Chapter Seven
On Friday Lucy didn’t come down to breakfast until after ten, hoping to avoid another entreaty to go skiing, or accompany Olly and Maya to the spa.
She’d had a fitful sleep full of confusing dreams about Sasha and Nate and Leo, and neither option seemed any more appealing in daylight than it had the night before.
The first thing she noticed was the breathtaking view through the doors to the terrace.
The window in her room looked out onto the back of another property, but here she could see the whole picture postcard, with the valley perfectly framing the distant Matterhorn.
The sky was a dazzling blue, the village groaning under a heavy blanket of pristine snow.
Lucy pulled out her phone and took some photos, briefly considering sending them to her mum, but knowing it would cause offence if she looked like she was having a nice time when Leo was still dead.
‘Hey,’ said a voice. Lucy turned away from the window, expecting to see some other stragglers, but there was only Nate.
‘Hi,’ she said, her heart sinking. She’d fallen asleep last night with a small feeling of admiration for Sasha and Nate for managing to work in the same company whilst having a secret affair, but she’d woken up with a whole bunch of questions.
Lucy was certain that Sasha had been leading the account when he started work in the Bristol office, so is that how Nate got the job on Titan?
If Sasha had smoothed the path for him, it was a huge betrayal, and presumably he was party to all kinds of pillow talk that gave him an advantage.
In the cold light of day, it all seemed a lot more like Sasha and Nate were mugging off the whole team, and she’d planned to avoid him today so she didn’t inadvertently let slip that she knew.
‘Everyone else has gone,’ he said.
Lucy nodded and pressed the cappuccino button on the coffee machine. It creaked and gurgled for a moment, then started spouting frothy milk. ‘Why are you still here?’
‘There’s an avalanche warning,’ said Nate with a shrug. ‘I decided not to go.’
Lucy laughed, shielding her eyes from the dazzling sunshine through the window.
‘Don’t laugh,’ snapped Nate. ‘Half a metre of snow fell last night, and there’s more coming later. The risk is level three, they’ve already closed all the off-piste.’
‘Right,’ said Lucy, resisting the urge to roll her eyes. ‘But wouldn’t they close the rest of the slopes if the risk was actually high?’
‘They did some blasting this morning.’ Lucy noticed that he was nervous and fidgety, like he’d already had too much coffee. Or not enough sleep.
‘Blasting what?’ she asked, draining half her mug in one go. She wasn’t really very interested, but it felt polite to ask.
‘The slopes. They use explosives to set off controlled avalanches, you could hear them earlier.’ He rubbed at his face with one hand, his eyes repeatedly glancing at the window like they might be buried alive at any moment.
‘OK . . . So what’s the problem?’
Nate looked down, colour rushing to his cheeks as he hugged his arms around himself.
‘It’s nothing,’ he said, standing up and shaking his head in frustration.
‘Maybe I’m coming down with something. Probably picked it up on the plane.
’ He glared at Lucy, like she’d stuffed a mystery virus in his hand luggage and everything that was shit in his world was her fault.
She bit back a snappy retort about how he wasn’t the only one having a difficult day, because that implied she wanted to talk about it.
But the last person she wanted to discuss Leo with right now was Nate Lambert.
He might still be good-looking, but any intrigue he’d held for Lucy before last night was now well and truly gone.
She’d been open to discovering a different side to Nate – hoping for it, even – but nothing she’d seen in the last twenty-four hours had convinced her he was anything other than dismissive and rude, not to mention that he was boosting his career off the back of a secret relationship. Sasha was welcome to him, frankly.
‘I’ll see you later,’ he mumbled, grabbing his mug and leaving the room. Lucy let him go without comment, and turned her attention to the table of breakfast options.
By eleven Lucy was in need of some fresh air, so she zipped up a grey, knee-length duvet coat, pulled on a white bobble hat and added a pair of giant sunglasses for good measure.
The whole look wasn’t exactly Victoria Beckham does Chanel, but it would do for a walk around Zermatt in the sunshine.
Everyone else was up the mountain and Nate was nowhere to be seen, so it wasn’t like she was going to bump into anyone she knew.
The first thing Lucy discovered was that packed snow was deceptively slippery to walk on, even in the fur-lined boots she’d specifically bought for the trip.
The fresh powder banked up on the footpath was impossible to navigate, so she picked her way along the edge of the ploughed road through the village like a child learning to ice skate.
‘Hey, British woman, you need ice grips,’ said an amused male voice.
Lucy turned to see a man on the wooden decking of a coffee shop, leaning against a pillar as he smoked furiously.
He was about forty, wearing a black ski jacket with silver trousers that hugged his muscular thighs like foil-wrapped hams. Dark hair, with a well-trimmed beard and white marks around his eyes from ski goggles.
A local, then. Or maybe an instructor. The accent sounded like he spoke German, either way.
‘How did you know I was British?’ asked Lucy, pulling off her sunglasses and contemplating whether her hair was clean enough to shake it free in a sexy fashion.
She’d sprayed half a can of dry shampoo on it this morning, so there was a reasonable chance it might freeze into whatever shape it was in when she removed the hat.
‘Because you’re wearing all the wrong clothes,’ said the man with a wry smile. ‘Jeans retain moisture, you need ice grips for your boots, and you will boil to death in that coat as soon as the sun touches you.’
‘Well, thank you, that’s super-helpful,’ said Lucy snarkily. ‘But I’m sure I’ll be fine.’
‘Don’t be like that,’ said the man, his smile broadening in a way that made Lucy’s thighs tingle. Lovely teeth, despite the smoking habit. Why were hot European men so committed to tobacco? The rest of the world had given up years ago. ‘Come and have lunch.’
‘You’ve just insulted my outfit, and now you want to buy me lunch?’ asked Lucy incredulously.
‘No,’ said the man. ‘I want to give you lunch. This is my cafe. What’s your name?’
‘Lucy.’ She put her sunglasses back on, hating herself for wishing she’d bothered with a bit of make-up.
‘I’m Leo,’ he said, holding open the door to what looked like a very cosy and welcoming cafe. ‘Come in.’
Lucy’s blood ran cold and a wave of guilt and pain washed over her.
‘No . . . I won’t, thank you,’ she stuttered.
‘I have to . . . I need to be . . .’ She turned and hurried away as best she could on the slippery road, ignoring the man’s calls of ‘Hey! What did I say?’ echoing behind her.
She kept moving through a breathless blur of tears until the road met a small patch of pristine snow.
She could hear a river running nearby, but couldn’t see it beyond the dazzling blanket of white.
Someone had cleared a narrow path to a wooden bench against a low wall, so she followed it and sat down, wishing she’d grabbed a coffee somewhere along the way.
You would have liked it here, Leo, thought Lucy, huddled into her coat and looking up at the awe-inspiring view of the Matterhorn.
She’d briefly worked on a Toblerone pitch a few years back, and it felt strange to be looking at the real-life image from the packaging.
The sun was now bathing the village in late-morning warmth, but she could see heavy clouds starting to roll over the tops of the mountains.
If I believed in heaven, I’d feel closer to my brother right now.
But Lucy didn’t believe, and if there WAS a heaven there was a decent chance that Leo wouldn’t meet the entry criteria.
He’d been a problematic teenager, self-managing his mental health issues with various substances over the years, which earned him some druggie friends that Lucy hadn’t approved of.
They’d been inseparable as children, but steadily grew apart as they got older – Lucy had stayed on at school for A levels, but Leo had gone to the local tech college to study graphic design, then moved to Bristol for a job.
They texted a lot, and it seemed like maybe he’d got his life back on track with a really good career and no drugs.
Until the day she’d been pulled out of a nineteeth-century poetry lecture at Liverpool University to learn that her brother had taken his own life.
A fall, they’d called it, but nobody fell from Clifton Suspension Bridge in January.
To this day she associated Elizabeth Barrett Browning with the most profound, bone-aching feeling of grief.
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
Of course Lucy blamed herself, for not being there for him when Leo had needed her.
They were twins, and protecting Leo had always felt like part of the job.
She’d spent hours and hours re-reading their text exchanges from the weeks before, trying to spot signs she’d missed, but there was nothing.
She was angry with him for ages, for not trusting her and hiding his feelings, something he’d never done when they were children.
It took months of therapy to break down her absolute conviction that she could have saved him.
Her parents had been through a whole other world of pain, of course, but they were a generation who didn’t like to talk about things, particularly to strangers.