Chapter 1: All Fools’ Day, 2012
‘Izzy – just the girl I need,’ Harry said as I came level with the Range Rover, heading towards the steep path up through the Sweetwell woods to the Lady Spring and beyond it the Lodge, where I lived with my guardian, Aunt Debo, and her friend and housekeeper, Judy.
He was leaning his tall, skinny frame against the open door of the car, as if he might fall down if he didn't – and going by the sparkle in his green eyes, he’d drunk more than enough for that.
‘Who, me?’ I asked, pausing uncertainly.
My recurring dream reran its usual course, a brief video clip of a golden evening and four young lives full of hopes and aspirations.
Harry and his friends had seemed so grown up and sophisticated to my sixteen-year-old eyes. They were all about to go their separate ways: Harry to medical school, and quiet, unassuming Simon to study horticulture at a nearby college, while Cara, who’d grown as tall and thin as a beanpole, had only days before been spotted by a top modelling agency and, much to her parents’ dismay, was poised to turn down her place at Oxford.
I always wished I could hang on to the dream long enough to see exactly what madness made me get behind the wheel of that car, but instead I usually woke suddenly, jerked right out of the past, just as I’d been summarily ejected from Heaven when I was in a coma in hospital after the accident...
For once, however, the picture dissolved as slowly as morning mist in the sun and I swam back up into wakefulness and the rattle of the ceiling fan in my Mumbai hotel room ... and the unwelcome memory of the previous night’s phone argument with my fiancé, Kieran.
Well, I assumed he was still my fiancé, though that might change once we met up at his parents’ house in Oxford on Monday and I laid on the line exactly what I intended to do next and, more importantly, where I wanted to do it.
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