Twelve Days The Beginning - By Jade Reyner Page 0,155

to realise that he enjoyed both pain and inflicting pain on others and there was no way she was ever going to be the woman to accommodate that side of his personality. They both needed to make a clean break and get on with their lives separately.

Celeste returned with the drinks and she passed Elise the remote control as she headed off to the front door to give Sean his cup of coffee. When they had first come out here, Elise had wanted to watch television. She had wanted to be distracted, to watch some mindless junk that would make her forget but now she realised that she didn’t want that at all. She wanted to know everything and now was as good a time as any to fill in the blanks.

“You not watching anything?” Celeste said as she came back into the room.

“No,” Elise paused, “if it’s OK with you, I’d like to talk for a while.”

“Sure,” said Celeste and curled up on the sofa next to Elise, a steaming cup of coffee in her hands. “What do you want to talk about?”

“Christmas Day.” said Elise and she watched as her friend stilled and then very carefully placed her cup down on the coffee table.

“What about Christmas Day?” asked Celeste cautiously.

“I want to know it all, Celeste. Everything that happened – everything that you know happened.”

Celeste shuddered and blew out a long breath, “Are you sure you’re up to this?”

Elise nodded. “I need to know.”

There was a short pause, the minutes ticking through the silence as Elise waited for her friend to respond.

“Okay then,” Celeste said finally and after taking a deep breath, she began speaking at length.

“You turned up here at about 5pm on Christmas Day and when I opened the door I couldn’t believe it – you were in a bad way, a really bad way. You passed out in my arms but I managed to get you to tell me who had done this to you before you lost consciousness completely; that’s how we knew that it was Dale.”

“My first instinct was to call an ambulance but Roger stopped me as he said that that would be the first place that Dale would look for you and I realised that he was right. I panicked then as I didn’t know what to do, so once we had got you to the bed I called Cole, hoping that he would know what we should do. He came blazing in here a few minutes later and you should have seen him Elise - it was like he was completely broken when he saw you. You needed a doctor but it was Christmas, and we had no idea where we could find someone who would come out and see you.” Her friend paused, reaching down to take a sip of her drink.

“Whilst Cole and I were debating what to do, Roger phoned Vaughn and I could hear him roaring down the phone. He was seriously mad. He immediately arranged for Dr Edwards to come over and shortly afterwards, the doctor arrived and we all began to relax a little. Less than an hour later, Vaughn came tearing through the door and I do not want to know how fast he must have driven to get here. I remember thinking it was weird that neither he nor Cole had had a drink, especially since it was Christmas day. It was almost like they both knew you were going to need them.” Celeste’s gaze became wistful as she seemed to consider the romance and beauty of that idea.

“Anyway,” she continued, “Dr Edwards tried to take care of you but Vaughn wouldn’t leave your side so he ended up having to ask him to leave the room whilst he examined you. Vaughn kept going on and on about that ‘bastard’ and how he should have known that this would happen and he kept blaming himself for not being here. He was saying he never should have gone to his sister’s. Cole was also doing a pretty good job of guilt-tripping himself so in the end, Roger sat them both down and threatened to knock their heads together if they didn’t give it a rest. I don’t know exactly what he said but whatever it was it worked and they both calmed down and focused on what was important – you.”

Celeste stopped for a moment and took another sip of her drink. “I don’t know how much else you want to know, Elise.”