Chapter 10
10
WEDNESDAY, 2 JULY, 2025 – HONG KONG
Moira
The ring of the room’s doorbell woke Moira from a fitful sleep. She hadn’t even made it to bed the previous evening and her bones ached from the discomfort of spending the night on the couch. Last thing she remembered after Carina and Stevie left the room last night, was showering, then sitting on the sofa, looking out over Victoria Harbour and the lights of Kowloon on the other side of the water, drowning in the memories of Lisa until sleep eventually came.
Their friend was dead. Not even out of her fifties and she was gone. And the irony that they were so close to seeing each other again would haunt Moira for ever. Lisa had been planning to meet them. She’d decided to come, booked it all and she was only three weeks away from being here when she was so tragically taken from them. How was that fair? More importantly, why had they waited this long? Sure, she was on the cruises, and Lisa was in Ireland, and Carina was all over the bloody place, but still, if they’d really tried, made it a priority, they’d have made it happen. Now it was too late. Now all they had was her poor daughter, coming all this way to tell them that her mother was gone. Stevie had stayed with them for a couple of hours, sharing the whole story of how her mum died, but by the time she’d explained everything, the poor lass’s eyes were almost closed with tiredness, tears and jet lag. Moira had so many questions, so many things to say, especially when Stevie had shared that Lisa had never told her that she’d lived in Hong Kong or mentioned Moira and Carina to her, but last night hadn’t been the time. It had been too emotional. Too shocking. Her heart had been broken for Lisa and for her poor lass, so both her and Carina had kept their thoughts to themselves and just let Stevie tell them what had happened, until she was wiped out.
‘Stevie, love, why don’t we call it a night and meet again in the morning? It’s been such a long day for you. There will be plenty of time for talking this week. That’s if you’d like to meet up with us again.’
Stevie had nodded, a sad smile on a face that Moira still couldn’t get used to seeing on anyone other than her gorgeous pal from the early nineties. Stevie had hugged them both, then left for her room, leaving Moira and Carina to talk until Carina’s eyes were closing too and she’d gone off to bed as well. They’d barely drunk the wine that had been a welcome gift from the hotel, hadn’t opened the fruit basket or cookies either – that had all felt too celebratory for the saddest of conversations.
A second ring of the doorbell cut through her thoughts, and Moira pulled her hotel robe tighter around her and went to answer it, hearing the clink of the room service trolley before she got there. Another vague memory. Carina calling down last night and ordering breakfast for them to be served here this morning at 10a.m.
Swinging open the door, she saw that the waiter was right on time. He wheeled the trolley in and left it where she requested, in front of the double doors out onto her own private roof terrace. One of her many thoughts last night was that Lisa would love this. The three of them should be out there right now having their morning coffee, revelling in how far they’d come and making plans for how they were going to spend one of the best weeks of their lives.
Instead…
Throat closing with grief, she blocked the thought as she signed the room service bill, adding a generous tip as always before the waiter toddled off happy, gently closing the door behind him. Generous tipping was second nature. Nothing outlandish, because she didn’t have a penny in savings left to her name. Most of her earnings had gone to supporting her parents, then Ollie, until he got his big break ten years ago. Since then, she’d allowed herself some treats, but squirrelled most of her cash away before blowing it all on a down payment on a lovely little one bedroom, riverside flat in Weirbridge, a village just outside Glasgow, that she’d bought last month. The bank would only give her a ten-year mortgage due to her age, so she’d put down a hefty deposit so that her monthly payments were manageable. Ollie had wanted to buy it for her, but of course, she wouldn’t let him. Her salary at the academy covered it, while leaving enough that a few decent tips wouldn’t bankrupt her. She’d been in the hospitality industry, albeit behind a microphone, for decades and she knew how hard most of the people in that industry worked, and how much the extra tips meant to them. Besides, it was only money and she couldn’t take it with her.
That thought brought her back to Lisa. She had so many questions, but there was one that had woken her up after a couple of hours on the couch, and then kept her awake until she’d finally dozed off again around dawn. One that she had to ask Stevie, yet she wasn’t sure she’d have the courage to hear the answer. Before she could play it back in her mind, the doorbell rang again.
Moira opened it and Carina came in looking both ashen, and annoyingly stylish, in white palazzo trousers and a black T-shirt, accessorised with a little cream cross-body bag and huge sunglasses. Moira had always envied effortless class because it took her several hours, a lot of make-up, a couple of rash, unaffordable purchases on an online shop and a good clothes steamer to look like she’d just casually thrown herself together at the last minute.
Moira instinctively wrapped her arms around her friend. ‘How are you doing, pal?’
Carina sniffed, and then wiped away tears under her glasses. ‘Awful. You?’
‘Same. I still can’t believe it.’ They both made their way over to the room service trolley, where Carina poured them coffees, while Moira took the cloche off the plates of Danish pastries and fruit. Not that she had any kind of appetite.
Carina held her mug in both hands. ‘That poor girl. Broke my heart to listen to her.’
‘Mine too. And I just… I just keep thinking this isn’t right. Lisa should be here with us now. And then I don’t understand how I can miss her more now. We hadn’t seen each other for over thirty years and yet I’m feeling bereft today. Am I just being self-indulgent?’
Carina shook her head. ‘No. Because for all those years we always knew we’d see each other again one day. It was like the light at the end of a long tunnel, and we were almost there, out in the daylight. That’s what we’ve lost. We’ve lost the Lisa that we loved, and we’ve lost that promise of our happy ending.’
Moira groaned. ‘I hate it when you talk sense. And Lisa would be rolling her eyes and reaching for a Jack Daniels about now. She always said you were the grown-up in the gang because you were always the sensible one.’
Carina shrugged. ‘Maybe being grown-up is overrated.’
Moira was tempted to take her coffee out into the sunshine, but she knew her west of Scotland skin would frazzle in seconds, so instead, she took her cup and sat back down on the sofa.
‘We didn’t even get a chance to talk about you and Spencer last night. I’m sorry.’
Carina joined her. ‘Don’t be. Not a single part of me wants to discuss it. I’m going with denial for today. Maybe tomorrow too. I only switched my phone on for a few seconds to check if either of my girls had called or texted – they hadn’t, so I’m guessing they don’t know anything about it yet. Spencer must have explained my absence away to Imogen and that’s fine. I’m not going to be the one to shatter her illusions about her father or her friend. I’ll leave that up to them. I ignored all Spencer’s calls and texts, so that means that the only person who knows where I am is his brother, Ben.’
‘I remember Ben! Sexy? Thick dark hair?’
Carina gave a rueful shrug. ‘All of it gone now and I don’t know about sexy – I never looked at him that way.’
‘Well, I did. Lisa too. Both of us had a soft spot for him. He and Lisa came close to having a fling but she said he was too nice for her so I don’t think they ever got together. Don’t quote me on that.’
Carina’s eyes widened. ‘How do I not know this?’
‘Probably because you were so obsessed with Spencer that everything else was invisible to you.’
Carina picked up a piece of melon from the fruit plate. ‘And look where that got me.’
‘I’m sorry, love. But anyway, if you’re going with denial, then I will too. Let’s just park that to one side until you’re ready to think about it, and in the meantime, see what we can do to help Stevie. Is it just me that loves that that’s her name?’
‘No, I love it too,’ Carina said. ‘Makes me think it was Lisa paying homage to our time here.’
A knock at the door interrupted them, and Moira felt her stomach lurch. She wasn’t ready for this. Not when she was still fighting a tsunami of anxiety about the question in her mind.
‘That’ll be her now,’ she said. ‘And look at the state of me – still in my dressing gown. Can you get the door while I throw some clothes on?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’ Carina saluted her.
Moira bustled off into the bedroom and yanked open her suitcase. Somehow flowery frocks didn’t seem right for today, so she went for a navy sundress, that would hopefully keep her cool while shielding her freckles from the sun.
After a two-minute shower, she brushed her teeth, washed her face, pulled her hair back into a bun and slapped on some deodorant and tinted moisturiser before checking her reflection in the mirror. Bugger. Her eyes were so swollen that no amount of cucumber face serum would fix them. Not that it mattered. Right now, the only important thing was taking care of that lass next door.
Feeling not quite stylish, but at least clean and presentable, she slipped her feet into a pair of pale blue espadrilles and went back into the lounge, where Stevie was now sitting on the sofa with Carina, coffee mug in hand.
‘Good morning, pet. How are you today? And aye, I know that’s a daft question.’
Stevie gave her a warm smile. ‘It’s strange, and I know this is going to sound crazy, but I woke up this morning with an odd feeling of lightness. I mean, I’m still confused about why my mum kept all this from me, and more than a bit gobsmacked about it all, but weirdly I feel like I’m supposed to be here. Like I was supposed to meet you both. If my mum had got knocked down at any other time in the last thirty years, I’d never have learned about all this. Does that sound crazy?’
‘No,’ Moira said honestly. ‘In a strange way, I feel like maybe we were supposed to be here for you too. Unless…’
‘Unless what?’ Carina asked her.
Moira’s felt her anxiety rise to the surface again, heard the question that had been revolving in her head all night, and then realised that there was no way she was going to be able to keep it in a moment longer.
‘Stevie, I need to ask you something that’s been playing on my mind, and I need you to promise you’ll be honest with me. No matter what, I won’t hold it against you, because it’ll be nothing that I haven’t thought myself.’
Moira watched as Carina’s expression turned to puzzlement, while Stevie leaned forward, put her mug down on the coffee table, and fixed her gaze on Moira. ‘Okay, I promise.’
Moira took a deep breath, then blurted it all out.
‘I keep coming back to what you said about your mum crossing the road to the post office, and that she had a letter addressed to me in her bag. Well…’ Moira paused, struggling to put her thoughts into words. ‘The thing is, if I hadn’t sent her the invitation to come here, she wouldn’t have written a reply. And if she hadn’t written a reply, then she wouldn’t be going to the post office. And if she hadn’t been going to the post office, she wouldn’t have been crossing that road and she wouldn’t have been knocked down by a minibus driver with the sun in his eyes.’
Joining the dots, that train of thought made perfect sense to her. But if she was going to blame herself, then she had to know if Stevie blamed her too. And if so, what could she ever do to even begin to make up for it?
‘So I need to ask you… Do you think it’s my fault that your mum died?’