Unless expressly invited, please do not attend.
Lawyers request your presence for the reading of his last will and testament followed by a private meeting with Ramon Acosta. Attendance strictly necessary.
Her throat clogging with fresh tears just waiting to be shed, she looked away from the words she didn’t want to read, never mind accept, and clicked on the attachment. A slight bolt of shock went through her when it sent her to an airline website. Swallowing, she clicked on further links until she arrived at the page holding the first-class return e-ticket to Cuba under her name.
The email and attachment had come from a firm of lawyers in Havana, the ones she’d been desperate to contact ever since she received the horrendous news of Luis’s and his parents’ deaths.
The same lawyers who’d refused to take her calls or answer her letters for two months, but were now reaching out to her. She knew they wouldn’t have contacted her without the express permission of Ramon Acosta, their client.
This email giving consent for her to visit Cuba to pay her respects wouldn’t have come from anyone else because Ramon was the only one left of the Acosta family.
Despite the turn of events after their night together, she’d reached out to him after Luis died. At first Suki had respected his deafening silence, knowing that he was grieving the family he’d tragically lost in a car crash. Until she’d learned via social media that several of their university friends had been invited to attend Luis’s funeral three weeks after his death. The date had come and gone without any of her frantic calls being returned by Ramon’s office or his lawyers, forcing her to grieve her best friend’s burial alone in her bedroom. Every single email she’d sent after that had also gone unanswered.
Until today.
She wanted to hate Ramon for denying her something so fundamental as a goodbye to the only true friend she’d known. But her emotions, already scraped raw by everything she’d endured these past ten months, were too shredded to accommodate another detrimental emotion such as hate.
Although she’d already been through a gamut of them. For weeks, she’d cried, begged, then railed against fate. And science. And her own weak body.
When she’d finally reached acceptance, she’d cried for days. Those tears had sapped the last of her will to fight, dropped her to what she’d foolishly thought was rock bottom. Until Luis was also ripped from her. Then she’d known true devastation.
Devastation she’d had to deal with on her own, while grappling with her own loss and remaining strong for her mother. The multiple blows fate had dealt her still possessed the power to disrupt her sleep and trigger bouts of tearful sadness.
Like when she’d dissolved into floods of tears during her meeting with the head of HR at her workplace last week. Even before she’d finished the return-to-work interview, she knew things hadn’t gone well.
Her boss had insisted she take the full three months of her sick leave, the need to protect themselves from professional liability overshadowing her protests that, with only one month remaining, she was ready to return to work.
She’d petitioned. With her finances fast dwindling and her mother’s medical bills piling up, she’d appealed the decision and been granted the interview. Only for her overwhelmed state to get the better of her.
She hadn’t been surprised when her HR manager had sympathetically ended the interview and called a taxi to take Suki home. What she hadn’t expected was a letter a few days later stating that her sick leave had been extended by another month with half pay because she wasn’t deemed fit to deal with clients in her current state.
Suki had been too drained to fight the assessment. And deep down she knew that, as much as she loved her job as an interior designer for one of the most prestigious firms in London, her passion had been depleted.
She didn’t need a psychologist to tell her she needed to find closure before things got better. Or barring that, a different avenue for the cocktail of emotions bubbling beneath the surface of her heart.
Closing her laptop, she rose from her small desk and trudged to the kitchen to dispose of her barely touched cup of tea. Mechanically, she washed the mug and set it on the draining board.
Outside, birds chirped and wasps buzzed as Vauxhall basked in the August bank holiday sunshine.
Suki turned her back on it, her hand sliding as it so often, so painfully did to her stomach, to the child that had never managed to thrive there. The urge to walk upstairs to her bedroom, curl up under her duvet and slide into perpetual oblivion was almost catatonically irresistible.
She fought the temptation, her mind returning to the email and the airline ticket. Although she’d been prepared to dig into her meagre savings to pay her last respects to her best friend two months ago, her resources had dwindled even further owing to her mother being readmitted to hospital. With confirmation of her cancer, Suki had had to use almost all her remaining funds to keep her and her mother’s heads above water.
Travelling to Cuba had fast become a distant dream.
The arrival of the ticket, although it bruised her pride a little, wasn’t one she was about to refuse. For a chance to say goodbye to Luis, she would set aside her ego for the moment. Once she was back at work, she would pay Ramon Acosta back every penny she owed him for the ticket.
The decision eroded a little bit of her apathy, made her half turn back towards the window, allow the sunshine to touch her face. Warm her.
She wasn’t aware how long she stood there, making careful plans, her soul mourning the vibrant, charismatic man she’d been lucky enough to call her friend.
The soft beeping on her laptop, reminding her of the appointment at the hospital, finally roused her. On automatic, she dressed, left home and made the short drive to the hospital that held far too many harrowing memories.
Fighting the ravaging pain that attacked her, Suki blocked out the smell of disinfectant and death, forced a smile, and entered her mother’s ward.
Moira Langston was dozing lightly, her shrunken form lost in stark white sheets. Sensing Suki’s presence, she opened her eyes. For a second, they just stared at each other.
Then her mother gave a soft, shuddering exhalation. ‘I told you not to visit. I know how hard it is for you to come here.’
Suki laid her hand over her mother’s. ‘I’m okay, Mum. It’s not that bad,’ she lied.
Moira’s lips pursed. ‘Don’t lie. You know I can’t bear lies.’
Tension rippled in the air, twisting through pain churning inside them both. Broken trust fired by a thousand lies was what had shattered her mother’s heart long before Suki was born. It was the reason Moira Langston had never again let another man close enough to hurt her, the reason she’d drummed into Suki the need to protect her own heart at all costs.
It was the reason her mother had been bitterly angry with her when Suki had told her about her pregnancy. Her mother had come round eventually, even put aside her own health issues to support her after she lost the baby, but the look of mournful regret still lingered.
Suki swallowed, and tightened her grip on her mother’s hand. ‘I can’t not visit you, Mum.’
Moira sighed, her face softening. ‘I know. But I’m feeling better, so I should be home very soon.’
Suki didn’t argue, although her mother’s notable weight loss told a different story. They chatted about neutral subjects for a while, before her mother’s shrewd eyes settled on her one more time. ‘Something’s bothering you.’
She started to shake her head, but, not wanting to upset her mother, she took a deep breath. ‘I heard from Ra...from Luis’s brother’s lawyers.’
Moira’s eyes narrowed. ‘And? What did Ramon have to say for himself?’ she demanded sharply.
‘I...nothing. The lawyers sent me a ticket to Cuba.