Page 7 of A Secret Escape

“No. I couldn’t afford it by myself, and we needed somewhere to live.”

Guilt niggled. If she’d known, she would have given Milly the money.She would have found a way to make sure she could stay in her home. But it was too late for regrets.

It was too late for a lot of things. Her therapist had told her to remember that the past was gone, and that the future was ahead, and what she really needed to focus on was the present. Unfortunately, she’d had no advice on what to do if your present was crap and you didn’t want to focus on that either.

“So where are you living now?”

Milly adjusted her grip on the wheel. “Remember the old boathouse? Our den?”

Their den. Scraped knees. Hide-and-seek. A buried time capsule. Childish promises.

Happy times.

“Of course. I also remember having to rush to the emergency department because you stood on a rotten plank and fell through the floor. So much blood.” She remembered it as if it had happened yesterday. “Are you about to tell me you’re living there?”

“Zoe and I moved in three months ago.”

“I assume you swept the floor and did something about the spiders?” She was relieved to see Milly smile. It gave her hope that something might still be salvaged from the wreck of their friendship.

“We tried to make it a bit more comfortable, yes.”

Nicole stared into the darkness, absorbing the changes in her friend’s life. “So now you live by the lake. You always loved the place.”

“I still do.”

“Is it hard living where you work? Do people bother you?”

“No. We have a good team of staff. And the boathouse is a little way away from the rest of the cabins, so that helps. If guests have a problem, they contact the team at Reception. I don’t advertise that this is my home.”

Milly drove over the cattle grid and into a densely forested area that Nicole remembered well from their childhood. A carved wooden sign stood at the side of the narrow road.

Forest Nest.

Instantly she felt some of the tension drain away. Milly wasn’t the only one who loved this place. She loved it too. It was geared toward outdoor life, and people staying here spent their time swimming, kayaking and having fun on the lake, hiking the fells, and cycling up steep mountain passes. Milly’s mother believed in active holidays where you had fun and got muddy, and Forest Nest provided the perfect base for those experiences.

Nicole’s mother, by contrast, had considered every holiday to be an opportunity for intellectual improvement, and Nicole had spent numerous sweaty summer weeks pounding the streets of Rome, Florence and Paris bored out of her mind as her mother lectured her on art and architecture. A talented vascular surgeon, Alexandra Walker (she’d drawn the line at taking her husband’s name) had forgone a career in London in order to accommodate her husband’s wish to live in rural Cumbria. A passionate conservationist, he was the one who had wanted children, and she’d agreed on the understanding that he would take responsibility for childcare. Unfortunately he’d reneged on that promise by dying two years after the move, leaving Alexandra with a lesser career and a parental role that was both unfamiliar and unwanted. Consigned to a life of disappointing compromise, she had spent her time trying to push her daughter to heights she herself had failed to achieve. She believed that every moment of the day should have a purpose and that time was wasted if it wasn’t spent on self-improvement. Fortunately for Nicole that meant that her mother saw the long summer holidays as an inconvenience rather than an opportunity to spend time with her only daughter, so apart from their compulsory art appreciation week, Nicole had been allowed to stay with Milly for the rest of the time, providing she met certain study goals.

The summers she’d spent at Forest Nest were the happiest of her life. She and Milly had been expected to help out and do chores, but once they were done, their time was their own. She’d learned to swim and kayak. She’d headed into the fells with Milly and her mother and learned to rock climb, and she’d felt guilty for lying awake at night wishing she’d been born into a different family.A family where individuality was encouraged. Where you were loved for who you were rather than what you did.

Nicole had spent most of her life trying to make her mother proud, but so far it hadn’t happened. Thanks to the lurid headlines of the last few days, she was resigned to the fact that it never would.

What must her mother be thinking now?

Nicole could almost hear her sigh of disappointment.

“Remember when my mother was encouraging me to be a doctor? She set up all those visits to medical schools.”

Milly kept her eyes on the narrow track ahead. “You would have made a terrible doctor.”

“I know. She arranged for me to watch her operating, and I passed out and bashed my skull on the floor.” It seemed a strange thing to be talking about in the circumstances, but anything was better than focusing on the present.

There was a pause. “You’re an incredible actor, so I think we can agree you made the right choice.”

There was a time when praise like that from her closest friend would have given her a high. She’d been chasing validation for most of her life. Now she was numb.

“But I don’t save lives, do I? No oneneedswhat I do.” Her mother had once asked her what she contributed to the world, and Nicole didn’t have an answer. No matter how many awards she won or box office records her movies broke, her mother always made her feel like a spectacular failure.

“Not true,” Milly said. “You enhance the lives of millions, and that’s important. There are ways of making a contribution that don’t involve being up to your elbows in someone else’s blood.”

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