She was about to step into the house via the French doors leading to the Chandler Suite in the hope of sneaking unnoticed into the library when she felt her handbag vibrate. Her spirits edged up a notch – whether it was Freya, Pippa, or Jasper, she couldn’t wait to settle into a comfortable chair and while away the next hour gossiping. She changed direction, dropped down onto one of the wedding chairs and pulled out her phone, answering the call before checking the caller ID.
‘Hi!’
‘Hi, Lexie, I wasn’t expecting you to answer, to be honest.’
‘Oh, erm, oh, I…’
Lexie felt as if a firework had exploded in her brain. Her heart pounded out a symphony of shock, her throat tightened around a particularly prickly pear, and she struggled to formulate a coherent sentence. Her first instinct was to swipe the screen to end the call, to pretend to herself that it had never happened and to simply continue her journey to the library, order a gin and tonic – coffee just wouldn’t hack it now – and tie up her phone by calling Pippa, then Freya, and then her mum if she had to.
‘Lexie, please don’t hang up, I just want to talk to you.’
Suddenly she wanted to run, run until she couldn’t run any longer, and then hide so that he couldn’t tell her all the awful things he had stored up to shower her with as excuses for why he’d been kissing another girl when he should have been celebrating with her at the Ritz. She knew what he had to say would hurt, and she couldn’t deal with that, not whilst she was in the middle of orchestrating a wedding!
‘No, I’m sorry Elliot, I can’t, not right now.’
Her thoughts were all over the place and if she wasn’t sitting down, she knew she would have crumbled to the floor. If only she’d checked the caller ID this wouldn’t be happening and she’d be curled up in one of the plump armchairs in the library enjoying a well-earned break before resuming her responsibilities for the evening reception.
‘Please, Lexie, I just need ten minutes of your time.’
Then Freya’s words, sent via Jasper that morning, popped into her head and she hesitated. ‘Be brave’, is this what she meant? Instead of doing her usual ‘cut and run’ at the first sight of trouble, she should grasp her recalcitrant courage by the scruff of its neck and face up to what was going on? She inhaled a breath and the maelstrom of panic began to ease and the fog in her mind cleared. Hadn’t she just been telling herself that she wouldn’t be able to move forward until she’d dealt with this conversation?
What was the matter with her? What was she, a woman or a wimp?
The mature thing to do would have been to meet Elliot in a neutral place, listen to his explanation, and then ask him all those questions that had been buzzing around in her head on constant repeat for the last two weeks, driving her towards the edge of her endurance. For the first time she realised that, had she spoken to Elliot before fleeing from London and hiding out in Cornwall, then not only would she be further along the road to accepting their relationship was over, but she would have had a clear conscience to ask Theo about what was going on with him. Their friendship could have started out in an open, ‘no-hidden-secrets’ way and wasn’t that the best way?
Freya was right, and indeed so was Elliot – it was time to talk and she had to mentally brace herself for what lay ahead.
‘Okay, Elliot.’
‘Thank you, Lexie. I’ve been trying to contact you, ring you, text you, lots of times… but well, you didn’t answer any of them.’
‘Do you blame me?’
Lexie gulped down on the flash of pain that whipped through her chest as an image of Elliot with the birthday girl materialised in her mind’s eye. She clenched her hands into fists and gritted her teeth until the feeling faded, before tuning back in to what he was saying.
‘I’m sorry, Lexie. I should have told you.’
‘Yes, yes, you should.’
Silence swirled around the terrace for what seemed to Lexie like hours, but she resisted the temptation to blurt out a whole host of questions, all of which started with the word ‘why’. Elliot had called her, not the other way around and she would wait until he told her what he had to say. As the seconds ticked by, she found her emotions were settling and when Elliot eventually launched into his explanation, the thing she had been dreading for so long, it was as though she was listening to a stranger talk about his life, not the man she had been planning to marry a mere two weeks ago.
‘I wanted to, I really did, but I just didn’t know how. The wedding arrangements were taking up all of your time, and then there was the fashion show, and the merger deal I was working on, we never saw each other from one weekend to the next. When we did manage to snatch a few minutes together, all we seemed to talk about were the flowers and the rings and the favours and the cake samples and the music and the invitations and… well, you get the drift. I admit, a couple of months ago, I had a bit of a panic attack, and I should have talked to you, I should have explained how I felt.’
‘Elliot, I—’
‘But I couldn’t do it. I really didn’t want to be the person who hurt you. I loved you, but I didn’t want to get married. That’s why I made all those excuses not to go up to my parents’. I couldn’t face another full-on weekend where all we talked about, ad infinitum, was the wedding. I know I’m a complete coward for doing what I did and I’m sorry, I never meant… well, I really didn’t want you to find out about me and Amy the way you did.’
‘You mean seeing you celebrating her birthday in the restaurant across the road from where we lived?’
‘I know, I know, it sounds awful when you put it like that.’
‘When I state the facts?’
‘I admit I just didn’t think it through. You were at the fashion show, then the after-show party at the Ritz later. I’d told you I was working late; it didn’t seem like it would be a problem.’
Lexie scrunched up every last ounce of her courage to ask the question, the answer to which she knew would send a burst of agony through her soul.
‘How long have you been seeing Amy?’
‘That was our fourth date. She’s one of the lawyers working on the take-over deal I’m involved in. We just, well, we just sort of clicked. I’m really sorry, Lexie, truly I am.’
Elliot groaned and despite not being able to see his expression, Lexie knew his regret was genuine. He wasn’t a cruel person, if anything he was too soft-hearted, and that had led to him being unable to face up to the fact that, well, that he’d fallen out of love with her. A few seconds passed during which Lexie was amazed to find there was no zap of excruciating pain, simply a surge of sadness that Elliot was no longer in her life.
She thought about Pippa’s non-negotiable rule of holding out for her ‘thunderbolt of lightning’ and realised that all the time she and Elliot had been together there had been no dancing on the ceiling, no blast of weather-related electricity, no high-octane drama, no arguments even, just a calm, plodding acceptance that they were in a serious adult relationship that required give and take on both sides. She had loved Elliot, but if he’d been her one true soulmate, then surely she would have noticed that he’d been withdrawing from his involvement in the wedding preparations?