Page 1 of A Secret Escape

Chapter1Milly

Why had she said yes?

Milly sat in her car outside the railway station, although it seemed generous to call it that, given that it was in the middle of nowhere and consisted of nothing more than a single platform and a shelter. There was no ticket office. No buzz of waiting people. Just one train an hour.

It was the last place on earth you’d expect to encounter a movie star, which was presumably why Nicole had chosen it.

Milly understood the need for discretion and privacy, but still, this felt like overkill.

There was one other car parked along the narrow country road, but other than that there were no signs of life and she sat in the darkness, trying not to be spooked as she waited for the last train of the day. She’d opened the car windows, but even at this late hour it was stifling and there was no sign of the weather breaking. Back in March when it had rained every day, Milly had dreamed of sunshine, but June had brought with it sunshine and a smothering heat that made her dream of rain.

The makeup she’d so carefully applied before leaving had already melted away, but she didn’t bother renewing it because what was the point? It was dark and there was no one to see her anyway. It didn’t matter how she looked. But when you were meeting someone many considered to be one of the most beautiful women in the world, it was hard to resist the urge to make an effort.

Not that anyone noticed her when Nicole was around. They never had.

She sighed and checked the time.

Maybe Nicole had changed her mind.Please let her have changed her mind.

She’d heard nothing since that single phone call the night before. Was she wasting her time sitting here? She thought about her child, safely asleep in her grandmother’s house. Milly hated asking her mother for help, and this time she hadn’t even been able to explain why she needed Zoe to do an impromptu sleepover because Nicole had sworn her to secrecy. Zoe herself had protested that at thirteen she was able to stay on her own, but after all the upheaval in their lives Milly wasn’t ready to consider that. Zoe was the most important thing in her life. What if there was a fire? An intruder? Having lost so much, Milly was clinging tightly to what she had left. Also she had a niggling feeling that something wasn’t quite right with Zoe, but whenever she asked she was given theI’m fineresponse. Milly had cycled through the obvious things: Was it school? The divorce? Moving to a new home? Whatever it was, Zoe clearly didn’t want to worry her with it, which simply increased Milly’s anxiety levels.

She needed to spend more time alone with her daughter, but when you were a single working mother, time was a scarce resource.

And now she had Nicole to deal with. Friendships were supposed to make you feel better, not worse. At what point did you sayenough?

She felt guilty because her mother had assumed Milly was finally going on a date and hadn’t been able to hide her delight. “Good,” she’d said. “It’s been eighteen months since Richard walked out,and the divorce has been final for six months. I’m pleased you’ve finally moved on.”

Moved on?

Milly hadn’t moved on. If she’d admitted that thelastthing she wanted was another romantic entanglement when she was still tied up in knots about the last one, she would have caused her mother even more worry, and she didn’t want to do that. She kept those thoughts to herself, but the effort required to pretend she was coping well was exhausting.

All she really wanted now was to be the best mother possible to Zoe, but she was pretty sure she was failing at that too. She’d read so many books and articles on how to make divorce easier on kids the advice swirled around in her head. She was trying hard to put everything into practice. She’d been careful not to say a bad word about Richard in front of Zoe (although she used plenty of bad words when she was alone in the shower), and she tried to keep everything around them as normal as possible. She forced herself to get up in the morning and smile and pretend to be fine when she really wasn’t fine at all and would gladly have spent the whole day in bed. She told herself that she was modeling coping strategies for her child, and that was what mattered, wasn’t it? It didn’t matter that inside her head she was a mess.

Between lying to her mother, putting on a brave face for her child and forcing herself to be polite to Richard even when he was being frustratingly unreasonable and uncaring and nothing like the man she’d married, she’d forgotten what it felt like to actually express her true feelings.

There had been a time when the prospect of Nicole coming to stay would have lifted her mood, because if there was one person in the world she could be honest with, it was Nicole. But not anymore.

What was she doing here when the last thing she needed was more emotional stress? She didn’t know if she was a fool or if this was the very definition of friendship: showing up no matter what.

Promises made when you were fifteen didn’t seem to make as much sense when you were thirty-five. They certainly hadn’t meant anything to Nicole.

Hurt and tired, she reached for her phone and sent a message.

Are you on the train?

A flash of headlights caught her attention and she froze in her seat as another car approached. It drove past without stopping, and she let out the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. She wasn’t built for subterfuge.

When Nicole had called her asking for help, she should have said no.

She was particularly frustrated with herself because she’d recently done an online course on assertiveness, thanks to a twenty-minute wait at the hairdresser, where she’d foolishly fallen into the trap of doing one of those magazine questionnaires.

If you answeryesto more than three questions, you may have a problem with being assertive.

Milly had answeredyesto all ten questions and had decided right then and there that she needed to do something about it. Her tendency to say yes was the reason she felt pressured all the time. It was the reason she lay awake at night, stressed and hyperventilating with her to-do list racing around her brain. Her inability to be assertive was the reason she never felt able to call out Richard’s unreasonable behavior. (He’d already humiliated and divorced her, so really what more could he do?) She didn’t know if the way he behaved was a hallmark of ex-husbands generally, but she knew she wasn’t handling it well. It had to stop. She had to change.

She was too busy to take a class in person, largely because of her inability to say no, so she’d enrolled for an online course and for two weeks had spent an hour every evening exploring ways to be more assertive. She’d learned about boundaries, about the importance of standing up for her rights and respecting other people’s, she’d filled out worksheets where she’d tried out different ways of saying no.Assertive, but not aggressive.Use theIword, notyou. When you do (fill in particular behavioral aberration here) . . . I feel (describe, without swearing, how it makes you feel) . . .

She’d passed with top marks and thought that maybe this would be a new beginning. And then her phone had rung.

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