The Darkest of Shadows (46 page)

“I don’t know,” Lawrence admitted, his mind running through a million thoughts.

“Where is she?” Reed caught on finally. “Lawrence, tell me she’s all right.”

“I don’t know where she is. She ran.”

“Oh, my God. I can’t handle this.” Reed was nearly hyperventilating.

“Is Duncan there?” Lawrence asked. “Put Duncan on, Reed.” A moment later Lawrence heard the sound of the phone being passed around.

“Lawrence, this is Duncan, Reed’s husband.” Lawrence liked the calmness of his voice. Here was someone in control.

“Duncan. What’s happening over there?”

“Billy’s in hospital; the doctors say it isn’t good. Reed’s been there with him the last few days, and she’s exhausted.”

“What did she tell Lilly?”

“That he was sick. He’s got pneumonia, and the doctors say it’s time for the family to say good-bye. She asked Lilly to come home.”

“What did Lilly say?”

“She’s on her way.”

“Thanks, Duncan.” Lawrence breathed a bit easier. “I’ll call you when I get to Australia. You take care of Reed, and I’ll look after Lilly.”

“I hope so, Lawrence.” Duncan responded. “Because you didn’t see her before and I’m not sure how this is going to affect her. I don’t think I could live through that again, and I know that Lilly most certainly wouldn’t.”

Lawrence disconnected the call and started at the phone in his hand for long moment.

“We’re going to Australia?” Nicholas announced with forced cheerfulness. Lawrence lifted his gaze and met Nicholas’s eyes, then finally nodded.

“Yes, we are,” he replied.

“Good.” He nodded. “Let me grab my passport, and I’ll meet you back in the lobby in ten. He grabbed Isobel’s hand and pulled her back into the restaurant.

“Charlie.” Lawrence snapped back to focus. “Lilly is going to try and get a flight back to Sydney tonight. She’ll have to try for Heathrow. Go, find her, and get on that flight, but don’t let her see you. Just stay close to her and make sure she’s safe. I’ll fly over and meet you there.”

Charlie gave a nod and disappeared into the darkness.

Ten minutes later, Nicholas and Lawrence, with Frost following, headed out of town to the small airport that they used for the corporate jet. Lawrence had already phoned ahead to warn them and have them start flight preparations.

They were airborne a full hour before Lilly’s flight left Heathrow.

Fourteen long hours later, and we landed in Singapore. The one thing that I hadn’t checked when I was booking the flight the night before was the layover. Five hours. God, what on earth was I going to do for five hours? It was an interminably long delay.

I ended up sitting in a café, drinking latte after latte. Anything to keep my mind off what waited for me at the end of this flight.

“Hi.” A voice sounded from beside me, and I nearly poured my coffee down my dress. “Sorry,” the voice apologized. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”

I turned to watch a man, young, early thirties, sit down at the table across from me. Uninvited. I didn’t answer him; I just watched in astonishment and he settled down with his own coffee.

“Are you traveling far?” He asked.

I contemplated ignoring the question, ignoring him, but I didn’t have the energy to be that rude. “Sydney.”

“Me, too,” he said. “I’m on a layover from Paris. I’ve got another two hours before my flight leaves.”

Super. “Same,” I reluctantly admitted, and hoped this man flew economy.

But by the looks of the suit he was wearing, I doubted it. It wasn’t really high-end, but it was a suit, so he was probably a corporate traveler, therefore business class.

“Do you live in Sydney?”

I shook my head. “London.” I wondered when he would get sick of my one-word answers, but at least he was keeping me occupied.

“I love London. Don’t get there as much as I would like, however.”

I just nodded and sipped my coffee.

“Are you traveling on business?” he asked, when he didn’t get any further response from me.

I shook my head.

“On holidays, then.” He assumed.

I shook my head again, but he still didn’t get it. I was over his questions. “I ran out of a restaurant in the middle of the meal to grab the first flight I could find that would get me back to Australia, in the mad hope that I might get there in time to say good-bye to my father before he dies.”

He sat in stunned silence for a full minute. “Sorry,” he finally stammered, then stood, and with a last glance back, he walked away.

The plane landed in Sydney, and once again I found myself looking for a flight. When I left London, I hadn’t really thought much further than getting from England to Australia. I also didn’t plan how to get from Sydney to my hometown of Newcastle. That would take another flight. But first I had to transfer from the international terminal to the domestic one. By the time I got through immigration and customs, nearly an hour had passed since we landed.

I took one look at the long line of people waiting for a taxi, and I chose the much cheaper ride in the shuttle bus. It felt strange, mostly for that fact that I had no luggage, was wearing a dress that cost more than two thousand pounds, probably looked like hell, and was riding a public bus with what looked to be mostly backpackers. I was getting my fair share of stares.

Getting a flight from Sydney to Newcastle was much easier than I expected. They left every hour, so I only had a relatively short wait for my next flight. However, by this stage, I was most definitely feeling sick with apprehension. The closer I got to Newcastle, the closer I came to the end of my untouchable world. Reality would intrude back with alarming clarity in less than an hour. I couldn’t ignore my phone when I arrived in Newcastle. For a start, I needed to know what hospital my dad was in. Phoning Reed would become a necessity.

Newcastle airport was small but efficient. I was offloaded with the other passengers, all economy class, and on my way to the taxi in a relatively short period of time. My sister lived in town, my dad in a smaller suburb on the outskirts of the city, but I wasn’t quite sure where to go first. I gave the taxi driver instructions to just head for the city. I could always change direction later.

I finally turned my phone on and cleared the massive number of missed calls without listening to a single one.

“Can you take me to the Hospital, please?” I asked the driver.

I didn’t ring Reed when I got there. I needed time to prepare myself. I knew that if I saw her first, I would break down and not be able to do this at all. So I checked with reception, and they gave me his room number. I took that as a positive sign that he was still alive. And as long as he stayed that way, there was a barrier between me and the blackness of despair.

I walked the halls of the hospital and tried not to see anything or anyone. I tried to block images of a similar place, of a similar feeling, but a much different time. To me, hospitals were death, and they bought those images to the forefront of my mind. Images I didn’t need right now, that didn’t help me face what I was heading toward.

The door to his room was open when I reached it, but I couldn’t see anything inside, because a curtain blocked my vision. I could hear voices, and my eyes closed at the sound of Reed’s voice and then Duncan’s hushed response. I leaned against the wall beside the door and waited. I waited for the time when it felt right to walk in there, when it felt like my heart wasn’t going to explode in my chest, when I thought I could handle what was coming without giving myself up to the darkness and becoming a casualty to its embrace.

It was Reed’s quietly whispered words that finally made me move. “Hold on, Daddy. Just a little longer, until Lilly gets here.”

The tears were streaming down my face when I pushed back the curtain and walked into the room.

Reed and Duncan were standing on either side of the bed, and Reed had one of dad’s hands cradled in hers. She saw me, saw my tears, and that burst the dam on her own emotions. Her shoulders shook with the force of her sobs. I walked up beside her, my tears silent and steady.

I looked down on the man who was my father. He had tubes coming out of both arms, a breathing tube was in his nose, and his eyes were closed. There was a faint tinge of pain to his face, and his breathing was ragged and hoarse. I leaned over and laid a soft kiss on his cheek.

“I’m here, Daddy,” I whispered to him, and then rested my face against his. I loved him, and God, it hurt to lose him. So much. Too much. Unbelievably.

I stepped back a pace to draw a painful breath into my lungs; then Duncan came around the bed and took Reed into his arms. He held her and whispered soft, soothing sounds over and over. I moved, around the bed, my body strangely numb, and sat down on the chair that Duncan had been using. I reached out slowly and took Dad’s hand in mine, breathing in the scent of him.

I don’t know how long I sat there, and I’m not sure exactly what made me up look up, but something changed—his breathing, or maybe it was the coldness that flushed through his body and burned against my hand— something made me look up, and my eyes met Reed’s as she sat across the bed from me. A mirror of my own grief. It was in that scene, with that company, that my father breathed his last breath. It was a ragged sound, and the silence that followed was profound. A whole minute or more passed before it became a reality.

I dropped his hand suddenly; the coldness of it hurt to touch. My dad was dead. I had made it in just enough time to watch him die.

Oh, God. I stood and stepped back, one pace, then another, then another. Oh, God. I was shivering, cold. Scared. Terrified. My breath coming too fast. My eyes met Duncan’s for a horrified moment, and I knew that I couldn’t do this. Not again.

“Lilly.” Duncan called my name, but it meant nothing to me.

I turned and crashed into a solid wall of heat and muscle. I bounced back a step, and a moment later my eyes focused on something astonishing.

I threw myself into Lawrence’s arms and sobbed my heart out. Nothing in that moment could have gotten me to let go of him. I tried to claw my way closer to him, crawl into his skin, anything to get away from the pain that was slashing through me. His arms wrapped tightly around me, and his head rested against the top of mine as he whispered softly into my hair. “I’m here, Lilly. It’s OK, baby.”

Over and over again, until eventually the sobs lessened; the tears still fell, but with less force. My lungs started working properly and allowed me to breathe more evenly, and everything calmed, slowed. The room became quiet, with just the soft sounds of slow, even breathing as Reed and I recovered from the death of our father.

I didn’t dare pull away from Lawrence. I stared at the material of his shirt, memorized the texture, the weave, the smell, his smell. I tucked my arms inside his jacket and hid in the warmth of his embrace.

He comforted me in a way that no one else could have. He was my tether to reality, and without him, I was certain that I would have fallen victim to the craziness that called to me in my darkest moments. Lawrence kept the shadows far enough away so that I could resist its call.

And I loved him.

I tilted my head up to stare in his eyes. Those beautiful, stunning, knowing eyes that I had come to love with a wholeness that surprised me. I hadn’t thought I would ever get that again. I had loved my husband, my soul mate, and I had lost him. I didn’t think it fair that I be given another chance with a man just as special as he had been.

“Shhh.” Lawrence’s look said that he understood. He knew I loved him. I saw it as plainly as if he spoke the words aloud. And I also saw the answering love in his eyes. He loved me, for whatever reasons that he had, he loved the good and the bad of me. He knew me, he still accepted me, and he loved me.

Oh, God, what would I do if I lost him? I felt the rush of fear bombard my body as it tried to comprehend that thought.

“Shhh,” he whispered again. “Don’t worry about it now.” It was almost like he knew what I was thinking. “Let’s take it one thing at a time. Give yourself time to deal with this first, and then we’ll talk about the other things later.”

I nodded and buried my head back against his chest. I wanted to stay there forever.

I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and turned just a fraction to see Reed standing with Duncan. His arms were still around her, but she had turned and was facing more toward me. Her face was tearstained and red, and when our eyes met, we shared a long, understanding look. We both hurt. This was our dad. We had already buried our mother, and now with Dad gone, there was only us left. Just Reed and me. We were all the family we had now.

We stood, looking at each other for a while, taking the time to reconnect and recover. It had been nearly four years since I had seen her.

Sometimes it seemed longer than that, and other times it seemed not that long ago that I had left. Today, it felt like centuries.

“Hi,” she whispered to me.

I smiled gently. “Hi, baby sister,” I answered, but neither of us moved.

“I’m glad you came,” she said after a while.

“Me too.” I think I actually meant it.

Eventually the doctors came, and the room was just too small for everyone to stay.