Free The Story of Us by Dani Atkins Page A

still hung down to her shoulders, and she hadn’t worn it that way for some time. The photograph had obviously been taken in summertime, for the subjects were all in shorts and T-shirts and were sitting in what looked like a beer garden of a pub, four bicycles propped up against a tree beside them. Nick and Richard were on one side of the bench, with long draughts of lager in front of them. On the other side of the table were Amy and Caroline, laughing crazily at whoever had been taking the photo. I was not in the picture.
    â€˜Where was this one taken, Caroline?’
    She took the snap from my fingers and a small smile curved her mouth at the memory. ‘Oh yes, that was the day Amy persuaded us it would be fun to cycle to Brownleigh, over fifteen miles away, on the hottest Sunday of the entire summer. I swear we nearly died from heatstroke. It must have been three, no maybe four years ago.’
    A strange feeling squirmed somewhere inside me as I took the photograph back from her. That was during the period of time when I’d temporarily lost contact with the girls. To begin with my job in London had taken up so much of my time, and weekends, that I’d hardly come back to our home town at all, except for brief family visits. Then, after two years of working in the capital, I’d been given a fantastic opportunity to transfer to the company’s Washington office for eighteen months, which I had absolutely adored. I’d never really given much thought to what had happened to the group of friends I’d walked away from. It was unsettling now to realise that they owned a past history and shared memories about which I knew absolutely nothing. It shouldn’t have bothered me – of course my friends had been entitled to be happy in the years when I’d not been around – but suddenly it did.
    Richard and I had been apart for almost five years, and in that time neither of us had found a relationship that matched the one we had left behind; the relationship we’d managed to rediscover just one year ago.
    A tentative knock on the door made us both look up, as Nick poked his head nervously around the edge of the frame. ‘You two girls okay?’ He wore the classic look of a man who was extremely uncomfortable around feminine tears.
    I looked at Caroline and reached out to squeeze her hand. ‘No. But we will be.’
    I eventually persuaded Caroline to come downstairs with me and have something to eat, which according to Nick were two things she hadn’t done at all in the last twenty-four hours. If I achieved nothing else, that alone justified the visit.
    Nick and Richard had opened a bottle of wine, and when we joined them in the welcoming kitchen, Nick reached into the cupboard for two more glasses. I was still on painkillers and definitely shouldn’t be drinking alcohol, and I’d noticed a small brown bottle from the hospital pharmacy beside Caroline’s bed, so I guessed that neither should she. Both of us took the wine.
    Inevitably the conversation was unable to stray far from the event that had exploded our world into smithereens. ‘Has anyone spoken to Amy’s family yet? Has anything been said about… Do they know when the…?’ Richard was clearly struggling with the word ‘funeral’,
and with good reason. That word belonged to old people, to sick people, to people who had achieved everything they had wanted to do and see in life. Not to a beautiful, funny and loving twenty-seven-year-old woman, whose life had hardly begun yet.
    â€˜They phoned to speak to Caroline this afternoon,’ supplied Nick.
    â€˜They
did
?’ Caroline queried, swivelling in her seat to look at her partner in surprise. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
    Nick’s face wore a look of caution, as he tried to find a reply that didn’t sound condemning. ‘I did, honey. But you wouldn’t come to the phone. In fact, you used some