Words for Anna: A Second Chance at First Love

By Lara Russell

In that moment, I understood why I had not been able to give up on finding her. We were not two people who travelled the world aimlessly, and we hadn’t been the whole time since we first said goodbye, when we left our birth country empty-handedly. We were a single entity, torn apart, little by little.

Set in Australia, England and South Africa in the early 2000s, Words for Anna is the heart-warming story of first love. Twelve years earlier, Anna and Daniel faced the cruelty of being forced apart as a result of one senseless letter. What happens when they are reunited and given a second chance at love?

Striving to establish a new identity, working in the Australian wine industry, Anna has had no choice but to create the best life she can for herself and her son, Mattie, in Sydney, Australia.

Meanwhile, Daniel, who has been pushing his father’s corporate agenda in the UK for years, as a means to an end, hopes that he may someday see Anna, his lost love, again.

But when they find each other in a chance meeting in Sydney, they are compelled to revisit the past. Forced to work together every day, the secrets Anna has kept for so long are gradually revealed. This, together with the separation they endured and the strange situation they now find themselves in, raises the question – Do they have any chance of rekindling their love?

Words for Anna is a moving novel about hope, resilience and rediscovery.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Nov 11, 2018
• ISBN: 9781925814927

Lara Russell

Lara Russell believes in happy endings. Not the endings of fairy tales, but the kind that she’s found in almost every romantic story she’s ever read. Her characters come to believe too, and they are never disappointed in the end.Lara lives in Australia with her husband, their daughter and Labrador puppies. They are in the middle of an unfinished renovations project, which may or may not be completed before her next book is.The Holiday Romance is her second novel, following her debut novel Words for Anna. Visit lararussell.com, Instagram.com/lararussellauthor, twitter.com/lararussell, and facebook.com/LaraRussellAuthor for more information.

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This is an IndieMosh book

brought to you by MoshPit Publishing

an imprint of Mosher’s Business Support Pty Ltd

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Hazelbrook NSW 2779

https://www.indiemosh.com.au/

Copyright 2018 © Lara Russell

All rights reserved

Licence Notes

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Disclaimer

This story is entirely a work of fiction.

No character in this story is taken from real life. Any resemblance to any person or persons living or dead is accidental and unintentional.

The author, their agents and publishers cannot be held responsible for any claim otherwise and take no responsibility for any such coincidence.

In loving memory of Oumie,

who was always my biggest fan.

1. Discovery

November, 2001

Daniel

‘Remind me again how much I’m paying you?’

My bag started to slip until it dropped at my feet. I balanced my mobile hesitantly between my shoulder and the left side of my face. Then I lost my grip on his report, which I was holding in my other hand, and everything fell to the floor.

‘Even more incredibly,’ I said while grabbing the phone again, ‘I’m arguing with you at my own expense. I’m the one paying for your time, and this phone call.’

I regretted my tone straight away. I could feel myself getting angrier and hating it.

‘I … apologise, Mr Hall,’ Will said, nearly choking on the words I’d heard countless times before. ‘We’ve never had this much trouble finding anyone before.’

I felt a familiar pang of guilt. I imagined Will’s pale face being two shades paler now as he undoubtedly realised how little he had achieved in the last year. But I was one to talk.

‘Just hang on a moment,’ I said, while getting the room card out of my pocket and stuffing it in the slide.

A red light flickered tauntingly. With silent alarm, I jammed the card in further, hoping it would work this time. It did. A glimmer of green appeared, just as the door clicked open. I removed the card and turned the handle. Balancing my bag was just as awkward as before, but I managed to hold on for long enough to fling it into the room, together with the document I had dropped, all while holding the door open with my foot.

I stepped inside the living room of my hotel room suite. ‘Have you tried the universities again?’

‘Yes.’

‘I meant the alumni records.’

‘Those too,’ he said. ‘She might as well have disappeared altogether.’

I sighed. In the far-right corner, above the wooden desk that faced the wall, was a painting of two African women laughing. I imagined for a second that they were staring at the one-sided conversation they were witnessing. I walked across the room and pulled out the desk chair to sit down.

There was a moment’s silence, until he spoke again. ‘I will go over it again this afternoon.’

Poor man. At least he was more organised than I was. ‘Just do what you can, Will,’ I said, refraining from yelling again, which would make us both uncomfortable. It’s not like she wanted to be found. ‘I have to go.’

The painted women’s taunts grabbed my attention again, so much so that I was somewhat surprised by his voice coming from inside my phone’s earpiece. ‘I’ll give you a ring as soon as I find anything.’

‘I appreciate that,’ I said, short with him. ‘Goodbye.’

Still in guilt’s company, caused by my own unjustified yelling, I pressed the off button on my mobile phone. The time on it showed it was 6:00pm. One hour before the teleconference with London.

I got up to retrieve Will’s report from where I had left it, flung on to the floor in front of the extravagant brown leather couch, which I hadn’t even noticed before. Page after page was filled with fluff and inconclusive rubbish. It was about as useful as a child’s blank colouring book.

The best PI in Australia. Right. He was certainly the most expensive of the five, but he had produced nothing. And he hadn’t been the only one.

She had left absolutely no trace of where she had been and what she had done over the last twelve years. There was no record of her applying for a visa, entering Australia or even studying at any university in Sydney, let alone working.

I walked through deco glass doors into the bedroom, feeling ridiculous in the posh space reserved for one or two people, while considering the investigative leads we had had. There was the Dutch school teacher who moved to Australia as a child and settled just outside Cronulla. Then there was the South African lawyer who became increasingly suspicious when Will, shady-looking at the best of times, started following her around and taking her picture, while not doing a very good job at hiding it. Finally, there was the Australian-born poet who chose the name Anna de Beer as an alias. What were the odds? The list didn’t stop there. But none had turned out to be Annie. My Annie.

I once had thought that our love could overcome anything. But that certainty had started to diminish with every year and with every unanswered search. Distance and time seemed too much in the end. And what was left after that?

My thoughts were interrupted by a faint knock on the door. A low feminine voice mumbled something through the wooden frame. I got up, report still in hand, and slowly opened the door.

A dark-haired woman, dressed in a pale-blue cleaning uniform, was hovering in the doorway, balancing at least three bleached white towels on top of her outstretched forearms. She stared me up and down, before blankly looking straight ahead, her face changing from rose to red as soon as her eyes met mine.

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ she said, gesturing towards something behind me. ‘I forgot the extra towels.’

Her cheeks were burning red now, but this reaction didn’t make sense.

‘It’s quite all right,’ I said. My own awkwardness and inability to converse with someone I didn’t know were just under the surface. ‘You can give those to me.’

I stretched out my own arms, while clinging to the report with one hand. A faint smile formed on her face as she handed them to me. Glistening drops of perspiration were forming in the corner of the spot where her hairline began, on her forehead. She dabbed at it with the back of her hand.

‘Thank you,’ I said, waiting for her to say something else, or leave, I wasn’t sure.

‘Have a nice day,’ she said finally, and turned to walk away.

I closed the door. Perhaps we were both shy of strangers. I dropped the towels on the couch and they fell in an untidy heap. I sat back down at the desk and turned to the last page of the PI report. The records from Annie’s grandparents seemed bland in comparison to the first time Will had discovered them. It was nine years since I had started my search and I remembered thinking we were so close. This, despite the traces being of very little help, since her grandparents were deceased. I put the report down. I had reached information overload. And besides, the teleconference was nagging me now.

I supposed I should have been paying more attention to yet another deal I had flown thousands of kilometres and jumped a few time zones to finalise. Although I knew about as much as before, which was basically the name of the company, Hunter’s Ridge, I found myself incapable of concentrating on anything at all. My eyelids drooped with exhaustion. I leaned back in my chair, sinking backwards on what seemed like a saggy spring for support. I almost lost my balance in the process and instinctively jolted forward, trying to steady myself. Who buys these chairs? I thought. There had been one in almost every room I’d ever stayed in.

I was distracted then by something stabbing through the back pocket of my jeans. I reached for whatever was poking into me. It was a rectangular piece of cardboard and it nearly unfolded itself in my hands, I was so eager to read it again. But this time my boarding pass, the proof of another flight to Australia and the inevitable stopover in Asia, just seemed colourless. I sighed again as I mapped out the entire airport of Singapore in my head … I could see the sign of the women’s accessory store right next to the escalator that continued to climb to the business lounge, inviting anyone with a shiny card into a waiting room where suits and laptops gathered, and cheap French champagne continued to flow.

At least it hadn’t been Africa, not yet. Isabelle had already been talking about having Christmas ‘at home’ this year. But calling it ‘home’ didn’t mean shit. It hadn’t been home since she left. Isabelle of all people should have known that. Perhaps sibling intuition just didn’t stretch that far. There was a specific connotation to the date on my boarding pass this time. The 7th of November. Annie’s birthday. A familiar dull pain welled up at the back of my chest and I leaned back again, steadying myself before swinging the chair around to get up.

I walked through the doorway that led to the bedroom and kept going until I was standing in front of the window on the other side of the bed. I reached for the blind cord next to it and pulled. The light hurt my eyes, which strangely darkened my mood. The exposed window stretched across the entire wall, framing the Harbour Bridge on the left and the Sydney Opera House on the opposite side. I glanced towards the bed behind me, which seemed to completely soak up the otherwise redundant space of the floor. I still felt a dull pain so I sat on the deep leather armchair in the corner facing the bed and listened as a whooshing sound disturbed the silence and the air conditioner blew a gush of fake cool air, masking the itchy humidity and heat coming from somewhere outside. It certainly wasn’t warm in London at the moment. One would be lucky to see a glimmer of sunshine at all, with there being nothing but drizzle under a constant cloud of grey. My mood would fit much better in England at the moment – it was the same colour grey.

I stared at the boarding pass again. The 7th day of November. More often than not, I would forget what a day signified, especially while travelling. But not this day. It crept up on me, year after year – only to sucker punch me from behind, every time. It cut through my subconscious and reminded me of the knife that had gutted my existence twelve years ago – in the bleeding country we both originated from, amongst the oppressed and the oppressor alike.

I had never been a fan of politics, but in South Africa the effect was unavoidable. I had been too young to appreciate the full extent of apartheid at the time, having been hidden behind propaganda and the uncertainty everyone had felt, especially kids, but I understood that which filled our history books, now. Although I didn’t speak much Afrikaans, I knew that the word ‘apartheid’ meant ‘separation’. Separating white South Africans from the people who were not lucky enough to be born that way. And everything that came with it. I understood separation. Even if it meant something completely different to me.

I asked myself the question that had plagued me my entire adult life. If the person who had consumed your thoughts for as long as you can remember, hadn’t thought of you, as a result of that separation or whatever else, did that force you to think of her any less? I already knew the answer. She would have turned 30 today. I counted the first twelve birthdays I had spent with her in my head, from the age of six, and then the last twelve, without her. The former was easier to digest. And, ironically enough, I had always thought I would have more time. But time wasn’t the problem in the end; it was time without her that tore everything apart.

I glanced at the clock next to the bed. 6:15pm.

‘Enough!’ I yelled. She had left for a reason. There had to have been a reason.

I forced myself to shelve any more thoughts on the subject for now, at least until I got the teleconference over with.

I got up and made it over to the minibar in front of the bed, where the porter had put the rest of my bags. I grabbed my laptop bag and walked over to the blinds, changing their angle to remove some of the glare in the room. I sat on the side of the bed closest to the window, resting my back against the headrest. The printed document I was looking for was easy to find, having a confidential watermark on every one of the 300 pages, detailing how the merger of my father’s company and Hunter’s Ridge, the company I was here for, was about to take place. As I scanned through the merger details, I wondered again whether I could have done more to find her. But what else could I do but travel to London with Dad? I needed the resources to look for her and my father’s company provided that. I couldn’t stay in Africa while looking for her, that would have been counterproductive. And going to Australia wasn’t possible. Not when moving from apartheid South Africa to the UK so suddenly. I had to stay there, a while. What good did it do when I eventually did come anyway? Will had exhausted the current round of searches. I had been here for an entire month, fighting against one Australian privacy law after another, as I eventually did my own ridiculous search. I really didn’t feel like reading the company’s document anymore. I remembered then that I hadn’t replied to Isabelle’s email yet … Distraction and procrastination, my oldest acquaintances. But I had to reply to her soon. I had to log in for the teleconference in less than 45 minutes, in any case.

I grabbed my laptop and switched it on. It took its time. What felt like an eternity passed, until I could enter my login details. I waited a bit longer for my desktop icons to display and then opened my emails. Isabelle’s was the third one from the top.

From: [e-mail]

To: [e-mail]

Subject: Long time no nothing

Date: Tuesday, 6 November 2001

Hi Dan

I see you’ve replied to my last email, thanks for that. J

No, seriously – Hope you’re not working too hard, there’s really no reason to. His business will keep going regardless, you know.

Speaking of Dad – Why did you tell him about the accident? I told you I was okay. The lion is in much worse shape than me. Now he’s ringing every few days to check on me. I owe you one for that.

Oh, I almost forgot. You would not believe who was mentioned in the Cape Times the other day … Rian Logon. He’s a reporter now, of all things, working for the Journal, I think. Apparently, he went to jail some years ago, some protesting thing during apartheid.

Did you see the article?

By the way, are you OK?

Isabelle

My stomach twisted. Why on earth would she assume that I would be interested in Rian’s news? If it hadn’t been for him, perhaps she wouldn’t have left. If he hadn’t made his move … on her. I pushed the thought of him out of my mind, simply so I could get on with things. I scanned through the rest of my inbox, my good intentions of writing a response to Isabelle’s email dwindling. As my gaze moved to the bottom of the screen, the lines started to blend into a mush of jumbled letters and numbers, becoming completely incomprehensible. I tried to keep my eyes open, in another attempt to focus. But I was too exhausted. Finally, I gave in and slid down to rest my head on the pillow behind me, my laptop already next to me on the bed. I closed my eyes.

All I could make out was Annie’s face, as I remembered her. I refused to open my eyes again in fear that I would have to let go of the image altogether. And then I realised the one thing I had managed to ignore this entire time, almost. Regardless of what led to the day she told me she was leaving, I knew that I was the only one to blame for what had followed. My wounded pride – the only real offender. I was the one who’d left her standing in the middle of our yard, to run away to Stellenbosch, not realising that she would leave before I had had a chance to stop her. I forced my eyes open again and I tried to focus on the abstract painting on the wall, largely overcome by blue and green shades of protuberant paint. I felt sick to my stomach, which generally happened when I was this tired. The natural response was to close my eyes again, and I succumbed willingly.

My mind seemed cloudy, my thoughts obscure. The images