AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘What?’ Janey coloured up. ‘No, of course I wasn’t!’
‘I’m just saying you were in love with him at the start.’
‘Actually, I wasn’t if you must know. Nash and I weren’t together long enough for my feelings to be that deep. I got out pretty quickly when I realised what a temper he had.’
Lance, realising he’d upset Janey, reached out a hand to her. ‘Hey, it’s okay. It’s not important.’
‘It’snotokay, Lance. It’s really not. I wasnotjealous.’ She scraped back her chair. ‘I’ll go and get dessert. It’s cherry cheesecake. Is that okay for you, Rori?’ She gave me a quick smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes, threw a furious glance at Lance and walked out of the room.
Lance, looking uncomfortable, got up from the table. ‘I think I put my foot in it,’ he said sheepishly. ‘I’d better go and make sure she’s still talking to me.’
After he’d gone, I sat there thinking about Janey’s very over-the-top reaction to Lance’s light-hearted statement about her feelings for Nash. What if shehadbeen in love with Nash and she’d resented me for taking her place in his affections?
She’d never given me any indication that this was how she felt. She’d always talked about Nash as being just a friend. But then again, people didn’t always reveal exactly what was going on in their hearts.
What if Janey was in love with Nash even now?
*****
Thankfully, she seemed fine when she came back in with the cheesecake, Lance following with a jug of cream. They were joking with one another already, the brief upset obviously forgotten, and I felt relieved. It was so awkward when a couple had a spat right in front of you.
When it got late and Lance was tidying up in the kitchen, Janey called a taxi for me.
As I left, they stood together at the door waving me off, and when I looked back a moment later, I could see them in the glow of the doorway, arms around each other, kissing. And I smiled, happy to see it because it meant Janey had forgiven her lovely boyfriend for his casual comments earlier about Nash.
Back at the flat, I made myself a hot chocolate and took it up to bed, thinking about the evening and how enjoyable it had been. Whether or not Janey had been in love with Nash, it was clear she and Lance were really good together.
I crossed to the window. A cold February moon hung in the clear, star-studded sky.
As I went to pull the curtains, I glanced down briefly at the square of back lawn and the bushes encircling it. There wasn’t a breath of wind and the spiky branches of the hawthorn tree seemed unnaturally still, as if a creature of the night had swooped down and cast a petrifying spell on it.
A little shiver ran along my spine.
Why was it that a garden – loved in daylight – could transform into such a sinister and alien landscape when cloaked in darkness?
And that’s when I noticed it.
The hawthorn tree. It looked odd somehow and I realised it was the shape of the trunk. It seemed distorted, bulging slightly to one side.
At first, squinting into the darkness, I thought I must be imagining that a person was standing there, half-hidden by thetree. As humans, we’re hard-wired to see faces everywhere – in clouds, on the surface of the moon, in the froth on our coffee – so surely, I was conjuring a body out of the darkness, in order to make sense of the eerie garden at nightfall.
And then suddenly, the shape separated from the tree and my heart gave a giant lurch of shock.
It had moved only fractionally.
But it was enough for me to realise that there was someone out there, standing silently in the shadows, staring up at me...
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
My heart was hammering against my ribs.
I swished the curtains shut and stumbled backwards onto the bed, where I sat rigidly upright on the very edge, staring in frozen horror at the window.
Whowasit out there?
Was itNash? But how had he found me? And what reason would he have for lurking in the back garden? If he wanted to see me, surely he would just come to the door?
Unless he was trying to scare me. And if so, he was doing a bloody good job of it.
