Page 160 of The Black Trilogy

When she’d ended up living in his house, nothing had felt so right. They’d spent every bit of his spare time together, and what’s more, he’d enjoyed it. Not because of what they’d been doing—watching a movie or eating a takeaway were hardly the most exciting activities—but because she’d been by his side. Pre-Ash, the scariest word in the English language, the one guaranteed to send him sprinting in the opposite direction, had been commitment. Now the one that terrified him was love. What if he only had that one shot at it? And he’d missed.

Rubbing his eyes, Luke stared again at the code on the screen. He’d spent his whole life talking to computers, but in the last week, it seemed as if they’d suddenly started to speak a different language because the words in front of him meant nothing.

He carried on colouring his circles instead.

At four in the afternoon, a knock at the door made him jump. He peeled off a couple of paperclips that had stuck to his face when he’d fallen asleep on the desk and tried to look busy.

“Come in.”

His secretary poked her head around the door. “Sorry to wake you, but Tia will be finishing school shortly. Do you want to pick her up or shall I arrange a driver?”

With Ash gone, he and Tia only had each other now. Nobody else understood what they’d gone through. After a heart-to-heart over pizza last night, they’d decided Tia would move in with him officially since she was seventeen and hated living with their mother. Luke quite understood why. He’d broken the news to her mother this morning, and her initial unhappiness at the idea had soon dissipated when she realised that not having to pretend to be a parent would give her more time to spend at the country club.

“No, I’ll get Tia. Can you send her a text message to let her know I’m just leaving?” It wasn’t as if he’d get anything done at work that afternoon, anyway.

“Of course, Luke.”

He took the express lift down to the basement car park and bleeped open his silver Porsche 911. Normally, the roar of the engine gave him a buzz, but even the burst of acceleration as he pulled out onto the main road didn’t make a dent in his misery.

Tia’s school lay half an hour from the office, and thanks to his secretary’s well-timed wake-up call, Luke pulled up outside just as Tia exited the building with Arabella, her best friend for as long as Luke could remember. Secretly, he’d always found the girl a tad irritating.

“It’s my turn in the front,” Tia said as they neared the car.

“Well, make sure you pull the seat right forward,” Arabella grumbled. “You know there’s hardly any legroom in the back.

“Good day at school?” Luke asked.

Tia shrugged. “Okay. We’ve got a new project to do for art and a ton of chemistry homework.”

“We’ve got a mock exam next week for chemistry,” Arabella said.

“Better knuckle down then, girls.”

The pair chattered away for the rest of the trip to Lower Foxford, discussing schoolwork, clothes, movies, and make-up the way teenage girls did. Not boys, though. Luke listened carefully for that, always in big brother mode.

At a red traffic light, Arabella told a joke and Luke glanced across at his sister, catching a half-smile, the first he’d seen since the kidnapping. That gave him hope. Perhaps with time, Ash’s desertion would get easier for both of them.

Luke dropped Arabella home first, hardly a chore since she lived on the same street, then slotted the 911 neatly into his garage alongside his Porsche Cayenne. Yes, he had the mansion, the cars, and the money, and to anyone looking from the outside, his life was the picture of success. But on the inside? His heart ached with every beat.

Still, the world kept turning, right?

He hefted Tia’s schoolbag over his shoulder and pushed through the door to the house. In their new routine, he headed to the kitchen to grab a beer and Tia followed him.

“Have you heard from Ash?” she asked as she reached past him into the fridge and grabbed a can of diet cola.

“Nothing, Tia.” He hated to dash her hopes, but he needed her to understand they’d probably never hear anything. “I’m not sure she’ll get in touch, sis. She did leave the country, after all, and we don’t know who she really was.”

“But we were friends. I know we were. Even if she hates you, she still might call me.”

Nice of his sister to be so tactful. “I suppose, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Have you done your homework yet?”

“You sound just like Mother.”

She grabbed a packet of crisps and stomped off to her room. The windows rattled as she slammed the door in the otherwise silent house.

Tia couldn’t have meant that, surely? Luke had aspired to many things in his life, but being like his mother wasn’t one of them. Should he lighten up on Tia a bit? He took a slug of beer and scraped a hand through too-long hair. Talk about being out of his depth. He only wanted the best for his sister, but being responsible for a teenager was hard. Ash had instinctively understood how to handle her, but he didn’t share that magic touch.

A sigh escaped, so loud and heavy it filled the room. Food. Food would help. What had his housekeeper left in the fridge? A lasagne big enough to feed Luke, Tia, and half the village, it seemed. In true cooking-for-dummies style, the post-it note stuck to the top told him what temperature to set the oven at and how long to cook it for. Would Tia show her face to eat?

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