Chapter Twenty-Three #3
Perhaps that was why she was still standing here, peering through the tinted glass at the place where she’d last seen him even though there was nothing left there to see.
She drew in a deep breath and let it out in a sigh.
What had she expected? They’d agreed, hadn’t they?
In all the ways that mattered, even if they hadn’t said so out loud, that this was it.
They weren’t going to stand there making promises neither of them knew they could keep, and his vague possibility of coming back because the terrain might be useful for training was about as close as Blane was going to come to offering her something he couldn’t guarantee.
Eventually, she made herself turn around. The alternative was standing in the drop-off lane until a man in a high-vis vest came over to ask whether she was all right, and she really didn’t want to become the woman someone in a high-vis vest had to rescue from airport departures.
She patted the roof of the Vitara, dusty and dented as it was, silently thanking it for waiting so patiently.
As she climbed behind the wheel one last time, tears rolled down her cheeks again.
It was ridiculous, and she knew it, to cry over a car she’d only known for three weeks.
It was still too big for her, and of course it had always been too small for Blane, and yet somehow over those weeks it had become perfectly right for the two of them.
She sat for a moment with her hands in her lap, not starting the engine, just breathing in the smell of diesel and warm plastic and, underneath it, the faint lingering scent that was distinctly Blane.
Then she started the engine because sitting in a car inhaling what was left of a man who’d just flown out of her life probably wasn’t the healthiest possible start to the next chapter of it.
It was only a couple of hundred yards to the smaller car park where they’d left her car the day before, and she didn’t know whether to smile or cry when she saw that the space beside it was empty.
She switched off the Vitara, patted the steering wheel once and sat for another moment, not wanting to get out.
Then she checked the door pockets and glove box again even though she’d emptied them that morning, putting everything into the bag that was still riding in the back.
Its final journey beside Blane’s duffel was over now too.
She made herself get out and left the keys on the driver’s seat, just as Cash had instructed.
When she opened the back of the Vitara, she had the keys to her new car in her hand, and her throat tightened at the sight of the little bee keyring Blane had given her.
Transferring her bag from the Vitara into the back of her own little car took all of eight seconds, and somehow it felt like the hardest thing she’d done all morning.
She stood there afterward with one hand resting against the warm metal and realized she was doing the whole goodbye again in miniature, only this time there was no Blane standing in front of her and no kiss to soften it.
It wasn’t simply another goodbye, though; it was a rehearsal for what came next too.
She was moving herself physically from the life that had him in it to the life that now didn’t.
She gave the roof one last pat, then got into her new little car and closed the door without looking back.
She’d had quite enough for one morning of watching things she’d grown to love being left behind to be taken away.
She reversed carefully out of the space, navigated her way between the Mercedes parked around her, and eased into the airport traffic. There was no need to worry about which side of the road she ought to be on; the crush of cars didn’t give her much choice.
Once she was clear of the airport, though, the road opened up again, and she pointed her lovely little blue car toward home.
She’d been so frightened of this drive. Not because she didn’t know how to make it—she knew the road now, knew which lane she needed, knew where it narrowed and where the impatient drivers would try to squeeze past. Blane had helped with that, certainly, but somewhere along the way she’d learned it for herself, too.
She patted the steering wheel. “Come on, then,” she murmured. “Just you and me.”
The words caught in her throat because that was the problem, wasn’t it? For three weeks, you and me had meant something entirely different. She blinked hard and kept driving.
The mountains were still there. The sea was still there, even when the road turned inland and she couldn’t see it.
The house was waiting for her, and the garden, and Katerina, and the village, and all the things she’d come here to build before Blane had ever appeared in London and changed the shape of them.
None of that had disappeared because he’d left.
It only hurt because now all of it carried the memory of him.
She tightened her hands briefly around the steering wheel, then made herself loosen them again. The road home stretched out ahead of her, and that was where she was going.