‘Anna?’

Chapter Eight

ANNA.

He’d said her name, but it wasn’t soft and warm and full of smiles. Just a word repeated because it made no sense to the person speaking it. Anna felt as if someone had tipped a bucket of ice water over her head.

Oh, my God! What am I doing?

She ended the call, dropped the phone, then sprang off the sofa and stood at the opposite side of the room, trembling. She turned so she didn’t have to look at the screen and found herself facing the small sideboard. She flung one of the doors open to reveal several dusty bottles of whisky. Spencer’s whisky. She pulled out a tumbler and reached for a bottle, bypassing the smooth Highland Park for the Lagavulin. She needed earthy, peaty tones and a fire in the back of her throat. She half-filled the glass, knocked it back in one go, then shuddered.

By the time she was at the bottom of her second glass, she wasn’t quite as mortified as she had been half an hour earlier. In fact, she was starting to feel much more philosophical about the whole thing. So much so, that she reached over, picked up her phone and dialled the number again.

There was no mechanical voicemail message, just a hesitant silence on the other end of the line.

‘I’m sorry. I know…’ she said, hoping the edges of the words weren’t blurring into each other too much. And then, when all that came back was a soft grunt, she added, ‘I know you’re not him… That you’re not Spencer…’ She broke off again to cough back a sob as the truth of that realization hit her a second time, as ridiculous as it was to have even considered it in the first place. ‘I just wanted to say that I’m sorry. For phoning in the middle of the night – twice now! – and rambling on like I’ve become unhinged.’

Another soft grunt. But there might have been the merest smidge of a smile behind this one.

‘I’m not unhinged. I’m just… Just…’

There was a heavy masculine sigh.

‘I don’t know what I am,’ she ended weakly.

For a few seconds it was very quiet, and Anna was half-expecting to hear it deaden, for that silence, that gap in a conversation when no one says anything, to become the blankness of no one else being there at all, but then she heard him take a breath, readying himself to speak. ‘You haven’t lost your mind,’ he said.

His voice was rich and warm and certain. Anna was tempted to believe him, even though she wasn’t sure it was the truth. Reality had been a hazy concept for a long time now. ‘How do you know? After all, I’m talking to a stranger in the middle of the night.’

‘Life… isn’t always easy,’ he replied slowly. It seemed as if he was picking his words carefully, not because he didn’t have the conversational skills, quite the reverse. She had a feeling that this man was always careful with his words, always weighed them and used them sparingly. ‘Things happen… Things you couldn’t ever have predicted. And when they do, it can throw you, turn you upside down and your life takes a very different path.’