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Alex raised an eyebrow. ‘Oh?’
‘I was sick of the industry. I’d been modeling since the age of six.’
Alex’s eyebrows practically hit his hairline.‘Six?’
Isobella nodded. ‘Catalogue stuff to begin with—you know, department store adverts, children’s clothing, that kind of thing. I did my first catwalk job on my twelfth birthday. I was fourteen my first season in Paris.’
‘That’s a long time. A lot to turn your back on. From what I understand of your case you were on your way to supermodel status.’
Isobella nodded, looking at their entwined hands resting in her lap. ‘I know it sounds really glamorous…and it was. But there was so much pressure to stay thin. And not just within a normal healthy weight range, but stick-insect-thin. I was tired of being obsessed with it. I just wanted to…eat a doughnut without worrying about the calories. Although I was lucky. I have a great metabolism—’
Alex laughed. ‘I noticed.’
Isobella blushed.So? She liked to eat.
‘Too many girls I modelled with suffered from eating disorders. Some of them used drugs to stay thin. I didn’t want to head down that path. Modelling can mess with your head. It’s hard to explain. It’s such a superficial world—a goldfish bowl. You feel like a slab of meat in a market. Every flaw, every blemish, every extra pound, every stray zit is a black mark against you. A risk of losing a job to another girl.’
Alex shook his head. ‘No wonder you’re so screwed-up about your body.’
She opened her mouth to protest. But what could she say? Shewas screwed up about it. She moved her hand out from under his. ‘You have to understand, Alex. I strutted the catwalks of Paris and Milan. I graced the cover of practically every fashion magazine in the world. I went from beautiful swan to ugly duckling in one searingly painful minute. That’s not the way it’s supposed to go, Alex. It’s not supposed to work in reverse.’
Alex couldn’t believe what he was hearing. ‘You’realive , Isobella. Do you know how close you came to dying? I’ve read your notes. You had three cardiac arrests in those first two days. If they hadn’t had an ambulance on site at the beach that day you would have died on the sand.’
The thought was utterly repugnant to him. Even thinking about her lying on the beach as her life force ebbed, relying on strangers to pound on her chest and pull her back from the brink, made him ill.
‘And I live with the ugly reminder every day.’
Didn’t she understand how lucky she was? ‘Why does the scarring matter? You just told me you were leaving modeling anyway.’
Isobella looked at him incredulously. ‘Itmatters ,’ she choked out. ‘It changed everything. Everything I thought I was—thought I knew about me…It changed my entire perception of myself. Yes, I’d chosen to do something else with my life, but Izzy the model—that’s still who I was, deep down. Then suddenly I’m scarred. Blemished. Flawed.’
‘So this whole shapeless clothes thing—it’s not just about covering your scars, is it? It’s about hiding from the world because you’re not Izzy any more. Pretending that whole other you didn’t even exist. You’re letting it define you.’
She shied away from the brutal honesty of his words. She wanted to get up and walk away, open the door and never look back, but sucking two hundred passengers to their doom wasn’t going to make the truth any easier to bear.
‘How can it not?’ she demanded. ‘People’s life experiences do define them. Your cancer did. It made you change direction. Switch specialties.’
‘Yes, but I’m not hiding what happened to me. Pretending it didn’t. Pretending I’m someone else. I’m not letting it affect who I am.’
Isobella looked at his neck scars, open for everyone to see, and was overwhelmed by the urge to trace them with her finger. No, he wasn’t pretending. At least not about what had happened to him. But…
‘You close yourself off to women, to any sort of meaningful relationship, because Sonya walked away from you.’
Alex felt the needle from her accurate dig prick at his conscience. ‘That’s not the same thing.’
‘Isn’t it?’
No, damn it, it wasn’t. And they weren’t talking abouthim . ‘You’ve let this thing shape every aspect of your life. You’ve let it make you a total recluse. You didn’t just change direction, you stuck yourself into reverse, backed yourself into the garage and threw away the key. You’ve let it completely take over your life.’
