Letting You Go Read Online Free PDF

if too sudden a moment might make it all disappear again like an illusion. ‘I missed you too, Finn.’
    His face was close enough to her that she could see tiny flecks of hazel in the green of his irises, the contours where laughter had left its footprint in the lines beside his eyes. Finn ran his fingertips from Alex’s hip along her naked spine and began trailing delicate circular shapes over her shoulders. Alex felt her goose-pimples rise to greet him. Finn had found her again. He’d come all this way and he’d found her.
    Alex reached her fingers to tease a lock of hair behind his ear. She’d been so buried in her coursework she hadn’t noticed the sudden arrival of winter in the city, not until she’d watched it walk in on the ends of his hair. She’d opened the secured door of her student halls and there he was, waiting under a tree, pearls of new snow clinging to the same long layers he’d worn through college. Nearly two hundred miles and he’d been standing there as if the end of the earth wouldn’t be too far.
    ‘Your mum told me how to find you,’ he’d said. And that was it, the snowflake that tipped the avalanche.
    It was a perfect crisp November night and they’d spent it, some of it, talking through the year they’d spent adrift while the Old Girl had carried on flowing and the world had carried on turning. And now here they were, naked and blissfully fatigued in a single bed in a pokey little bedroom in a student house a million miles away from Eilidh Falls. And it was perfect.
    Blythe had given Finn the address. Alex sent a quiet
thank you
out into the snowy darkness and hoped her mum would somehow feel it and think of Alex and Finn right then. Blythe was a sucker for a good love story; she’d probably compared theirs to the kind of love all of Blythe’s favourite operas were made from. Of adversity and triumph and explosions of something precious happening between two people.
Luminous and powerful, darling!
She would say.
Love as beautiful and terrifying as a bolt of lightning!
    Finn propped himself up on an elbow. ‘What are you thinking about?’
    Alex’s hand naturally migrated to the hardness of his stomach. The grin got the better of her as soon as she opened her mouth. ‘Lightning.’
    Finn’s mouth gave in to a smile too. He was still beautiful; the tiny scar Ted’s wedding band had left over the bridge of his nose hadn’t changed him. A monster had risen in Alex’s dad that night. Thankfully, none of them had ever seen it since.
    Alex didn’t see Finn’s head furrow. ‘OK, so what are you thinking about
now
?’
    She didn’t want to let any more thoughts of her dad in. ‘Nothing,’ Alex replied but she already knew it was too late. She stroked Finn’s side. A futile gesture, as if she was trying to tame a piece of her coursework before the clay hardened and left her with something incomplete, misshapen.
    ‘Let me tell him, Alex.’
    ‘No. Not yet.’
    ‘Alex, he can punch me all he likes if it makes him feel better. It won’t change anything.’
    ‘I know. I just … don’t want you to say anything that …’
    ‘But I
want
to. I want to say it to him. I love you, Foster.’
    ‘I love you too.’ She really did. It was the only certainty. But Finn’s expression had already changed.
    He cut her a smile and nodded softly to himself. ‘I know you do, Foster. You just don’t want anyone to know it.’

CHAPTER 4
    T he sky was like a lingering bruise on the outskirts of town. Alex pulled off the main road and cruised alongside the Old Girl into Eilidh Falls, the light still steeped in the eeriness of a new day. Just over two hours without a dip into a service station was a new personal best, made possible only by non-existent traffic and two eyelid-expanding double espressos before leaving the flat.
    Alex pinched between her eyes, trying to stave off her tiredness. Her dad would go mad if he knew how little sleep she’d had. She shifted in the driver’s seat,