locals waved eagerly at her through her window as she passed them by, clearly more enthusiastic than she was to see her back home.
Freymoor was one of those places where everyone felt like more than just a familiar face, and where the gossip mill was even faster than the internet speed.
So, she knew that her arrival would be the talk of the town by the evening, and the idea of her failures being small town tittle-tattle elicited an uneasy feeling in her stomach.
Ignoring it, Noa wound down her window as she drove down the familiar cobbled street that led to the place she once called home, and now would again.
She took in a deep breath and let the cool, fresh spring air fill her lungs, reminding her she certainly was not in the city anymore.
Somehow, that thought settled her. There was something about the countryside that soothed a part of her whenever life felt too heavy.
Everything felt slower and less chaotic in Freymoor, and she needed that now more than ever given her whole life had just gone up in flames.
Dramatic? Maybe.
But she felt like she had earned the right to be a little dramatic.
She’d wanted to move back here with Lucas one day, but had soon buried that idea with a few other things on her ‘to do’ list, under the sacrifices-she-was-happy-to-make-for-him pile.
It was funny thinking of those things now.
She doubted that list ever ran both ways, but she would pull it out once she got settled and start crossing them off one by one.
Doing so would probably be very therapeutic under the circumstances, like claiming back something she had lost. She mentally applauded herself for the head start she had unknowingly given herself by returning home.
Silver linings.
There was no time like the present to start a ‘30 before 30’ list after all and, with no other solid plans in her future, maybe it could be a way of really turning her breakup into something positive.
That ought to motivate her to really give it a good go too.
Nothing motivated her quite like the power of putting pen to paper and creating tasks for herself.
It had been an ongoing joke in her family growing up; she’d constantly left scraps of paper and rambling lists around the house, and it drove them all crazy.
Just as the recollection of her family began to calm her racing thoughts, she was jolted back to reality when a ginger ball of fluff shot into the road, causing her to slam on her breaks.
The piercing screech of metal on metal reverberated through the car and Tinks mewled in the back seat, clearly less than impressed by the disturbance.
Now, it wasn’t only her thoughts that were racing, but her pulse thrummed so intensely she had to slow to a crawl as she tried to gather herself.
A panic attack was not on her bingo card for today and every tiny disruption or stimuli threatened to tip her over that edge.
She was a raw nerve, and it was clear the next few days were going to test her coping strategies.
The ginger cat now sat preening itself on the kerb, looked completely unfazed by the war currently raging inside Noa.
She couldn’t help but think that the near miss was a sign—from who she didn’t know—that she had made a mistake and that this journey home was the wrong one.
But there was no going back now. Overanalysing would get her nowhere.
Trying to drown those thoughts out, she turned up the volume on her car’s old speaker, the tinny sound of The Greatest Showman’s ‘From Now On’ filling her ears. She braced herself for the tears she was sure would fall soon enough.
They should, right?
Six years of her life and the future she had once planned for, now nothing but a distant memory.
And yet, all she felt was numb. Like the last forty-eight hours had been nothing but a fever dream, or a few chapters in the latest book she was reading— The Third Act Breakup —and everything was going to be okay again soon.
Well, that settles it, she was definitely in the first stage of grief alright: denial.
And if denial was what kept the overwhelming anxiety she felt when anything big changed in her life at bay, she was all for it.
In fact, she could stay here in that bubble forever, quite blissfully ignoring the shitty situation she had now found herself in.
The car rocked, her suspension being pushed to its limits as she directed it over the cobbles that paved the way to her family home .
Noa tried to centre herself, to push down the rising sense of panic gripping her chest. She focused on the light smell of pollen in the air and the newly-planted hanging baskets which lined the stone-built terraced street—the sign of new beginnings.
She concentrated on the hum of her engine as she pulled to a stop and on the bright green door, now chipped and peeling from years of slamming and heavy rainfall in this northern town.
The sight had her making another mental note to apologise to her parents for those moody teenage years when she got a chance.
The door’s stained-glass panel had always been one of her favourite features of their house.
It was like her very own ‘welcome home’ sign that stood out from the rest on the street.
The side of her mouth tipped up into an almost-grin at the sight of the plain glass squares in the corner, a stark difference to the vibrant patterns surrounding it.
A memory arose from the depth of her subconscious, of a much younger Noa and her brother, Ryan, when he had kicked a ball through the glass during a game of dodgeball.
The wrath of their father had scared them half to death—a side of him it took a lot to unlock—and their mum had refused to replace it to match the rest because she’d said that it would only happen again. Turns out, she wasn’t wrong.
Her brother was a human tornado, always had been. And he had never been one to simply walk through life, more like hop, skip, and jump with a crash landing.
He was fun-loving Ryan. What she would do to steal a bit of that for herself right now, to not take life too seriously and just take her current situation in her stride. She knew that’s what he would do.
Unlike Noa, Ryan hadn’t wandered too far from home when he’d moved out.
Still sitting in the car outside her parents’, she glanced to the bottom of the street.
There, she could see his small inconspicuous cottage, tucked behind overgrown green shrubbery, a huge opposition to her brother’s exuberant energy.
She’d made fun of him endlessly at first, teasing him for being too chicken to fly too far from their parents’ nest. But who was laughing now?
The slamming of a car door, followed by loud greetings between neighbours, halted her trip down memory lane.
Noa turned to her cat, eagerly meowing to be let out of her cage where she sat on the back seat.
‘We’re back where we started, Tinks,’ Noa whispered to her feline companion with a deflated sigh.
Tinks had always been Noa’s emotional support animal and had moved out with her when she was twenty and it seemed the two of them had come full circle together.
It was hard not to feel that heavy sense of failure and somehow, despite her grounding techniques, her mind still wandered to forty-eight hours before.
Lucas’s ‘we can still be friends’ still rang on repeat in her head, along with him calling her ‘irrational’ as she packed her bags to immediately flee the scene of their breakup.
They didn’t call it fight-or-flight for nothing. And irrational or not, she’d chosen flight as she hightailed it out of there.
Noa shook her head to rid herself of the hazy memories.
In less than twenty-four hours, she had called her mum, quit her job, and driven halfway across the country back to her parents’ house where she now sat paralysed by the gravity of what she had done.
Again, maybe that was a dramatic reaction, but if after six years her relationship truly was over, then why delay the inevitable, right ?
Whilst for some people a move like this might be as insignificant as changing a pair of socks, to Noa it felt like she was free-falling with no one waiting to catch her.
It was like being on a fairground ride when the carriage suddenly drops, taking her stomach with it, except the ride doesn’t end, and neither does the sensation that comes along with it.
She had never been an impulsive person. It simply wasn’t in her makeup.
Maintaining control and acting according to a well-established plan had always kept her anxiety at bay.
The closest she had ever come to an impulsive decision was when she’d decided to use a semi-permanent box dye to turn her hair Rhianna red at eighteen.
So, maybe this rash decision should be concerning; the personality transplant was what they would probably reflect on later as the beginning of her mental breakdown.
When she left for university and her career eight years ago, relocating hadn’t felt like a big deal.
But now, retreating back to her old life with no master plan, did.
There was no goal she was chasing. And that made her feel dizzy.
But when Lucas ended things, there was a voice inside her head telling her that she had to get out of there—it hurt too much not to.
She couldn’t breathe in that flat they shared so many memories in, a constant reminder of the future she had lost. And she couldn’t process her emotions with him there either.
So, here she was, in a place she had always imagined herself returning to, yet the circumstances couldn’t be further from the plan she had envisioned.
It made it impossible to know whether she should be grateful for the push that brought her back here or wallow in fear and heartbreak.
It was a battle in her brain, a dichotomy of emotions, and it was exhausting .
Whilst she too, knew her and Lucas had grown apart as of late, she really thought the conversation was coming where they’d talk about how they could work through it. But, it seems, they truly had been on different wavelengths. Or maybe denial really was her go-to coping mechanism.
She’d talk to her therapist about that later.
With that thought in mind, Noa took one more deep, soothing breath, opened the car door, and let her feet hit the pavement to make her way to the old terrace house.
For the first time in her life, Noa’s family home, did not fill her with comfort.
The sudden realisation that this was not just a vivid dream, but real life, sunk in. Had she made the right decision?
She didn’t get a chance to dwell on that too long as the door flew open and she was enveloped into her mum’s arms, her floral scent making Noa feel at home. She was then clumsily tackled to the floor by her not-so-gracious older brother. With a playful huff, she shoved him off and got to her feet.
The smell of her mum’s home cooking coated her nostrils and pulled her through the house and into the family kitchen.
The room was dimly lit by candle and firelight.
It had historically been a cardinal sin to turn on the ‘Big Light’ in their house.
Her mum had always thought it gave their home a friendly and cosy feel compared to harsh artificial light, and right now Noa couldn’t agree more.
Wood crackled and popped in the log burner, a comforting soundtrack that made her want to curl up with a book and get lost in a fictional world for a while.
But, no matter how much she tried to ignore it, she knew that this was not just another story.
This was real life, and she certainly was not getting her happily ever after.