stood and crossed her bedroom to the window and opened it. Katie caught the heavy bass booming from a car stereo below. He spread his hands on the low windowsill and, for several moments, just stared at the street below.
‘Ed?’
‘I love you,’ he began slowly, turning to face her, ‘but I believe you are making a mistake. What about everything you’re leaving behind? What about our wedding?’
They were due to get married in August. They had booked an intimate country house in Surrey, which they’d planned to take over for the weekend with their closest friends and family. Katie’s evenings had been occupied with searching for a band that would play beyond midnight, deliberating over the choice of cheesecake or profiteroles for dessert, and collecting vintage photo frames to create a display on the cake table. The excitement and anticipation that had only recently consumed her now seemed as if it had been part of a life that was no longer hers.
‘I won’t be away for long. A few months at most.’
‘I know you’re going through hell right now,’ he said, pushing aside a cream lantern to make space to sit. ‘I wish, I really wish, there was something I could do to make this easier for you. But all I can say to you, darling, is that I truly believe it will help if you can begin looking towards the future, rather than the past.’
She nodded. There was some sense in that.
He indicated the spot beside him and she moved across the room and sat. She could smell the residue of his shaving foam, mixed with the fresh tones of aftershave. He looked handsome in his suit; the slate-grey tie had been a present from Katie and she liked to imagine his hand brushing the raw silk in a meeting, his thoughts trailing from the boardroom to her.
‘This isn’t the answer,’ he said, looking at Mia’s journal which she still held. She heard the smile in his voice as he said, ‘Come on, you hate flying! You’ve never been outside of Europe. It is just not safe for you to go backpacking on your own.’ He placed his hand on her thigh, rubbing gently. ‘Let’s work through this together. Here.’
Ed always had a practical way of assessing situations; it was one of the many things she admired about him. Perhaps this was a mistake. Flying to the other side of the world and giving no indication of when she would be back was unfair on Ed, she knew that much. ‘I don’t know what the right decision is any more.’
‘Katie,’ he said quietly, ‘eventually you are going to have to let her go.’
She ran her fingers over the sea-blue cover of the journal, imagining all the times Mia had written in it. She pictured her swinging lazily in a hammock, her tanned legs stretched in front of her, a pen moving lightly over the cream leaves. The journal contained the most intimate details of Mia’s thoughts, and Katie held it in her hands.
‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘Not until I know what happened.’
Ed sighed.
She wondered whether he had already decided what had happened. In the time he’d known Mia, he had seen her at her worst – impetuous, wayward and volatile – but he didn’t know the real Mia; the one who swam like a fish in the sea, who kicked off her shoes to dance, who loved catching hailstones in her palms. ‘It wasn’t suicide,’ she said firmly.
‘Perhaps it wasn’t.’
And there it was. The ‘perhaps’.
She stood, picked up Mia’s empty backpack and began carefully replacing items she had taken from it. From her own suitcase she grabbed a pile of clothes, her washbag and her passport, and squeezed them into the backpack, then buckled it shut. She shoved her suitcase in the wardrobe, closing the door with a satisfying smack: what good was a suitcase where she was going?
Ed was on his feet. ‘You’re actually doing this?’
‘I am.’
She could see he was hurt and that he wanted to say something more. There were a thousand reasons why she shouldn’t go: she had never travelled alone before; her career would suffer; she was grieving and would do better with company. They had been through all of these reservations, Ed giving pragmatic advice, just as she would have offered someone else. Only now she felt differently. Now it wasn’t about practicalities, risk assessment or smart decision making. It was about her sister.
California, October Last Year
Mia’s legs rested on the dash of the battered Chevy they’d rented. She pressed her bare toes against the windscreen and then withdrew them, watching the toe-prints of condensation slowly disappear. Beside her, Finn was drumming his thumbs against the steering wheel in time to a blues number playing on the radio.
They were driving south along the famous Highway One, leaving San Francisco in their wake. They’d spent far more time there than intended, having been captivated by the city’s offbeat charm. On their first night they took a room in a cheap motel, dumped their backpacks and went for dinner at a busy Thai restaurant that served incredible sweet chilli prawns. The owner tipped them off about a basement club a couple of blocks away and, in spite of their jet lag, they found themselves drinking and dancing until their feet throbbed. They surfaced, hours later, to find dawn breaking over the city, and stumbled across an early-morning coffee house where they bought cinnamon bagels with fresh coffee and sat on the edge of the bay watching a pale pink sun climb over Alcatraz.
Low-lying fog stalked them down the coast and clung to the sea like a damp cloak obscuring any view of the horizon. Mia wound down the window and stuck her head out, squinting towards the sky. ‘Sun’s coming out.’
‘I’ll stop at the next lay-by.’
A few miles on was a gravel viewpoint on the cliff top. Sure enough, the sun was burning through the fog to unveil a rugged, grassy coastline. Wildflower-strewn cliffs, which she imagined would be spectacular in spring, staggered down to an untamed bay frothing with white-water.
She stepped from the car barefoot, interlocked her fingers above her head and stretched, her stomach pulling taut. The air fizzed with salt and she inhaled, closing her eyes.
Finn leant against the car with his arms folded loosely over his chest. ‘Look at this place.’
‘You want to go down?’
‘Sure.’
They found a narrow footpath that wound down the impressive cliff face, cutting back and forth to steal the incline from the steepest parts. Reaching the bottom, Mia was the first to jog towards the shore and plunge her feet in the sea. ‘Hello, Pacific!’ she bellowed. Then she turned to Finn. ‘Swim?’
‘Here? It looks pretty rough.’
‘You can look after my clothes, then,’ she said, pulling off her top and wriggling free from her shorts, leaving her in mismatched underwear. Her body was lean and muscular; she thought herself too angular to be considered beautiful, although she’d grown used to the jut of her hip bones and her small breasts, and wasn’t abashed in front of Finn. They’d seen each other’s bodies hundreds of times – she knew the broadness of his shoulders, the way his belly button protruded slightly, seen the coarse hairs spread from around his nipples across his chest.
‘Good London tan,’ she said, referencing the lily-white shade of his chest as he stripped from his T-shirt.
‘Good slacker’s tan.’
She laughed,