Never Say Goodbye by Susan Lewis Read Free Book Online

friend. ‘How are you? Have you seen any of the wedding photos yet?’
    ‘Yes, they’re lovely,’ Bel assured her, because they were. ‘Did you get the link? Have you seen them yourself?’
    ‘Yes, we’re so happy with them. Aren’t they gorgeous of the kids? And there are some beautiful shots of you.’
    Nick suddenly came back on the line. ‘I promise you, I’ll never . . .’ he called out laughingly, but whatever he went on to say was lost as the connection failed.
    Putting the phone back on the nightstand, Bel lay in the darkness listening to the rain beating the windows, while trying to imagine where Nick and Kristina were now. It wasn’t easy to picture their surroundings, since the Sacred Valley of the Incas didn’t feature amongst the many places in the world Bel had visited. Nick and Kristina, archaeologists both, had joined a dig for their honeymoon. This was how they’d met, on a project somewhere in Israel, where Nick had gone in an effort to escape his grief after Natalia’s death.
    Try as Bel might, she simply couldn’t understand how Nick had found himself able to marry again so soon. It didn’t make any sense to her, when he’d always been so crazy about Talia. How had he got over the loss so quickly, when so much of Talia was still all around them? He hadn’t even emptied her wardrobes or cleared away the photographs by the time he’d brought Kristina home to meet Oscar and Nell.
    Five months after that, he and Kristina had tied the knot, and now there they were, in the depths of Peru, probably not thinking about Talia at all, while Bel hardly ever stopped. How on earth was she going to accept Kristina into the family when everything about her presence felt wrong? It wasn’t that she disliked the woman – under any other circumstances she was sure they’d get along well. Kristina had apparently been good friends with Talia when they’d spent time in Egypt together during their uni days, though Bel had no recollection of Talia ever mentioning anyone of that name back then.
    It didn’t mean anything; she and Talia had made plenty of friends and acquaintances over the years that the other knew nothing about. They hadn’t gone to the same uni, or chosen the same subjects, nor had they shared a home after graduating and moving to London. By then Talia had been with Nick, so they had found a place together, while she, Bel, all fired up about winning an internship at Tate Modern, had splashed out on a studio close to the river at Limehouse.
    Though she and Talia had inherited a small fortune from their beloved mother after her untimely death while they were still in their teens, their father had tried to pay for everything back then, because that was what their father did, try to throw money at his daughters. Or, put more accurately, at his guilt. Presumably he thought he was buying off his conscience, or perhaps buying their silence, and Bel supposed that in a way he’d acquired the latter. They never talked about him to anyone; as far as they were concerned, it was as if he was dead. The tragedy of it, at least to Bel and Talia, was that their mother had seemed to love him in spite of his violence. She’d even considered him a doting father, or as doting as he could be given his own torturous past. Bel didn’t know too much about that, nor did she want to. She only felt relieved that after their mother’s death their father, a prolific and highly regarded artist, had taken himself off to some Pacific island where he could, presumably, indulge his passions more freely without ever having contact with his daughters again.
    He hadn’t even returned for Talia’s funeral, and Bel was profoundly glad of that, since she knew he was the last person on earth Talia would have wanted there.
    Her eyes closed as the pain of her sister’s loss surged through her in a relentless wave of longing.
    Was a day ever going to dawn when she didn’t wish for Talia to be alive again, when she wouldn’t