Helping Sarah

Chapter 36

Michael

Sarah wasn't answering her phone, and I was swiftly going out of my mind.

Both Lisa and I had called and texted her over and over again since she'd walked out of Capra Games, but neither of us were getting a reply.

It was close to four in the afternoon. It was hours ago that Sarah had left me standing in the middle of my office with my heart beneath my own two feet, stomped on by my own idiocy. By now it wasn't just the pain of losing all that I had come to crave that was making me clutch at my hair, it was worry.

I needed to talk to Sarah. I needed to know where she was and that she was safe.

Courtesy of Lisa, I knew Charlie was with his grandparents as arranged by Sarah this morning when I'd thought I would be spending the afternoon apologizing to her and doing whatever it would take to make her forgive me.

That was still my plan. I was not going to give up. I wanted Sarah. I didn't care what it took, I was going to tell her how sorry I was and at least attempt to get her to talk to me long enough that I could get her to tell me what it would take for her to forgive me.

Only, right now, I couldn't tell her anything because I had no idea where she was.

If Sarah didn't turn up soon, or at the very least responded to a text to let me know where she was, I was going to set up camp outside Benji and Helen's house until she came for her son.

At the moment, I was in my car outside her flat. She wasn't there. I had hammered on her door and called her name until Mrs Boyce next door had come out wielding her broom and snapped at me that she was calling the police if I didn't stop making such a racket.

So I sat in my car in the car park, in a spot where I could see the front door of Sarah's building. Waiting. Worrying. Berating myself for ruining the best thing that had ever happened to me. And banging my head against the steering wheel, a couple of times startling myself when I hit the horn.

I deserved this. I'd had so many chances to tell Sarah everything, to come clean, and I hadn't taken a single one of them. Instead, I'd invented excuse after excuse as to why it wasn't the right time that were just plain idiotic. It didn't matter that I had tried to tell her. All that mattered was that I hadn't.

Groaning, I folded my arms across the top of the steering wheel and leaned my forehead on top, but the sound of a car made me jerk upright so abruptly I banged me knee against the underside of the steering wheel. But the pain didn't register. I was too focused on the car turning into the car park and stopping five spots over from me.

Sarah was in the passenger seat, but I didn't recognize the strange man who got out from the driver's side. He was taller than me, about my age, and well built. I recognized the car as an Audi A8, a model I had looked at myself before I'd settled on the Bentley, and his dark suit and matching waistcoat sat too well over his broad shoulders for it to not be tailor-made.

The last time I had worn such a get-up had been at my sister's wedding four years ago. My hands tightened around the steering wheel while I watched Sarah hug the man.

When she leaned up to kiss his cheek, I opened my door and got out.

The sound made them both look over, and Sarah fell back down to her feet again. Her smile faded.

She spoke to the man who nodded and crossed his arms over his impressive chest, but he stayed by his car when she walked towards me.

"Hi," I said to her. I didn't move. I wanted to go to her, hug her and say all those words tumbling on my mind, but the look of pain I had last seen on Sarah's face held me back. As did the stranger behind her and the scowl he directed at me. It held my arms by my sides instead of throwing them around her to hold her as tight as I could.