‘I don’t name cars,’ he said flatly.
‘Well, maybe you could start.’
They drove in silence for a while, the only noise the rustle of the doughnut bag. Until, just as he finished the last of his coffee, Dawn spoke again.
‘Cassandra,’ she said. ‘Cassie for short.’
‘You’re actually naming the car.’
‘Well, you weren’t going to.’
‘Not Cassie.’ That wasn’t...regal enough for a car like this.
‘Calliope.’
‘No.’
‘Carly?’
‘Definitely not.’ She glanced over as he shuddered at the suggestion. ‘High school ex-girlfriend,’ he explained.
‘Ah. Not Carly, then.’
She was quiet for so long that he thought she might have actually given up on the idea.
Until she said, ‘Claudia.’
Cooper considered. Then, against his better judgement, he smiled.
‘Claudia it is.’
* * *
A new day. A new start. A new Dawn, even.
That was what Dawn had been telling herself since she’d woken up. It was no longer her wedding day. Which meant that the rest of her life started now.
Even if she was going to spend almost the first week of it on a road trip with her almost-husband’s brother.
She’d picked her sunniest yellow tee shirt, plucked up all her courage to speak to the reception staff about the broken lamp and accepted that breakfast was going to comprise mainly of sugar and caffeine. Hell, she’d even persuaded Cooper to lighten up enough to name the car.
Claudia was an excellent name, although she still maintained there was nothing wrong with Cassandra, either.
The only problem was, that kind of cheeriness took effort. It meant constantly distracting herself from everything she’d lost.
And Cooper wasn’t helping with that.
She tried to start all sorts of diverting conversations—about cities he’d travelled to, his work, his family—but got nowhere. Somehow, Cooper managed to answer even the most open-ended of questions with a definitive yes, no or sometimes just a grunt. What was it with this man and small talk?
She even reached for the radio once or twice, but Cooper’s glare put her off the idea. Apparently he really wasn’t a morning person.
Justin hadn’t been either, so maybe it was a family thing. Whenever they’d gone away together, he’d objected to her getting up at the break of dawn, ready to explore. In his mind, weekends and holidays were for sleeping late, then staying out later that night. Dawn, on the other hand, hated wasting so much of the day. Still, since they hadn’t lived together, and Justin didn’t like week-night sleepovers, it wasn’t as if it had been a problem every day. Dawn had managed to adjust to his schedule, more or less, whenever they’d stayed out of town together. And, when she couldn’t, she’d just used her quiet, alone morning time to read up on fun places they could go and explore when Justin did get up. Or if she ever came back alone, if he had other plans for the day.
She frowned to herself at the memory. Why had they always had to do what Justin wanted, anyway?
Maybe it was time to start demanding she get to do what she wanted for a change. Starting with this road trip.
‘So, where shall we stop next?’ she asked Cooper, after they’d been on the road for a couple of hours. Sugar for breakfast really wasn’t her thing, and she was aching for some savoury food, even if lunchtime realistically was still more than an hour away.
But Cooper just shrugged, forgoing anything even approaching an answer this time.
‘I thought you had this route all mapped out.’ Dawn reached under her seat for the road atlas she’d found the day before. It was old, but she could always double-check the details with the travel app on her phone.
‘I wasn’t exactly planning on taking this trip, remember?’ Cooper said, not even glancing her way.
‘Well, neither was I, buddy,’ Dawn grumbled under her breath. ‘You can thank your brother for that one.’
That did earn her a look, but one she couldn’t quite read.
‘I guess I just figured you’d done all the planning for when you meant to take the road trip with Justin,’ she said. Although, if he hadn’t, that meant she could start choosing some of their stops. She could insist they went where she wanted to stop. It was strangely liberating.
Then she frowned again, as another question occurred to her. ‘Why didn’t you take that road trip?’
‘I got married that summer instead.’ Cooper’s words were even, unemotional, but Dawn could tell there was a whole big, messy story behind them. One that would definitely distract her from thinking about Justin—if she could get him to tell it.
‘I didn’t know you’d ever been married.’ In fact, it was hard to imagine Cooper stopping glowering long enough for anyone to fall in love with him, but she didn’t mention that.
‘It didn’t take,’ he said flatly. But Dawn saw the way he glanced down at his left hand, as if he were still expecting to see a wedding band there.
‘Justin never said.’ Which was strange, although not unimaginable. Justin had always shied away from the subject of Cooper. Maybe this was why. ‘Can I ask what happened?’
‘No.’
‘Right.’ Of course not. ‘I just thought—’
Cooper interrupted her with an exasperated sigh. ‘Would you like to spend the next thousand miles or so discussing possible reasons Justin might have had for not turning up to marry you yesterday?’
‘I suppose not,’ Dawn admitted. Although, in some ways, that was exactly what she wanted to do. Just not with Cooper. What she really needed w
as Ruby, a bottle or two of wine, a bowl of potato wedges with sour cream and sweet chilli sauce and several uninterrupted hours to dissect exactly what had gone wrong in her relationship.
Justin’s brother was no substitute for that.
And none of it changed the fact that the only person who could give her the actual answers she needed was Justin himself. Who was still—she did some quick mental arithmetic—forty-one driving hours away.
Yeah, she was definitely going to need to stop for lunch before then. But at least she got to choose where.
Leaning forward, Dawn rooted around in her bag for the leaflets she’d picked up at the hotel, fanning them out as she looked for a likely place to stop and eat. If Cooper wasn’t going to distract her, she’d occupy herself by planning their journey. Her way.
Checking their location on her phone, and matching it up with the ancient road atlas she’d found in the glove box, she narrowed down her choices, putting some leaflets aside for later in the trip. Eventually, she held up one with the picture of a giant polar bear on the front.
‘Elko, Nevada,’ she said triumphantly.
‘Excuse me?’
‘That’s where we should stop for lunch,’ Dawn explained. ‘Elko, Nevada. Home of the world’s largest dead polar bear.’ It was spontaneous, quirky and all the things she hadn’t been lately. Totally out of character, really. Except...it didn’t feel that way. It felt as if maybe this could be her character, if she let it.
As though this was the Dawn she’d been looking for.
‘Why would we want to eat lunch with a dead polar bear?’ Cooper asked, eyebrows raised. ‘And besides, I thought we decided that we weren’t stopping for kitsch roadside attractions on this trip.’
‘We have to eat some time,’ Dawn said reasonably. ‘Why not take a peek at White King while we’re at it?’
‘White King?’
‘That’s the polar bear’s name.’
Cooper sighed. ‘Of course the polar bear has a name.’
‘You’re the one who named the car Claudia,’ Dawn said with a shrug.