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After slamming the toilet door hard enough to rattle the frame, Halle glared at herself in the mirror above the sink.
Are you on crack? What the hell were you thinking?
Arguing with Luke Best had always been a futile and frustrating task. When they’d been together, she’d spent four long years believing that if she just kept chipping away at that emotional shield, she’d eventually discover the real Luke beneath and be able to fix him. Unfortunately, the real Luke had turned out to be as shallow and thickheaded as the fake Luke. The man had about as much empathy as a slab of reinforced concrete.
So he hadn’t had enough clean underwear as a boy? So he’d kept the squalor of his home life a secret? None of that mattered now.
She absolutely refused to feel sorry for that boy. There were no excuses for the callous way he’d treated her. None.
She dumped her purse on the vanity and repinned the few strands of hair that had escaped her chignon during her near-death experience at take-off. She then wet a paper towel and dabbed the back of her neck, which still burned with indignation. After digging out the plastic bag that contained her cosmetics in handy one-hundred-millilitre containers, she set about removing her make-up. And then reapplying it.
Not that it needed repairing. But as the simple ritual unfolded, her nerves settled.
She smoothed on foundation. Obviously, he’d caught her at a weak moment.
She dabbed on powder. A weak moment they could both have avoided if he hadn’t insisted on bumping himself up to first, too, just to get in her face.
Her fingers trembled as she rolled out her lipstick, recalling the red indents of her nails on the tanned skin of his hand.
She breathed. He’d held her hand, so what? She would have been fine once the Xanax had kicked in without him there. The tremble faded and she outlined her lips with a fresh layer of pale pink mocha.
Getting fixated on his crotch and the memory of hitting third base at the fifth-form recital had been a major misstep, though. Because the halcyon memory had been distorted by teenage naivety and rioting hormones, making her remember Luke as a troubled boy, reckless and thrilling and eager to please. And sneaking back on the shirt tails of that memory had come all those old futile misguided hopes. That she could change Luke, that she could fix him, by saving him from the demons he refused to talk about.
But it had never happened then, and it wasn’t happening now, because there was nothing there to fix, even if she still had the desire to fix it. Which she did not.
Luke is a lost cause. Always was. Always will be.
She packed her make-up back into her purse and took one last look at herself in the mirror.
This was New Halle. This was Truly Indestructible Halle. Not the excitable, easily swayed child who had once been so desperate to make Luke love her, she’d been willing to let him stomp all over her.
This was the woman who had money and class and a career she adored and that had made her a star—on BBC Two at least—and bought her a house in the most sought-after postcode in London. This was the woman who had two amazing children whom she loved to bits—especially when they weren’t trying to kill each other. This was the woman who was happy, no, ecstatic, to live her life on her own terms, and who no longer had to handle hopeless causes like Luke Best.
She swept out of the bathroom, her resolve repaired alongside her make-up.
There would be no more pointless arguments about Luke’s inability to share and discuss his fucked-up childhood. There would be no more reminiscing about his magic fingers. And absolutely under no circumstances would there be any more ruminating on whether or not he was wearing underwear.
Because rich, classy, career-orientated supermum Halle didn’t care about any of that any more. She was here to make his phantom memoirs go away and to have a two-week break at his expense. And maybe, just maybe, to hear him own up to what a shit he’d been to her back then. But she wasn’t going to push, because she didn’t need to hear his excuses, or his sob stories, or deal with his drama any more.
She had more than enough of her own.
The plane shuddered as she stepped out of the cubicle. She gripped the door frame, holding on until the judder of air turbulence subsided. Her stomach wobbled, her pulse fluttered, but the nausea didn’t return.
How about that? Sitting next to Luke Best had an upside; it had effectively distracted her from her terror of plummeting to her doom from thirty thousand feet.
That or the Xanax.
Chapter 9
Halle held on as the hire car took another tight bend on the solitary two-lane road that had been undulating upwards for over an hour through the lonely, isolated, densely wooded landscape.
Thanks to a surprisingly untroubled sleep—make that virtually comatose sleep—on the plane, and despite her wristwatch telling her it was close to midnight in the UK, she felt alert and well-rested.
The drive from the airport had been a snarl of five-lane freeways edged by nondescript strip malls, which had eventually taken them through Atlanta. The city had been a surprise. After reading Gone with the Wind in her teens, she’d expected the quaint peach-tree-lined streets of colonial houses decorated with porches and picket fences, but the mirrored high-rise blocks, not so much. Modern-day Atlanta seemed to be a thriving mix of commerce and Civil War Americana comfortable with, rather than conflicted about, its past.
She’d drifted off to sleep again, Luke silent and apparently lost in his own thoughts beside her, as the road evened out into endless pasturelands lined with orphaned mailboxes, only to wake up again in the Nantahala National Forest, the mailboxes and most other signs of human habitation now gone.
As the road snaked up through the trees, the landscape had become more primal—and beautiful in its isolation.
