Nowhere Girl by Ruth Dugdall Read Free Book Online Page B

stayed at the edge, watching her daughter play with the dog. Blinking at the water, it’s silvery blue-green sheen, transparent and beautiful. The lake was edged by fir trees that graded in colour from lime to deep moss green, flanking the hills around them. Cate felt lucky to have escaped the past and Suffolk and all that had meant for her, but she found that even in this place she was still herself. Unable to shake the pensiveness, her habitual tendency to see the glass as half-empty. That trait had always been something she had associated with her work, or her marital struggles with Tim, more latterly with her sister, Liz, reappearing in her life. She shivered, no longer from the cold, but now thinking about the court case against her father, which she was avoiding by being here. The first day of his trial was tomorrow.
    She was miles away from all that, she had escaped all the darkness of her past and her career. Yet now, she realised her need to seek the darker side of a situation was habitual to her. Because rather than enjoying the beauty laid out in front of her she was straining her ears, and her terrible French, to try and decipher what Olivier was saying so urgently into his phone.
    “Mum, look!” Amelia turned slowly, her face full of delight, and Cate saw the butterfly that had landed on her forearm, the copper wings and black body, no doubt attracted by the bright white of Amelia’s skin or the salty sheen of the factor 50.
    The butterfly stayed put for so long that Amelia gave it a name, “Valeria, like the girl in my class,” and asked if she could take him home. Olivier was still in conversation under the tree, and the weather had not yet changed but the ice saints were there, in Cate’s mind and heart, the sudden drop from hot to cold that was so swift it could not be accounted for or predicted.
Something has happened
.
    Olivier stopped talking, the phone was returned to his pocket, and then he was on the foreshore with Amelia, marvelling as the butterfly flew away in a flash of gold, and showing her how to choose the flattest flint to skim across the silvery surface.
    Luxembourg was so different from the Suffolk landscape of yellow rape fields, its huge skies and brown marshlands. Cate was now in a setting that seemed straight from a fairy tale, unending forests of Hansel and Gretel, pretty stone turrets of chateaux and ancient castles. It was all unreal. Beautiful but strange. And the man she was with, she did not yet completely understand why he had asked her to come. Even now, six weeks after arriving in Luxembourg, she was unclear as to why he had invited her. It didn’t seem that they were in the midst of a great romance, though each night they made love, because each day his activity was a mystery to her. Paul had been right, she did not leave Suffolk because she wanted to be with Olivier; she was with Olivier because she needed to leave Suffolk.
    She should really call home. Liz and her mother would, even now, be preparing for court. Her father, whom she had not seen in almost two decades, would be going over his statement, thinking through his defence, probably meeting his barrister for a final time before the trial. This was what she was running from.
    And here she was, by a lake watching a white dingy sail past with baby blue sails, red buoys, yellow flags marked a path through the flat water. Isolated from all that was familiar, from her mother and Liz, from the career she had spent so many years working at. This was a chance to start again but also a blank page and whatever came to be written there, she was the only author. She was no longer a child, no longer subject to managers or budget cuts. There was no ex-husband breathing down her neck. This realisation was fascinating yet frightening.
    Olivier re-joined her, sitting heavily on the grassy bank, looping an arm around her waist.
    “Everything okay?” she asked him, picking up her sketch book and drawing the lines of the lake,