The Liberation of Alice Love - Abby McDonald [146]
Flora shook her head.
“You need to call him, now,” Alice repeated, fixing Flora with an even gaze. “I know you think this is all on you, that you have to deal with how you feel alone, but sweetie, we’re talking about Stefan. He’ll do anything for you.”
It didn’t seem as if her words had any impact, but then Alice caught sight of a flicker—just a flicker of longing in Flora’s expression.
“You miss him, don’t you?” Alice asked softly. “I can tell you do; you’ve checked that phone for messages a dozen times in the last hour.”
Silence.
“So let me call him for you,” she offered. “I won’t say what’s been going on, but I could get him down here. Then, you could talk, properly, away from everything.”
Flora was wavering, she could tell, so Alice unleashed her final weapon: guilt. “Has he ever let you down before?” she prompted, looking right in her eyes. Flora shook her head slowly. “So why don’t you give him this chance—hasn’t he earned that much by now?”
It was a low blow, and a slow tear began to trickle down Flora’s cheek in response, but Alice was determined. If it had been anyone else, she would have taken Flora’s side unreservedly. But for all her sister’s anxiety, Alice knew in her heart that Stefan was made of sterner stuff. A foreign residency, some violent paintings, even the delay of his much-wanted family—he would give it all to Flora in a heartbeat, despite what she may fear.
“OK,” Flora whispered finally. “I’ll talk to him.”
Alice summoned Stefan that evening with a vague invitation to drive down and join them all for a family weekend. Then, despite Flora’s wide-eyed pleas, she left. Some things, she couldn’t mediate, but they would come through this. Alice hadn’t spent the past three years watching them with a wistful eye not to know the steel that ran beneath their relationship, even if Flora had been thrown into doubt by her own experience of love and the limits it so often showed.
Catching the late train moments before it left, Alice curled up in an empty car and gazed absently out at the dark blur of country landscape and small towns that would take her back to London. They were more alike than Alice had imagined, she and Flora both. She was old enough not to feel it so keenly, but the legacies of their parents’ various carelessness had left their mark. Flora kept herself in a state of perpetual need, and Alice? Well, she realized, she’d long ago rejected the idea of needing anyone at all; spending years constructing her life to be a calm, uncomplicated, and, in the end, solitary pursuit.
But people could change. Flora had already come a long way from the needy child who first married Stefan. Now, she clearly burned for some independence and autonomy, even if she hadn’t yet found a way to understand those desires. And Alice too—she’d been gradually inching away from that old life of hers, whether through her hunt for Ella, or more basic restlessness, she wasn’t sure. It struck her now that she might have been wrong, thinking everything had switched back to the way it had been—before Ella, or any of this drama had begun. Despite the woeful current state of her life, all was not entirely lost, Alice decided. Whatever the outcome with Nathan, or her job, she was no longer willing to sit back anymore, watching everybody else’s drama unfold and only edging in afterward, to restore order and calm. Those days, she realized with quiet measure of satisfaction, were behind her for good.
Chapter Thirty-two
Alice returned to London with a new sense of purpose. Her instincts to organize and find some sort of order in the chaos now applied more than ever to her own life. The hopeful messages and pleading texts were clearly not working, and however much she longed to reconcile, Alice knew that all the apologies in the world wouldn’t make Nathan listen if he didn’t want to. So, making one last effort to reach him, she handwrote a