Page 1 of We Belong Together
1
As I hurtled down the country lane, horrendously lost and half blind with panic due to fleeing for my life, sanity and quite possibly my soul, it was perhaps understandable that I didn’t spot the sheep in time. A sudden crack of lightning through the rain-splattered windscreen revealed it to be about five metres closer than whatever the stopping distance was for apocalyptic tornado-like conditions.
Screeching in horror, I automatically wrenched the steering wheel to the right while jamming on the brakes, skidding into the opposite lane and praying that no one else would be stupid enough to be out here at five in the morning.
A few terrifying moments later, as I tried to remember how to undo the seatbelt, I swapped that prayer into hoping that someone would not only be heading my way, but carrying a tow rope and whatever else it would take to haul this hunk of junk back out of the ditch I’d ended up in.
I closed my eyes, dropping my head to rest against the steering wheel as I fought to steady my rasping breath, and tried to ignore the creaks of the wheels straddled between the grass verge on one side and the muddy bank on the other.
‘Come on, Eleanor, get a grip,’ I eventually croaked. ‘You can’t stay here for the rest of the night.’
Or could I? Huddling in the tiny seat, a loose spring poking into my backside, I contemplated whether the best thing to do was sit it out until the storm cleared and the sun came up.
A suddenthudagainst the passenger window startled me out of my stupor. I scrabbled about for the interior light switch, feeling a mix of dread and hope as I finally managed to pop open the seat belt and shuffled across to peer through the blurry window.
‘Baaa!’ The sheep – presumably the same one, I didn’t get that good a look at it the first time – knocked its nose against the window, giving me another jolt. Slumping back into the driver’s seat, I resumed the head-against-the-steering-wheel-until-a-better-solution-miraculously-presents-itself position.
It was January. Four days earlier I had celebrated the new year, ripe with promise and potential, in a Welsh castle, surrounded by the rich, famous and genuinely fabulous. Wearing an outfit that came with the compliments of a hot new British designer, swigging sophisticated cocktails and sampling food created with the express purpose of impressing me, as the revellers chanted down to midnight I leaned over and kissed my gorgeous boyfriend, who whispered that this would be the Best Year Ever. And I had agreed with him. Now, half-buried in a ditch, the tatty remains of my life spilling across the back seat, thunder and lightning booming in my ears, fear and exhaustion rattling my bones, I changed my mind. Which made sense, seeing as nearly everything else he’d ever said to me had turned out to be a crock of lies.
But enough wallowing. If the sheep wasn’t going to help, I’d better come up with another plan. I grabbed my phone from my bag and clicked to contacts.
Okay… who to call?
Not my parents. They were hundreds of miles away, and would be blissfully asleep for another hour at least.
Not Marcus, obviously, since he was a scumbag liar who I was never talking to again.
My thumb hovered over Lucy. As someone who worked for me, was it okay to wake her up this early in the morning and ask her to come to my rescue? Maybe, but considering that later today I’d be terminating her internship, it hardly seemed fair. Besides, she couldn’t drive. What was she going to do, order an Uber to pick me up from ‘shallow ditch, winding road, back of beyond, somewhere in the Midlands’?
Were you supposed to call the police under these circumstances? I twisted round to see if I could tell whether the back half of the car was sticking into the road. Thanks to the sizeable verge, I didn’t think so. Could I call them anyway, or was that a waste of police time, given that there was no emergency? I wasn’t hurt beyond several bumps and bruises, and a quick check of the car door confirmed that I was quite capable of exiting the vehicle without assistance.
And once I had to provide my name, let alone other details like why I was here in the first place, driving through the heart of a severe weather warning in what might possibly have once been a stolen vehicle in the middle of the night…
I didn’t want to go there.
The perfect person to call was Charlie. While she was unlikely to be able to help, as the person who I was on my way to visit, she lived at least somewhere in the area and would surely know someone who could. Either way, she would turn the whole thing into a hilarious story by the end of the call, and have a bath running and a hot chocolate waiting for me when I finally made it to her farmhouse.
But I couldn’t call Charlie, because the last phone number I’d had for her had stopped working over a year ago, around the same time she disappeared on social media for the hundredth time since I’d met her.
I opened the maps app to find out the name of the road I was on, in case I could persuade a local taxi firm or an all-night breakdown service to come and help. Bolstered by discovering that I was on Ferrington Lane, given that the village nestled into the border of Charlie’s family farm was Ferrington, I began searching, managing to type in ‘taxi’ right before the screen went black.
And yes, while racing about my flat chucking random stuff into bags four hours earlier, I’d forgotten my charger.
This was not good news.
I slipped a few inches lower in the seat, shrinking my hands up into my coat sleeves and tugging the hood over my head.
A couple of tears may have trickled out – my face was too numb with cold to feel anything. At this point, I had two choices: clamber out, wade through the rapidly swelling ditch water, and wander about in the storm until either I found help, someone found me, or I died of exposure. Or I could wait it out until morning and spend the time trying to figure out what my next move was, or even better getting some sleep.
Resigned to option two, I gingerly climbed into the back and buried myself under a pile of clothes. The slight tilt of the car meant that I had to wedge myself in a half-sitting position so I didn’t topple forwards into the footwell. The rain continued to hammer the car from every angle, even as the flashes of lightning grew fainter and the storm gradually blew into the distance. Eyes fixed on the deep darkness, I watched for the first glimpse of sunrise.
* * *
I was woken up sometime later by a glare of light accompanied by the sound of tapping on the window and a man’s voice. ‘Hello?’
Jerking upright, my stiff limbs sending jumpers flying, I hastily rubbed the sleep from my eyes. It took a few gormless seconds for me to remember where I was, what had happened, and who I was. Tugging my coat around mismatched pyjamas (I’d left in a hurry), I braced myself. The man opened the car door, the glow of the sunrise casting his face in shadow.
‘Are you okay? Can you move, or are you hurt?’
