“Where are we going?” Edward asked after breakfast, as I strode ahead of him down the path. We’d left the others to their own occupations back at the main house, and ignored any suspicious glances from Isabelle as we left.
“If you want to understand my grandfather, and his writing, then you have to understand this place.” I threw my arms out wide to encompass the house and the gardens and the woods.
“I have been living here for more than a year,” he pointed out, catching up to me with long strides.
“Ah, but how far into the woods have you been?” He didn’t answer that, so I carried on down the path, the crisp, chill air stinging my cheeks and my lungs.
“So what’s so important about these trees?” Edward pushed a low-hanging branch out of my way, and I ducked into the real heart of the woods, where it got darker and damper and scarier, counting tree trunks as I went.
“How many of my grandfather’s books have you read?” I asked, answering a question with a question.
“All of them,” Edward responded promptly, as if insulted that there could be any doubt. “Repeatedly.”
“Then you should already know.” My hand brushed against the seventh tree, and I swung myself round to the right. Edward scrambled to follow my abrupt change of direction. “This Day or the Next, set mostly in…” One tree, two trees…
“A house in the woods,” Edward answered, catching on finally.
“And best scene in Underworld Dreams?” Three trees…
“The night in the woods. Okay, I get it. They were all this wood.” Give the man a medal.
Four trees. “Correct. And now we’re here.”
He looked around, confused, even as I reached behind the tree for the hidden ladder. “Where?”
“The place I wanted to show you.” The ladder swung down, and I tugged to make sure it was still secure, before putting my foot on the first rung. “Nobody else knows this is here. Well, except for Caro. Not now Nathaniel’s gone.”
Edward followed me up the ladder into the cramped wooden box of a tree house, looking too tall and out of place as he stretched his legs out more than halfway across the floor and propped himself up against the wall. I sat across from him, my arm resting across his ankles, and tried to remember why I’d asked him up there in the first place.
“You brought me to see your secret tree house,” Edward said, folding his arms behind his head.
“Sort of.” I tried to gather my thoughts, but it was hard when he was looking at me that way, with warm amusement and affection in his eyes and the lines of his body. “This tree house… Nathaniel built it for me, when I was small. Well, actually he conned his assistant at the time into building it for him.”
“And I thought that shopping for an anniversary present for Isabelle was bad,” Edward murmured.
I ignored him. “He wanted me to have a place that was my own, you know? Because we were down here for whole summers and the house was always full of people, and I wanted to have adventures and secrets because I was that sort of child…”
“Like Caro.”
“Like Caro,” I agreed. “And nobody knew about it except for me and Nathaniel, once the assistant quit.”
“And now me.” Edward lowered his arms and wrapped one hand around my ankle. “And you brought me here because you wanted me to know more about Nathaniel?” Even as he said it, I could tell he didn’t believe that was all there was to it.
“And me, I suppose. A bit.”
He nodded. “I seem to be learning more and more about you.”
“And I seem to know less and less about you.” I shifted my body slightly, turning in towards his. “I don’t suppose you want to redress the balance?” And that, I realised, was the real reason I’d brought him out here. Because he was uncovering my secrets and my family’s secrets one by one, and I needed to have something in return. And the tree house was the best place I knew for secrets.
Edward smiled, a slow, lazy smile. “What do you want to know?”
My answer wasn’t quite what I’d have expected it to be, if I’d spent any time at all thinking about it before my mouth blurted it out. “What’s the deal with you and Ellie?”
From the look on Edward’s face, it wasn’t the question he’d expected either.
He sighed, and for a moment I thought he wasn’t going to answer, or was going to fob me off with some half-truth, but instead, he started to talk. “When I first arrived here, I was… Well, to be honest, I was running away from my real life. Things had got away from me, fallen apart, and I just wanted to be as far away from it all as possible.”
I suspected that this tied in to Ellie’s comments about being careful with him. I also suspected that if I interrupted to ask, I’d never get the full answer to my question, so I let him carry on.
“Ellie… When I arrived, Ellie was still very angry. It had been hard for her, I think, not just dealing with what happened between you and Greg…” I winced. Nice to see he wasn’t going to soften any of this for me. “But also because she’s really very isolated out here. She wasn’t working much at the time, and the only people she really saw were her grandparents, who she couldn’t tell what was the matter, and her husband, who had cheated on her before they were even legally married.”
The hand around my ankle tightened, just briefly, as though to reassure me that he was merely stating facts, not judgements. I wasn’t really all that reassured, although it wasn’t as if anything he was saying wasn’t true.
“So, I think it was nice for her to have me around,” Edward went on, loosening his grip on my leg. “Someone vaguely her own age who she could talk to. And with me having my own relationship issues…we bonded. Became friends.”
I couldn’t really bring myself to ask ‘Just friends?’
Luckily for me, Edward answered it anyway, eventually. “It took a while for me to realise that our situations were actually very different. I’d been betrayed and humiliated by a woman I thought I loved. My ex… We were supposed to get married. Until I found out that I wasn’t the only person she’d promised that to. She and my best friend were making plans to elope, before our booked wedding day. I guess she figured that once the deed was done, I couldn’t try and talk her out of it. I don’t know.”
“That’s awful.” I knew I wasn’t really the right person to censure another for their actions in relationships, but still. That was pretty cold, and my heart ached for Edward.
He just shrugged. “It was. And that’s why I had to get away. When Nathaniel called and invited me here, it was a lifeline. A chance to live a new life, to step outside my reality for a while. And once I got here I realised pretty quickly that, while it still hurt, and it stung and I woke up thinking about it every morning, I was more angry with myself for being a fool than I was with her. And I didn’t really have any interest in seeing her again or making things better; I just wanted to forget and move on.” He shifted, pulling one long leg up against his chest. “Ellie, on the other hand, just wanted to be able to forgive and forget, and couldn’t figure out why she wasn’t able to yet.”
“She still loved Greg,” I said, with a certain amount of relief.
“And she still loved you,” Edward said, his voice quiet and soft.
That, inevitably, was when the sob that had been fighting its way up my throat found its way out. Suddenly I was aware of the tears on my cheeks, and the fact that my nose was starting to run – not least because it was cool and damp in that tree house.
Edward shuffled himself round to sit beside me, and I found myself pulled into his arms, my face against his warm, broad chest. I have to admit, it did make everything seem just a little bit better.
“She doesn’t want to be angry with you any more, Saskia. She’s just not sure how to stop.”
I sniffled, probably very unattractively. “She and Greg seem happier, at least.”
Edward nodded; I could feel his head bob above mine. “I think it has helped, seeing you this summer. Seeing how lit
tle interest you have in him. Telling everyone that you have a new boyfriend – even if that wasn’t exactly accurate.”
“I tried to make it obvious,” I admitted. “I wanted her to know that it was all over long ago. I hadn’t even spoken to Greg since I left.”
“So,” Edward said, with the tone of someone changing the subject. His mouth was very close to my ear, and his breath was warm against my hair. “Do you feel you know something more about me, now? Like why you are the last person in the world I should be falling for, and why kissing you that night in the attic was the biggest risk I’ve taken in years?”
“I think so.” I straightened up as much as I could, without dislodging his arms from around me, letting his words sink in. To his mind, I was exactly like his ex – worse, I’d already committed a terrible betrayal, so he already knew I was capable of it. No wonder he’d been keeping his distance. Until now…
“Good. Then I’d like to ask you one more question.” I nodded to give him permission and, looking straight into my eyes, he asked, “What is the situation with you and Duncan right now?”
“Why do you want to know?”