Page 77 of Hate You to Love You

I decide to get some fresh air away from everything and hop on a bus to Arthur’s Seat. I start walking along the trail but pause when I reach a wide open field that descends towards the town again. Even from here, there’s a magnificent view of the city. The jagged outline of the Old Town is visible on the left, and the ocean in the distance. As a cool breeze passes over me, I take in a deep breath. But Elliot’s crushed face lingers in my mind. The all-consuming way he takes over my every thought and feeling means I’m essentially right back at square one. Fantastic.

I need to focus on the endgame, I remind myself: the article that will save my career. That’s what I’m here for. Elliot is just a blip in the space-time continuum.

I keep telling myself this as I finish the rest of my hike. It tires me out enough that I’m fast asleep by the time I return to the hotel. In fact, as the sun rises on Monday, the hike has loosened the tension in my body so much that I have a bounce in my step as I hit the high street of the neighbourhood where Claudia is staying. It’s full of brightly coloured shopfronts. There’s a mouth-watering scent of freshly baked cinnamon rolls drifting from Söderberg Bakery, and I admire the children’s window display at Golden Hare Books. I wish I had time to explore the area properly.

Keep your eye on the prize, I tell myself as I turn off the main street and head towards Claudia’s hotel. By the time I arrive at her room, she’s perched by the window with a teacup in her hand.

‘Tea?’ Claudia offers as I sit down opposite her.

‘No, thank you. Not much of a tea drinker.’ I look around the room one more time and thankfully there’s no sign of Elliot.

‘Ready for some answers, I see.’

‘You said something happened here in Edinburgh? This is where you ended things with Alastair, isn’t it?’

‘It was,’ she confirms.

‘Did it hurt, knowing you’d have to talk about a book about Alastair so soon after you’d broken up?’

Claudia chuckles. ‘Oh, Carlos. You really haven’t worked it out yet? Summer Memory was never about Alastair.’

‘What?’

She tilts her head and raises an eyebrow, as if I should be able to figure out what she’s trying to tell me.

‘You mean… you fell in love with Stephen?’ I speculate.

‘I wouldn’t say that I fell in love,’ she says. ‘I think I was always in love with him.’

‘Why didn’t you say that from the beginning? Why did you tell me about all this other stuff about Alastair?’ I ask, intrigued.

‘I told you that to understand the end, we’d have to go back to the beginning. It was only through looking at what was missing in my relationship with Alastair that I finally understood my love for Stephen. When I was with Alastair, our relationship was wild and exciting, but it was fuelled by our careers. Stephen was my best friend. It was how I felt in the tiny moments of everyday life with him that made me realise I was in love. I had been using Alastair as this escape, but the person who was really there for me? It was Stephen.’

I quickly flip through my notes, trying to find the last time Claudia had mentioned Stephen. ‘You never said what happened to him. Why aren’t you together now?’

‘For the longest time,’ Claudia says, ‘life just got in the way. But nothing ever happened between us until I came here.’

Leaning forward, I let her tell the end of her story.

‘At this point, I’d already figured out that I was in love with Stephen. The only way that I could comprehend my feelings was through writing. If the Golden Ruins series was an escape from a time in my life when I felt lost, Summer Memory was a way for me to come to terms with how I really felt about Stephen.’

‘And… he didn’t feel the same way?’ I guess tentatively.

‘I called him straight away after I ended things with Alastair. We had wasted so much time, and I didn’t want to live without him for one more second. He was confused. He admitted that he’d had feelings for me, too, and he had been about to confess right before I’d started seeing Alastair.’

Claudia takes a deep breath. I can see her hands shaking.

‘We were angry with each other first, sidestepping around how we felt. But I was sick of holding back, so I called him out for pulling away from me. He said he had pushed me away because he didn’t recognise the person I was becoming, that Alastair and the success of my books had changed me.’ She pauses. ‘It hurt me, but it needed to be said – we couldn’t move forward if we weren’t honest about how we felt. And I think by the end of that phone call, we both felt at peace with the past.’

‘So… you did end up together?’ I’m confused. If she and Stephen had their happily ever after, why did she disappear?

Claudia brings her hand slowly up to her chest and places it over her heart. She shuts her eyes and lets out a deep breath. ‘I asked him to meet me here. Considering the book was a culmination of feelings about him, it was only right. I booked him a last-minute plane ticket to take Alastair’s place and everything.’

‘And? Did he show up?’

Claudia’s eyes remain closed. ‘He didn’t. Because he died.’

I’m shaken by her words, and for a moment, we sit in complete stillness. I can hear the cry of a bird outside the window, the hum of distant traffic. But within this room, the only sound is Claudia’s heavy breathing as I stare at her, speechless.