Thanks to the savage anger coursing through her veins like fire, Orla held it together as she packed up her things, checked out and then drove the two hundred and fifty kilometres from the hotel to the airport in the early hours of the morning. She spent the entire duration of the first flight back to London grimly thanking her lucky stars that she’d discovered Duarte’s true colours before humiliating herself by begging him to let her stay. He wasn’t at all the man she’d thought he was and she’d had a narrow escape, she’d told herself over and over again in the taxi from Heathrow to her flat. Such a narrow escape.
It was only when she walked over her threshold and closed the door on the world outside that she fell apart. Exhausted, miserable and wretched, her armour falling away and vanishing into thin air, she dumped her bags in the hall and sank to the floor.
The pain that lanced through her then was unlike any she’d felt before. It sliced open her chest and tore her heart to shreds. It whipped the breath from her lungs and put a sting in her eyes. She thought she’d been devastated when Matt had broken up with her, but that was a scratch compared to this. This was true agony.
How had things gone so badly wrong? she wondered as the sting became tears that seeped out of her eyes and flowed down her cheeks. They’d been going so well. She’d had no sign that anything was amiss. Apart from the strangely charged moment she’d handed him the custard tarts on their return from Porto, perhaps. At the time, she hadn’t paid it much attention. She’d been too starry-eyed from the scorching encounter in the helicopter and too overwhelmed with emotion for nuance. But now she thought about it, his jaw had been rigidly tight then too. Perhaps she’d gone too far, overstepped a line.
And she’d done it again by pressing him on his marriage. Deep down he couldn’t have wanted to talk about it. It was a harrowing tale. She should never have indulged her curiosity. She should never have forced him to relive it. Yes, she’d tried to backtrack and leave him in peace at the time, but she wouldn’t have been able to for long. It would have festered until the belief that she was right would have pushed her to demand the truth anyway.
What had she been thinking? What on earth had made her believe that she could possibly help? She knew nothing of what he’d been through. Nothing. She wasn’t right. About anything.
She’d been so stupid to allow herself to fall in love with him, she thought on a heaving, painful sob. She’d been swept away by the romance of the location and the situation and read too much into everything. Despite the intensity of their affair, the conversation and the thoughtfulness, they hadn’t had a real relationship. They’d barely stepped off the estate. It had been a one-scene fantasy. The perfect fantasy, in fact, until reality had intruded and smashed it to bits.
She’d been a fool to believe in it and as deluded as Isabelle Baudelaire to assume that she could be the one to bring him back to life and teach him to love. She wasn’t that person. She wouldn’t ever be that person. It was truly over. There was no coming back from this. So what on earth was she going to do now?