Summer of Secrets (7 page)

THIRTEEN

Rhi headed up the cobbled steps, determined to see where Brody was going at this time of the evening. Why hadn't he said anything? He'd been running off a lot recently, now she thought about it. All those occasions when he'd called a halt to their rehearsing and dashed away. There was always “somewhere he had to be”. What if he had a girlfriend he hadn't told Rhi about? Rhi felt cold at the thought as she turned into the High Street at the top of the steps. If he had a girlfriend he was keeping secret, what else hadn't he told her?

How much did she really know about Brody?

Rhi couldn't think of a single personal conversation that they'd had that hadn't revolved around her. She blushed at the thought. She had been so self-centred that she'd never asked him
anything
about himself.

What kind of a friend didn't ask a person a single question about their lives? She knew everything about Lila, Eve and Polly, but precisely zero about the boy she had been dreaming about for weeks.

How was that even possible?

The air was growing colder as Rhi sneaked from doorway to doorway. When she felt the first splash of cold rain on the back of her neck, she almost leaped out of her skin. She'd left in such a hurry, and hadn't picked up her jacket. She was going to get drenched. Maybe she should just return to the warm, dry café with her friends and forget this madness.

Keeping Brody firmly in her sights, she pressed on.

The town looked different in the rain. Darker, quieter. The only sound was the occasional car swishing past and the drum of rain on the rooftops and the pavements. Rhi had reached the stage where she was so wet that her shoes squelched and her hair hung limply around her face. If her reflection in the shop windows was anything to go by, she looked like a freak, but she didn't care. All she cared about was not losing sight of Brody.

Brody moved quickly along the road, his blond hair darkened by the rain. His guitar case was zipped firmly against the weather, his collar turned up to protect him from the downpour. He was going somewhere he'd been to before, that much was clear. There were no hesitations at road junctions, no checking directions on his phone. Was he going home? Rhi could feel herself blushing even more deeply as she realized she didn't even know where Brody lived.

It was insane that she had shared so much of her soul with someone so mysterious to her. The more she thought about it, the more she understood that Brody had only done his sharing through their music.

They were climbing the hill now. A bus flew past, and Rhi jumped back automatically at the spray of water thrown up by its wheels. She almost felt like laughing. Even if the bus had splashed her, she couldn't have got any wetter.

As she looked round for Brody again, she panicked. She'd lost him. She was useless at tracking people. Had she got this wet and come all this way, just to lose Brody as she had lost the boy in the wheelchair?

Squinting from beneath the bus shelter, she finally spotted a Brody-shaped figure heading towards an old church on the corner. Her heart rate steadied again. All was not lost after all. But … a
church
? Was Brody religious? Rhi couldn't imagine it. But what did she know?

She hesitated outside the church gate. Maybe she should leave Brody alone. This felt private. Then again, if she didn't follow him inside, she might never know why he'd gone in there. Suddenly it felt like the most important thing in the world to know.

St Saviour's was Heartside Bay's oldest church. Rhi had passed it hundreds of times, but had never set foot inside. It was popular for many of the weddings that took place in Heartside Bay as it was incredibly picturesque with a meadow-like churchyard and a neat little lychgate leading off the street. At this time of night it was hard to picture it full of chattering guests in brightly coloured hats, its winding flagstone path covered in pastel-coloured confetti. Right now it didn't feel romantic at all; just dark and a little forbidding, particularly with the rain darkening its great stone walls.

Rhi heard the boom of the closing church door as Brody went inside. Still not convinced she was doing the right thing, she squeezed through the gate and tried not to slip on the rain-slicked flagstones leading to the main door. She opened the big wooden door and peered nervously inside.

There was no one there. Candles flickered on the altar, and in several small side chapels. A smell of old stones and incense hung in the air.

Water was beginning to puddle around Rhi's feet. She shivered, rubbing her arms. It was warmer outside. Brody was in here somewhere – she had
seen
him come inside. The silence was unnerving her. She scanned the big cork noticeboard in the porch a little hopelessly, wondering what to do next.

 

AA MEETING TODAY

NEWMAN ROOM

TAKE THE STAIRS IN THE SACRISTY

ALL WELCOME!

 

The words were printed in bold on a yellow background, the letters “AA” inside a triangle with the words Unity, Service, and Recovery written along the three sides. Rhi stared at the poster with a creeping sense of unease. AA? As in … Alcoholics Anonymous?

Before she could talk herself out of it, she walked towards the back of the church and took a flight of stone steps that curved down to a lighted basement. It was more modern down here than she had expected: a little kitchen, a toilet – and a plain wooden door with a glass panel at eye level. She paused at the door and stared through the little panel into the room beyond.

Eight people were sitting in a circle. A ninth stood at a podium directly facing the door. Looking right at her.

Rhi gasped and stumbled back from the door the moment she met Brody's eyes. It couldn't be true.

“Rhi!” Brody yelled, jumping down from the podium. The others turned and stared curiously towards the panel in the door.

I can't be here
, Rhi thought in horror.

Whirling around, she raced back up the stone steps and into the church again, her wet feet slapping against the stones and leaving footprints. She sprinted through the porch, barged against the wooden doors with her shoulder, and fled back out into the evening, intent on leaving Brody behind her. She couldn't speak to him…

The rain was still pelting down but Rhi raced on heedless, slipping and sliding on the flagstone path, flying through the gate and skidding away down the road. Her shocked brain was moving almost faster than her legs. In her mind's eye, she heard the squeal of brakes, the swerve of wheels, the hideous scrunch of metal. She pictured Ruth's eyes widening in horror, then closing for ever. A drunk driver.
A drunk driver…

Brody was an alcoholic, like the person who had killed her sister.

FOURTEEN

It can't be true. It can't be…

Of all the secrets Rhi might have imagined, this was the worst. She'd had no idea. Brody… The driver of the car that had killed her sister… Drunk. Drunk.
Drunk
…

Snakes in her head, coiling and writhing. Rhi ran faster but still they hissed, their black tongues flickering and their fangs extended, poised to strike. Halfway down the road she stumbled over the kerb and went sprawling to the ground. The physical pain of the bloodied scrape on her knees was a relief as, for a moment, it distracted her from her thoughts.

But she couldn't let Brody catch her.

Picking herself up, she pelted up an alleyway, down a fenced path, past a jumble of warehouses. She was heading downhill, she knew that much. The snakes knew it too.

How could she have been so blind?

The beach. The sea. Rhi ran on, her feet pounding on the packed wet sand. When she reached the water's edge she stopped, gasping for air, pressing her hands to her aching sides. Blood trailed down her legs, mingling with the damp salt air. The wounds stung.

He was behind her, gasping almost as much as she was. She had no need to turn round to confirm it. She hadn't run far enough.

“Rhi, please! Let me explain!”

Rhi gazed numbly out to sea. “There's nothing to explain,” she said. She could feel her teeth chattering together as the cold rain seemed to soak into her bones. “I shouldn't have followed you. I wish I hadn't. I'm sorry.”

“Rhi, please look at me.” He sounded desperate. “We need to talk about this.”

Rhi turned slowly.

Brody was just as bedraggled as she was. He looked at her with eyes that were dark and full of pain. “You're drenched,” he began, reaching out a hand to touch her sleeve. “You're going to get sick. Let's talk about this somewhere that's out of the rain.”

Rhi flinched away from him. She liked the feel of the rain washing over her. She wished it could wash all her problems away. “How could you not tell me something like this?” she said. Her voice shook despite her best efforts. “Brody, I thought we were close. I thought…”
I thought maybe you liked me.
She left her sentence unfinished. It seemed pointless now.

“I wanted to tell you so badly,” he said, “but I could never find the right moment. ‘Hey Rhi, how are you doing, love the song, by the way I'm an alcoholic' – it's kind of a buzzkill. I was scared of what you might say. How it would change the way you thought about me.”

Raindrops were shimmering on his eyelashes. Or maybe they were tears. Rhi wondered how you could tell the difference.

“I'm so, so sorry for keeping the whole AA thing from you,” he went on quietly. “I've kept it from everybody. It's not exactly something I'm proud of. I was going to tell you this weekend, but then you told me what happened to your sister and … I couldn't.”

Rhi's feet felt like blocks of ice now. She pushed her sopping wet hair out of her face. “Are you still drinking?” she asked as steadily as she could.

He tipped his head back and gazed up into the rain, running his hands through his hair. Then he looked at her again and shook his head. “I've been sober for nearly a year. I swear it.”

Did she believe him? Rhi didn't know. It was like the raindrops and the tears. How could you tell the difference between the truth and a lie?

“Please believe me, Rhi,” he pleaded. “I couldn't bear it if this ruined things between us. You're too precious to me.”

Rhi caught herself before she softened. Too much was at stake to mess this up.

“How often do you go to your meetings?”

“Whenever I can. But at least once a week.” He looked older than she'd ever seen him. “Alcoholism is something that stays with you for life. You have to know that to have any hope of fighting it. Sometimes it's small things that set you off, and sometimes it's bigger than that. Problems, dramas. You want to reach for a drink to take the problem away. You go to a meeting and the need is easier to manage. You know you're not alone.”

Rhi forced herself to ask the next question. “Did you ever drink and drive, Brody?”

“I did a lot of stupid, scary things when I was drunk,” he admitted. “The truth is that I can't remember half of what I did, and that's the most terrifying thing of all. But it's in the past now. I swear it to you, on my life. On my guitar. On everything that matters to me.” He paused. “I swear it on you.”

A fresh wave of tears felt hot on Rhi's cheeks.

“Music has been my salvation.” His voice was growing more urgent. “It's everything to me. It's how I cope, and it's how I make sense of my life. When I play, when I sing … somehow, I don't need to drink. Making music is all the comfort that I need. Especially when I make it with you.”

He came closer to her, cupping her face in his ice-cold hands. Rhi didn't push him away. She found that she couldn't. She stared into his eyes as they blazed at her with the relief of a secret kept too long.

“My AA sponsor told me not to get involved in any new relationships for at least a year. But I can't help it, Rhi. I've tried, but there's nothing I can do. I'm completely and utterly in love with you.”

His lips crushed against hers, hot and cold at the same time. Rhi instantly found herself kissing him back as if her life depended on it, her hands around his back and in his hair. Despite the chill of the rain still hammering down on their heads, she wasn't cold any more.

“You're so beautiful,” he whispered against her mouth. “I've wanted this for so long…”

Rhi had wanted this too, more than anything. His kisses were so passionate they were making her dizzy. They were soulmates. She loved him. But…

This couldn't happen.

Did you ever drink and drive?
Ruth watched her with expressionless eyes.

Rhi gave a sobbing gasp and pulled away from Brody's arms. She felt cold all over again, and more broken than ever.

“I can't do this,” she said in despair. “I'm sorry…”

And she ran back up the beach with her head down and her heart scattered across the sand behind her.

FIFTEEN

Rhi had very little memory of her exams over the next few days.

It had turned out that she wasn't immune to the rain and cold after all. She shivered and sneezed her way through four hours on subjects she found that she had forgotten about almost as soon as she had laid her pen down and handed her paper in. She wrote blindly, seeing Brody's face with every sentence she scribbled. His blazing blue eyes, the feeling of his lips as he had kissed her… Her whole body boiled at the memory. It wasn't easy to bring her thoughts back to calculus, or
Hamlet
.

“Only two more to go,” Polly said as they all trailed exhaustedly out of English literature on Thursday. “Study session at mine?”

“I'd prefer an ice-cream session at the Heartbeat,” Lila groaned.

Rhi sucked throat sweets and blew her nose and hoped no one would start curious questions about where she'd gone after the previous night's gig. It was a vain hope.

Polly started first. “Where did you
go
, Rhi? You were so brilliant, especially that last song about Ruth. We'd ordered you a massive hot chocolate to celebrate and you vanished! Ollie had to drink it all by himself!”

“I suffered,” said Ollie seriously.

“Brody left about the same time as you did,” Josh observed. His arm, as ever, was around Lila's waist.

Eve's grey eyes were bright with curiosity. “Were you with Guitar Hero? Confess it all, Rhi.”

“Brody and Rhi sitting in a tree,” giggled Lila.

“S-I-N-G-I-N-G!” Rhi said, as firmly as she could, and left before anyone asked her anything else.

She couldn't bear to think about Brody just now. It was too painful. She had already deleted four despairing texts from him that morning.
We can make this work. Don't cut me out. Talk to me. Kiss me in the rain again.
She knew them all by heart, despite deleting them as soon as she had read them. It was taking all her willpower right now not to take her phone out of her bag and check for more.

Did she love him? She thought she did. Every time she remembered their kiss, she got goosebumps all over. They were attracted to each other, certainly. But could she honestly commit to Brody? She thought she'd known him, but her faith in him was based on thin air. She didn't know him at all. Maybe the guy she loved didn't even exist.

Her head ached every time she tried to answer that one.

Friday wasn't much better, although her throat had eased by lunchtime. She had hardly made it out of the examination hall that afternoon when she was almost bowled over by Ollie.

“WHOO!” he shouted, racing at full speed down the corridor. “SCHOOL'S OUT!”

“No running, Mr Wright,” shouted Mr Morrison, their form teacher, putting his head out of the staffroom door a fraction too late.

“I'd like to see Mr Morrison try to stop him,” Eve laughed. The corridor was full of relieved students hugging each other. “Summer's here, darlings. Can't you taste it?”

They could still hear Ollie whooping his way down the corridor.

“I'm am SO glad it's over,” Lila squealed. “No more exams for months! I need to leave now and eat chocolate and listen to music and dance and have FUN. Are you coming, Josh?”

Josh slid his bag over his shoulder and smiled at Lila. “In a heartbeat.”

The look in his eyes made Rhi's heart hurt. Brody had looked at her like that on Wednesday night, and she had pushed him away.

“In
the
Heartbeat you mean,” Polly laughed. “Ollie's probably there already, he was moving so fast.”

The sun was shining warmly on the steps of the school as they left. Everyone around her was chattering and laughing. Rhi tried to smile and look as pleased as everyone else, but she couldn't do it. Brody was bound to be at the Heartbeat. Whatever was she going to say to him?

The Heartbeat was already half-full of other people celebrating when they got there. Rhi stayed at the back of the crowd as Josh pushed open the doors, holding them open with a bow.

Max was at their usual table, his arm around a girl Rhi recognized from Year Nine. He didn't even acknowledge them as they selected their second favourite table right beside the bar. Rhi felt nothing at all. Not a jolt, not a moment of regret. How could she have spent so long going out with a boy she hardly even thought about any more? It was a mystery.

“When is Max going to stop sulking about Rhi?” Eve asked, sliding along the padded bench to make room for the others. “He's got to move on.”

“He already has, if the girl on his arm is anything to go by,” Rhi observed.

The others glanced at each other.

“Are you OK with that?” Polly checked, laying her hand on Rhi's sleeve.

If there was one thing Rhi felt certain about in the mess that constituted her life, it was that she was over Max Holmes. “I'm fine,” she said. “Really.”

“She's got Guitar Hero to think about now,” Eve drawled, sipping on her frappe. “And I don't want to over-excite you, Rhi, but he's heading this way.”

The smile froze on Rhi's face as she registered Brody in the door of the Heartbeat Café, looking gorgeous in a blue shirt that matched his eyes. He was looking right at her. She couldn't panic in front of her friends; it would be too embarrassing. Instead, she picked up her bag, got to her feet and walked towards him. Her legs felt like jelly.

“Hi,” he said when she reached him.

Rhi tried to swallow her nerves and smile, horribly aware of her friends watching her every move. “Hi,” she mumbled.

He looked at her. “Exams go OK?”

“Mm-hmm.”
Full marks for conversational prowess
, she thought hopelessly.

“Good to hear it. Did you get my messages?”

She could hardly say no, could she? “It … they were lovely,” Rhi managed to answer. She could feel herself blushing. “I'm sorry I didn't reply.”

“There's still time,” he said. His eyes were so blue. So pleading.

I can't do this
, Rhi wanted to shout. “Sorry,” she said, backing towards the café door. She was terrified she might start crying. “I'm just … I can't be with you right now, Brody. I'll sing at tomorrow's wedding reception here with you but … I can't be here now. I have to go.”

She bolted. Brody's stricken face stayed with her the whole way home.

 

Stupid, stupid, stupid
. Rhi raged at herself as she walked furiously along her street. Why couldn't she get this together? This was
Brody
. Her singing partner. Her future – at least musically. How was she ever going to sing with him again, feeling the way she did? How had she messed things up so royally? She was already dreading the wedding reception at the Heartbeat the following day, but she'd made a commitment. She wouldn't break it. Even if it broke
her
.

As she wearily put her key in the door and turned the latch, a familiar sound greeted her. Her mother was shouting at her dad down the phone.

“Why did I even agree to talk to you, Patrick? You never change. You never listen to a word I say.”

This is all I need
, Rhi thought through gritted teeth. She walked steadily towards the stairs. Her mother didn't seem to notice her at all.

“You don't seem to realize how ridiculous all of this is… You haven't got a shred of common sense… How I ever married you in the first place is beyond me—”

Rhi shut her bedroom door. It helped a little. She put her guitar carefully on her bed, trying not to think about the expression on Brody's face as she'd run away from him tonight. It was difficult.

To distract her, she picked up her favourite photo of her family and tried to lose herself in the memories. The four of them in Trafalgar Square, laughing as if they'd all just heard the funniest joke in the world. It felt a very long time ago.

Someday I'd like to tell you what really happened…
Mac's cryptic email resurfaced in her mind. Had there been more to Ruth's death than she had realized? She flipped open her laptop and logged on. Then she pulled up Mac's email and stared at it. She needed a distraction from the rest of her life. Maybe this was it.

She started typing.

Mac

Meet me tomorrow at Ruth's grave? I'll be there. 11 am.

Rhi