Poison

Only this time it was different. This time it wasn’t my mother.

This time it was Anna.

Just like it should have been in the first place.Chapter Twenty-NineAnnaThe night was cold and dark as I waited for Lucas at the end of my street. My legs felt weak and my heart felt broken all over again, even though it was still waiting to tear in two.

Still, all of that paled into nothing once his truck pulled up alongside me and I slipped into the passenger seat.

Lucas was destroyed.

His knee was tapping nervous as he drove, and even in the flash of the street lighting through the window he looked ashen. Ashen and broken. His eyes were sunken and his lip was a tight line, like he was trying to hold himself back from teetering over the edge.

But I guess that’s what you look like when your little girl is being torn away from you right across the country.

And I’d done this.

I’d done this with one random text message on one random Sunday morning. One random Sunday morning that may be costing him his daughter, and his family, and any shot at making this right again.

I waited for him to speak with my heart in my throat, because I just didn’t know what to say. We were both silent, the tension heavy enough to slice, and the roads turned to lanes, and those lanes started climbing, and we were up on the hilltop when he pulled into an off road parking spot and turned off the ignition.

I felt physically sick at what was coming.

“I can’t face going home,” he said to me, and his voice was thick. “Beth and Wes left the dogs earlier, and I need to get back there tonight, but I can’t face it. Not yet.”

I waited for him to carry on.

“She’s taking her,” he said. “I tried talking to her, and I tried waiting, but it wouldn’t matter how long I stayed there, she’d just pack her off in the car as soon as I left.”

“So, she’s gone?” I asked. “She’s really taken her to Hampshire?”

He nodded. “I got a voicemail from my mother before I got to yours. She was screaming that Millie’s on her way down there.”

My own voice sounded so raw when I spoke again. “What happens now? Can you follow her down there? Can you ask her again to come back?”

He lit up a cigarette and put the window down before he answered. “She won’t come back until I do what she wants me to.”

I pulled a cigarette out of my own before I found the strength to ask the next question. “And what does she want you to do?”

I knew the answer before it came, but it still punched me in the heart.

“She wants me to choose, them or you.”

I managed a nod, but that was all. It took me a while to speak, and he was silent too. Both of us staring ahead at the lights of Lydney burning oblivious down below, taking deep drags of our cigarettes as we battled with the words.

I forced down the tears as I summoned my final statement.

“Then we’re done,” I said, “and it’s okay. It’s okay.”

He spun in his seat in a flash, shoulders hard in a way I didn’t expect. “What do you mean we’re done?”

I was glad the night was dark outside so he didn’t see how my eyes were filling. “I mean we have to be, Lucas. She’s your little girl, and you can’t risk it. And I get that, and it’s okay. We survived losing each other last time, right? We can do it again.”

He was shaking his head as I spoke. “No, Anna. That’s not it. We can’t be done.” He stubbed his cigarette out. “There has to be another way out of this. Maybe I can talk to her. Maybe over time she’ll be able to accept that we’ll never work, me and her. I mean, she’s hurting right now, and I didn’t see that, and I should’ve seen that, and I should’ve seen so many fucking things and I didn’t. But it doesn’t matter.” His eyes were hard on mine, even in the dark. “There’s got to be another way. There has to be a way we can make it through this. I mean, people have to come around to us, at some point they have to accept we’re together. Even Maya. Even your parents. Even Nicola fucking Henshaw. Right?”

I was shaking my head as the tears fell. Because there was no way out of this. There never would be.

“They have to!” he insisted. “Jesus, Anna, at some point they have to!”

But they wouldn’t. I forced my breath to stay steady as I found the words.

I told him how I’d spent the rest of the morning trying to tell Vicky the real, full story of just how and why he’d left me all those years ago. I told him how she’d scoffed at me and told me I was an idiot for believing the bullshit. I told him how I’d called Nicola over after and tried again with her and Vicky in the same room and got the same response.