AllFreeNovel
Share Us
This is to thank you for being the best flower girl in the world at our wedding.
This little rabbit needs a name and someone to love him. He’s very lucky to have you as his new owner.
Lots of love, Auntie Gemma and Finn xxx
‘I’m assuming by the shocked expression on your face that you knew absolutely nothing about this?’
I shook my head, reading and then rereading the card. I could hear Finn’s voice in every word of the message, as though he was standing right there beside me.
‘We said we’d get her a special gift, but I thought we’d pick up something like a cuddly koala toy from Australia.’
‘Fluffy is the best present I’ve ever had, Auntie Gemma,’ declared Milly, carefully setting down her new pet and running towards me to wrap her arms fiercely around my legs.
I bent down and kissed her head, my eyes still locked on Hannah’s.
‘Let’s talk in the kitchen,’ Hannah said, as Milly raced back to the newest member of the family.
I pulled out one of the brightly painted kitchen chairs and positioned it where I could watch Milly playing delightedly with the rabbit.
‘I called the pet shop,’ Hannah said, pouring a coffee and setting it before me. ‘They confirmed that the order was placed by a Mr Finn Douglas last Friday.’ She paused before adding unnecessarily, ‘The day before the wedding.’ She shook her head as though the truth was a troublesome wasp buzzing around her.
‘I’ve been going over and over it in my head all morning, and none of it makes sense. Why go to the trouble of picking out a present to thank a child for being your flower girl, twenty-four hours before the wedding, if you know full well you’re not going to go through with the ceremony?’
She was looking at me as though I had the answer to that one. She should have known better.
‘I don’t know why he did it,’ Hannah said, and I could see how hard it was for her to stop hating Finn, having already decided he was the villain of this story. She pointed to the gift card that was still in my hand. ‘But that changes everything.’ She gave a troubled sigh. ‘I still have no idea what happened last Saturday – I wish to God I did. But it’s starting to look more and more like Finn did have every intention of marrying you.’
She took a huge swallow of her coffee, as though the admission had left an unpalatable aftertaste on her tongue. ‘I’m sorry it’s taken me a while to get here.’
I smiled at her across the table as she swam in and out of focus through my tear-blurred vision.
Two believers had now become three.
25
FINN
The birds had woken him again. He couldn’t see them, but he could hear them. Too large for starlings, too angry for blackbirds; he was convinced they were crows. And they sounded hungry. It had been a horrible thought to wake up to on this, his fifth – or was it his sixth – morning? The days were beginning to run into each other, and without the benefit of sunlight, which scarcely penetrated the darkness, it wasn’t always easy to tell night from day. There were other things he was struggling with too. Reality was slowly disintegrating. He could hear things that made no sense, and voices of people who he knew couldn’t be here with him. And yet sometimes they were.
The pain had been constant to begin with, but that too had started to fade. That should have been a good thing, but the loss of sensation in his right leg was terrifying. His head made up for it though, pounding with a headache that had been there from the moment he’d come round, and had never left. It was his only companion.
Hours must have passed again. He knew that, because it was hotter in the car. His body was drenched in sweat. It would stay that way until the sun went down, and then the perspiration would dry like liquid ice on his skin. He’d shake for hours, so violently his teeth would rattle in his head. It made the headache a million times worse.
The stench in the car was becoming unbearable. For the first day or two he’d smelt nothing but petrol. It had dripped steadily into the passenger compartment from the tank he’d filled shortly before the accident. Logically, he knew cars rarely burst into flames the way filmmakers would have you believe. But fire was his nemesis. He’d escaped it once as a child, but if the spilled fuel ignited while he was trapped in his mangled vehicle, he wouldn’t escape again.
As the hours and then the days passed, other smells had filled the car. His sweat was pungent and acrid, so strong it made him gag. And the urine he’d eventually had to release had stung his wounds and the stupid remnants of his pride that told him he should have somehow managed to hold on to it. But those odours were easily eclipsed by the hot, coppery tang of blood. He couldn’t see his leg, but he knew it was still bleeding, for it continued to drip down on to his torso in slow, lazy tributaries.
*
Finn had no recollection of the crash. He had no idea how his car had ended up on its side, tilted upwards, at the bottom of a steep-sided gully, hidden beneath a dense cover of bushes. He’d waited for the sirens and flashing blue lights. But they never came. He could only assume his car wasn’t visible to passing motorists. There could be no skid marks on the road, no signpost bent askew. The foliage in the gully had simply swallowed him up.
Sometimes, in the distance, he could hear the sound of a passing vehicle. Then he’d cry out so loudly, he’d make himself physically sick – another joyous smell to add to those already clinging to him. But there’d been no sound of braking. No voice frantically calling down to him from above, telling him to hang on, that help was on the way.
Surely they must be looking for him? Gemma would be frantic with worry by now. Thoughts of her were a double-edged sword. In the middle of the night, in almost total blackness, tears leaked from his eyes as he allowed himself to remember the warmth and the softness of her as she lay in his arms. Her smile filled his head, and he could almost hear the sound of her voice begging him to hang on, that she would find him. At other times, he was wracked with despair, knowing how terrified and alone she must be feeling.
His lips were cracked and sore, and he looked longingly at the bottle of water he’d wedged behind the sun visor. The litre container, that miraculously hadn’t punctured in the accident, had been almost full when he’d driven away from the stag party. The urge to drink rabidly from it now was getting harder to resist. What did it matter if he rationed himself to just two sips, four times a day, or drank the whole thing in one greedy swallow? It would all be gone soon anyway.
His body was covered in cuts and abrasions, and while they throbbed and stung, Finn knew they were mostly insignificant. More worrying was his right arm, which was hanging at a weird angle that limbs weren’t meant to achieve. His right hand and fingers twitched pathetically when he instructed them to move. Anything else was beyond them.
