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For the second time that day, Hannah’s anger surprised me. ‘You have to stop doing this, Gemma. Stop defending him. The bastard left you at the altar and robbed you blind and yet you’re still making excuses for him.’
If Hannah had been even slightly on the fence about Finn’s guilt, she was now coming down, feet first, on the side of him being just one step up from the Antichrist.
But she was wrong.
‘When we needed the deposit money for Mushroom Cottage, we each put whatever we had in savings into the account,’ I said. ‘Finn still had a sizeable amount left over from the sale of the coffee shop. I didn’t have nearly as much to put in the pot.’
‘So how much of the money was his?’
‘Fifty thousand,’ I said with a sigh. ‘Finn’s taken out only what he put in. No one’s robbed anyone here. There’s been no crime.’
Unless breaking someone’s heart was a criminal offence. If it was, then I was now closer to finally admitting that Finn just might be guilty after all.
22
MUSHROOMCOTTAGE
Twelve months earlier
‘This car is insane.’
Finn’s eyes briefly left the road as he turned to me. ‘Do you mean in a good way?’ he asked with a grin.
‘No, I mean in a crazy “Who on earth buys a car like this?” way.’
‘Me. I do… I did,’ Finn said with a happy shrug of his shoulders. And for a moment I didn’t see a thirty-six-year-old man sitting behind the wheel of a head-turning American Ford, I saw an irrepressible, mischievous little boy. With a start, I realised I was glimpsing the face of the son we might one day have. Perhaps that’s why I softened.
‘It’s certainly not the kind of car that slips under the radar, is it?’
Finn’s hand left the wheel and briefly squeezed my thigh, making me momentarily forget all about the classic red-and-white Gran Torino he’d picked up that afternoon.
‘At least it’ll be easy to spot in a car park,’ he said, as though that was the only reason he’d bought it.
I shook my head in amusement. ‘Probably because it’ll be taking up two spaces.’
‘Only if you park it,’ he teased, and we shared a look no one but us would ever understand. Any conversation about parking always transported us back to the day we first met, six years earlier. It was a curious trigger, but it never failed to remind me how much I loved this man.
We were on our way to an early evening cocktail party at his editor Tom’s house. Tom lived in a remote village ‘at the arse end of nowhere’ – his words, not ours. The roads we were travelling were narrow, and the car was wide, and for all his banter I could tell Finn was having to concentrate hard on his driving. I, on the other hand, had the luxury of being able to enjoy the scenery, and I had to admit it was spectacular. I’d grown up in a hilly rural area, but here the land was low and flat, turning the fields around us into an enormous green patchwork quilt.
‘It’s so pretty around here,’ I said.
‘It is. It reminds me of Australia, in a way; there’s space to breathe here. I can see us living somewhere like this one day.’
‘You can?’ I said, twisting happily in my seat towards him. I loved it when Finn did this, spoke about future us, as though it was the next chapter in a book we were writing.
‘Sure,’ he said, his fingers drumming lightly on the steering wheel in time to the music on the radio. ‘We’ll find an old, cosy place to do up, with a garden large enough for a couple of dogs to run around in.’
I was like a child hearing her favourite bedtime story for the hundredth time. I knew every word, and yet I still never tired of hearing it.
‘Dogs?’ I queried. ‘In the plural?’
‘That’s negotiable,’ Finn said, throwing me a look that melted something inside me.
I sat back in my seat with a happy smile, imagining a pair of lively border collies and a little boy, who looked just like Finn, running gleefully behind them.
*
We were happily following directions on my phone when we suddenly fell into a signal black hole. We drove on for a while, trying to remember the next bit of the route, which had now disappeared from my screen, but it wasn’t long before we realised we’d taken a wrong turn somewhere.
