Page 77 of All Summer Long

‘We need to check the rest,’ Alice whispered, half running through the trees towards the tree house. More graffiti, more crude insults.

Standing looking up at it with her hand over her mouth, Alice felt tears spring into her eyes. All of her hopes and dreams were tied up here along with all of her happy memories of her romance with Robinson.

‘A jealous fan, maybe?’ Niamh offered, obviously meaning someone connected to Robinson.

‘I guess it could be,’ Alice said, looking at the deck and remembering the fish and chip supper she’d shared there with Robinson. It seemed a lifetime ago now.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I need to get down to the yurt. If that’s been sprayed, there’s no way I’ll get it out.’

It was worse than she could have imagined. It hadn’t just been sprayed. The fabric sides had been slashed through completely.

‘No, no, no!’ Alice ran to it, tears running down her face as she ran a hand down one of the gashes as tenderly as if it were a wound. ‘Why, Niamh? Why?’

Niamh pulled her in to a hug, crying herself too at the shock and the unfairness, at the vandalism of something so precious to her friend.

An awful thought had Alice running again, no thought for the fact that she was barefoot as she hurled herself through the woods towards the far meadow.

Banjo. Big, beautiful Banjo.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Indescribable relief washed through Alice’s body at the sight of the horse grazing unharmed near to the stable Robinson had built for him. She gasped for air, her hands on her knees as she bent double to try to get her breath back. Niamh was right behind her, her hand resting on Alice’s back as she breathed heavily.

‘He’s fine, he’s fine, he’s fine,’ she soothed, repeating it over and over to reassure both Alice and herself. And then she gasped and took off across the grass towards the gypsy caravan at full pelt as Alice straightened to see what had Niamh running again.

There was someone there.

A figure dressed in dark jeans and a hoody ran away from the caravan towards the cover of the woods, back towards Alice because there was no way out from the other end of the meadow.

Acting purely on instinct, Alice gave chase too as the figure spotted her too late and tried to veer away. Her fingers were within inches of the intruder’s hood when her bare foot caught in a branch and she went down hard, still grabbing out for an ankle, a shoe, anything to stop whoever it was that hated her so much that they’d do this.

‘No!’ she yelled, the sound wrenching from her body as the dark figure put more space between them. Niamh faltered beside her, caught in the agony of indecision between helping her friend or catching the intruder.

‘Go!’ Alice yelled, half dragging herself up despite the pain that shot through her ribs. Niamh glanced down once and then hurled herself off again, determined. Whoever it was was almost at the house now; if they made it round to the front and into the street there was every chance they’d melt away into the spider’s web of old alleys and gardens that made up the village. Niamh knew she had two minutes at best and gave it her all, her chest on fire, and then someone else came striding up the driveway directly into a collision path with the intruder, way too late for them to do anything else but smash straight into each other and both hit the ground hard.

‘Catch them!’ Niamh yelled at Brad, who looked up in dazed confusion as the intruder scrabbled away from him across the gravel. He reached out and managed to grab hold of a leg, and a second later in a show of surprising strength he dragged the person on their back and managed to sit himself astride their middle.

Alice stumbled across the gravel, bleeding from a gash near her hairline, her feet cut to ribbons and clutching her ribs, and Niamh dropped down beside Brad and his wriggling catch. All three of them stared down in horror as the hood on the intruder’s jumper fell back to reveal who had felt such a level of hatred for Alice as to wreak such destruction and horror.

Brad blanched.

‘Felicity?’ he said, staring in shock at the woman bucking furiously beneath him.

‘Oooh, this is just too much!’ Niamh said, and launched herself at the woman on the floor.

Brad managed to pull her off, at the same time as dragging his ex-lover to her feet and staring at her accusingly.

‘You’re supposed to be in America,’ he spat out. ‘Doing my job, remember?’

Even the prettiest of faces could be ugly in anger, and in that moment Felicity Shaw was hideous.

‘I got fired,’ she hissed. ‘Because of you!’ She jabbed him in the chest, catching the spot that was still tender from Lena doing the same thing.

‘Me?’ he said, rubbing his chest and scowling.

Felicity had the dangerous glint in her eye of someone with nothing left to lose. ‘I took too much time off, they said. Wasn’t sparkly enough for them, and it was all your fault. You reduced me to this because you never loved me enough, it was always Alice this, Alice that, Alice the fucking other.’

Felicity shot daggers at Alice, who would later see the irony of the woman who’d wrecked her life accusing her of doing the very same thing.

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