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Pansy nodded. ‘I am. I’ve been seeing Walker. Quite a lot, actually.’
‘The barrister who defended you?’
‘That’s right.’
A flare of anxiety washed through her. ‘Pansy, is that even legal?’
Her twin shot her a reproving look. ‘Of course it is. It happens all the time, lawyers falling in love with their clients—although apparently it’s always best to wait until the case is over.’ She grinned. ‘And Walker is way too ambitious to ever risk breaking the law.’
‘And he doesn’t mind—’
‘That my mum was on the game and that I spent time in prison myself?’ Pansy sighed and shrugged her shoulders. ‘Well, obviously it’s not the perfect CV for a barrister’s wife but he says those experiences are what made me the woman I am today, and he loves that woman. Anyway, isn’t the whole point of life supposed to be about learning from our mistakes and other people’s? About redemption?’
‘I’m sure it is,’ said Marnie gruffly, knowing she had to get her twin out of here because any minute now she was going to break down and cry. ‘Anyway, you’d better get back to him.’
‘Marnie—’
‘No. Honestly. I really don’t want to hear it.’
‘But you don’t know what I was going to say.’
‘Yes, I do. We’re twins, Pan, and sometimes I know what you’re thinking, though that’s going to happen less and less, the closer you get to Walker. And that’s the way it should be. I’m so happy for you. Really, I am. I think it’s a wonderful love story, but I don’t want to talk about Leon. Not now and not ever. I just don’t. It...it hurts too much.’ She drew in a deep breath, aware of just how much vulnerability she was revealing to her younger sister. And that was a first. ‘Do you understand?’
Pressing her lips together as if she too was trying not to cry, Pansy nodded. ‘I understand perfectly,’ she whispered, and suddenly the two sisters were embracing, more tightly than they’d done in years. ‘Just keep in touch, won’t you?’
‘Try stopping me,’ answered Marnie fiercely, but once her twin had driven away in Walker’s strangely silent electric car, she didn’t have to pretend any more. For a while, she sat on an overstuffed armchair, buried her face in her hands and wept. She wept as tears trickled out from between her fingers and dripped onto her jeans. Until she felt exhausted, but in a way washed clean. And lighter, somehow—although the terrible ache in her heart hadn’t gone away.
But as the next few days passed, Marnie tried to come to terms with what had happened, convincing herself that it was nothing more than she had ever expected. Like Pansy said, it was always going to end in tears. She couldn’t allow what had happened with Leon to define her life in a negative way, she just couldn’t. She needed to extract all the lovely elements they’d shared and remind herself that she was capable of a lot more things than she’d previously imagined. Of love, for a start—and how could any experience which had given her that ever be described as bad? It wasn’t as if she’d ever seriously considered a future with him, was it? She’d get over it eventually, because people did. Every day thousands of people were getting their hearts broken and picking themselves up and carrying on.
Well, so would she.
Leon had managed to do it. Obviously. He hadn’t tried to reach out and connect with her since she’d stormed from his Kensington apartment, had he? And she told herself she was glad about that. It would have been torture to speak to him, or see him and pretend that her heart wasn’t shattering into a million pieces. She might have announced that her love for him was in the past tense but that wasn’t true, was it? Love didn’t disappear overnight, more was the pity.
Each day she would pull on some wellington boots, a waterproof coat and wide-brimmed hat and set off across the green-grey landscape of the brooding moorland, her stride lengthening as she got further away from the cottage. She’d bought herself an ordnance survey map and had started to explore the area in detail. It was so beautiful out here—in a very stark and elemental way. There were rocks and waterfalls and circling birds of prey. She was completely alone and yet somehow that felt okay.
One afternoon she had a slight wobble on her way back to the cottage, when she thought she spotted a man on the horizon, surveying the landscape through a pair of binoculars which glinted in the winter sun. The tall and brooding figure so reminded her of Leon that her heart constricted very painfully and tears sprang to her eyes. But thankfully the sound of a bird distracted her and when she turned back again, the man had gone. And that was normal too. You’re not going mad at all, she reassured herself. It was probably a common phenomenon to imagine you’d seen someone when you’d been thinking about them as obsessively as she had about Leon Kanonidou.
She was tired when she let herself back into the cottage, but it was a very satisfying sort of tiredness. It wasn’t like working out at the gym but a much more gratifying form of exercise, she decided. Peering into the tiny mirror over the bathroom sink, she appeared to have lost some of the haunted look which had made her face look so sallow recently and she wondered if it was time to leave London for good. Perhaps she should make the break from Hair Heaven permanent. She could move to somewhere like Yorkshire and see if she could get the backing to set up a little salon of her own. It was good to make plans. It made the future seem less bleak.
It was growing dark and she was deciding which book she would start reading this evening, having told the cottage owner that she didn’t mind not having any broadband—how stupid was that?—when she saw the flare of headlights on the approaching track and heard the purr of a car drawing up outside the cottage.
Her heart raced and she knew then that she hadn’t imagined a man who looked like Leon on the Yorkshire Moors. Because no other man looked like Leon and no other man ever could. He was here. Somehow he had managed to track down where she was staying. On the other side of that door was the man she loved with all her heart.
And she didn’t know if she could face him.
Wouldn’t it set her recovery back and prolong the torture if she allowed her eyes to feast on him once more?
The loud knock reinforced his identity as much as the powerful car he was driving.
She’d heard a knock like that once before when she’d been in Greece, feeling miserable and foolish after losing her virginity to him and realising he wasn’t the man she thought he was. But she was a different Marnie now. She might be badly hurt, but she had always been strong. The question was whether she was strong enough to cope with seeing him again.
He was probably expecting her to play push-pull. To act all coy while not quite managing to hide her excitement at the realisation that he’d driven all this way to see her. Telling him to go away while expecting him to kiss her into changing her mind. He probably thought she would allow him to seduce her in front of that stupid damp fire, which she had been trying unsuccessfully to light. Well, he could go to hell!
She walked over to the door and pulled it open, trying not to react to his dark and windswept beauty as, coolly, she met his gaze.
‘Who do you think you are? Heathcliff?’
‘I hope not.’ His voice was wry. ‘Because I haven’t come here to see a ghost.’
