“My grandparents’ parties have been known to go on all night.” And into the following day, if the story Nathaniel had told me earlier had any truth in it. “Haven’t you covered any of the parties in the book so far? Like…the one they threw when they moved into Rosewood?” If anyone knew the truth behind the story – apart from Nathaniel – it would be Edward, right?
But he just signalled for me to be quiet as we heard footsteps on the gravel again.
“We need a better hiding place,” he said, once the crunching had faded away.
I thought for a moment, then said, “I know a place.”
The attic was still stuffy, despite the hour, and I forced the window open as Edward worked the cork out of a bottle of brandy he’d liberated from Nathaniel’s study on our way up. “He got me into this mess, after all,” he’d justified.
“Who does all this stuff belong to?” Edward asked, kicking out at a box underneath the window from his cushion seat.
I peered at the box in question. “Well, that one’s mine, anyway. Most of this stuff near the door is. Further back…” I shrugged “…anyone’s guess.”
For a moment, it looked like Edward was about to get up and investigate, but instead he slumped back against his cushion. I dropped down to sit beside him and grabbed the brandy from his hand. “Why’s all your stuff up here?” he asked.
I shrugged again and as I raised my shoulders, I could feel the warmth of his arm against mine, the rub of his shirt against my bare skin. I hadn’t realised we were so close. Was it his nearness or the wine making my blood buzz?
“You know why,” I said, shifting a little to my left to try and maintain some distance, at least. “You already admitted that Ellie told you all the gory details.”
Edward stretched out his left leg so it ran along my right and, suddenly, somehow, his shoulder was touching mine again too. “She told me about you and Greg – about what happened.” He turned his head to look at me, and I could feel his breath against my neck. “Doesn’t seem very like you.”
“I like to think I was a different person then.” I didn’t say that the problem was knowing that it was still me. Or realising that everything I’d believed about what had happened had just been a story. Accepting the truth was even worse. “Younger, for a start. And particularly stupid.”
“Or just in love?” Edward asked, passing me the bottle. I winced at his words. “How did it happen? Not the… I mean… I don’t need the actual gory details, or anything…”
He trailed off, and I sighed. “We were always close, the three of us, from the first time she brought him home. I was worried that I’d, I don’t know, lose her, now she had Greg. But he went out of his way to include me, too. We did everything together, and I adored them both. Then when they got engaged, Ellie was so busy with the wedding plans, Greg and I ended up spending a lot of time together, just talking. About the future, our hopes, dreams, that sort of thing. I always wanted to be more like Ellie – you know, petite and blonde and lovely, instead of tall, dark and difficult. Greg made me feel like it was okay to just be me.”
But if anything, what happened next had only made it more obvious than ever that I would never be Ellie. Ellie would never have done what I did.
“That summer…” I paused, my conversation with Greg still echoing through my mind. I couldn’t tell the story the way I always had before, in my head. I knew better, now. “Greg and I… I thought we were in love. Or I wanted to believe we were. And I imagined that Ellie knew, deep down. That she…I don’t know. I guess I told myself enough stories until I convinced myself that it was okay, somehow. That it was still just the three of us.” I shook my head. “Doesn’t matter. She’s my sister.” I took a long slug of brandy, and absently wondered just how much I’d had to drink already. “I slept with her fiancé, two days before their wedding. I betrayed her, she’s never going to forgive me, and I just have to accept that.”
Edward was silent for a long moment, staring out towards the window and the ongoing party. Noises still floated up: music and voices and clanking crockery. They must be on to the sausage and bacon baps Ellie had ordered, in lieu of an evening buffet. “I think she’d like to,” he said, eventually.
“Hmm?” I asked, drowsy from the brandy and the long day.
“Ellie. I think she’d like to forgive you. She’d like to move on. She just doesn’t know how.”
“Do you think she’ll ever figure it out?” My voice came out smaller than I’d intended, and Edward snaked an arm around my shoulder, just like he had the night before.
“I hope so,” he said. Then, “I think she will.” He sounded more certain that time, and I allowed myself just a little bit of hope.
“It’s nice that she has you here,” I said, leaning into his embrace. “Rosewood’s a long way away from pretty much everywhere else. It’s hard to make friends.”
“She has Greg. She doesn’t need me,” Edward said. “Is that why you left? To make new friends?”
“I left because I couldn’t stay,” I said simply. “After what I’d done… Ellie was so upset, and she wouldn’t tell anyone why but they knew it was my fault. I knew it was my fault. And when she married Greg anyway…they had enough to sort out between the two of them. Me being there could only make things harder. So I left.”
“To try and make her happy?” Edward shook his head a little. “Do you ever think that if you’d stayed you might have made up by now?”
“No.” Because if leaving was the wrong thing, and staying would have been the wrong thing, what else could I have done? But I couldn’t stop hearing her words, You just ran away the minute the confetti was thrown. Had she wanted me to stay?
I turned my body inwards, resting my head lower down on Edward’s chest, listening to his heart beat through his thin dress shirt. “I thought you were going to hate me, when I first arrived. I thought that Ellie had told you everything, so you’d despise me.”
“So did I.” Edward sounded surprised, almost rueful. “In fact, you’re pretty much the last person I ever thought I’d want to get to know better.” That would have stung a hell of a lot worse if he hadn’t tightened his arm around me and added, “I’m still not quite sure how you won me round.”
“So you’re not just gathering material for the memoirs, then?” I asked, wondering how I’d managed to forget about them, even for a short time.
Edward s
hook his head, and I felt the movement more than I saw it. “I think Nathaniel’s got more than enough for that already.”
“Why do your family think you’re having a midlife crisis?” Time to shine the spotlight on his life, for a change. “I mean, aren’t you just doing your job, same as always?”
“Not exactly. Usually, the subjects of my biographies are long dead, for a start. But this time…I guess I needed a new direction, for a while.”
“You mean you’re running away from something too.” Except he got to run to Rosewood, instead of away. Lucky Edward.
“I suppose I am,” Edward admitted. “Life out there in the real world got kind of screwed up for a while. And when Nathaniel asked me to come here…I jumped at it. Left everything else hanging and jumped on the next train.”
“That doesn’t sound like you either.”
“It’s not. Hence the midlife crisis accusations.”
I tilted my head to look up at him, his arm sliding down to wrap around my waist until I was practically lying in his lap. “Are you glad you came?”
“Very,” he said. “I just hope I’m allowed to stay, now it’s all out in the open. That Isabelle won’t talk him out of the memoirs project, I mean. I hadn’t expected to find, well, a place here at Rosewood. But now I have…”
“You don’t want it snatched away,” I finished for him. “Trust me, I understand that.” Except Rosewood hadn’t been snatched from me, had it? I’d thrown it away.
“The memoirs… Is… What happened with me and Greg. Is it in there?” Because it was one thing for Edward and Ellie to know what I was, what I’d done, and quite another for my family and friends to find out, at the same time as the rest of the British reading public. God, my parents. Whatever they suspected, it would kill them to read it there in black and white. And Caro, when she was old enough. How could I bear that?
“I don’t know,” Edward said, slowly. “We haven’t got that far yet. I don’t know if he…”
“It doesn’t matter. Well, it does, but we don’t have to talk about it.”
Edward twisted around on his cushion, and pulled me closer, up his body. “You said it yourself; you’re a different person now.”