P 18–21
The Favor Copyright © 2022 by Nicci French.
“Anyway, congratulations,” said Liam, holding up his coffee cup.
“What about?”
“About your upcoming marriage.”
“How do you know about that?”
“Someone told me. When I was tracking you down.”
Jude laughed. “Tracking me down? What are you, a private detective?”
“Just an old friend.” He sipped his coffee. “A doctor, like you always said you’d be. You did it.”
Jude’s throat felt tight. She had thought she would never see Liam again, and yet over the years she had imagined meeting him: by chance, on a bus, on a street, in a crowd of people, walking in the Clee Hills by her parents’ house in Shropshire. Because there were things that she needed to say, had needed to say for over a decade, although now the moment had actually come she didn’t know how to start saying them.
“I should be the one tracking you down,” she said, haltingly. “I know that you . . .” She stopped. “I’ve never forgotten.”
He frowned, as if he was considering this. When he spoke, he didn’t seem angry or even sad. Just reflective, as if he were talking about someone else.
“I made some choices,” he said. “Not always good choices. You probably heard about how I messed up my exams, on top of everything else.”
“I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right. It happens. And things are better now, on the whole. I’ve got some stuff to sort out but I’m fine.” He paused a beat and then smiled—not ironically or one of his knowing half-smiles, but a smile that transformed his face and made him look younger. “I’ve got a little kid,” he said. “Alfie. He’s one now.”
Jude blinked. “Wow. A son! Does he look like you?”
“People say so. Poor little guy.”
“That’s so nice.” She wanted to cry but didn’t know why. She smiled instead.
“Yeah, well.”
Jude took a deep breath. “I need to say something.”
“All right.”
“First, before I say it. I’m with Nat and I’m lucky to have him and we’re going to get married, well, you know that, and we’re buying a place together.”
“Good.” His tone was dry.
She put out a hand and gripped his; it was dry and warm and his fingers curled around hers.
“No, listen, I’m being serious. I had to say that first, because I really want to say something else.” She took another breath. “I loved you so much, Liam, back then. I was smitten. Blown away. You were all I could think about. And for ages after, I thought about you. For years, really.”
Jude almost gasped as she said this. She had never said anything like this to him at the time. She had never said anything like this out loud. She thought of Nat and felt a stab of guilt.
Liam shook his head slowly. “You turned my life upside down too, you know.”
“And then it got taken away. After the crash.” Now Jude spoke very carefully and slowly. “When I look back on it, it’s like a kind of fairy tale. This awful thing happened and at the end of it, I got everything I wanted and you lost most of what you wanted.” Jude looked at Liam but she couldn’t see any response. She couldn’t tell what he felt. “Afterward, you rejected me. You didn’t want to see me. I felt you hated the sight of me because of what we had been through and then I went into a tunnel and tried to pretend none of it had ever happened. I’m ashamed of that.”
“It was ten years ago,” said Liam softly.
“Eleven,” said Jude. “More than eleven.”
“We were just kids.”
“I know. And here we are, all grown up.”
She looked down at her coffee. She had barely even touched it. She took a sip. It was cold. Without asking her, Liam picked up the two coffee cups, took them over to the counter and came back with two fresh ones.
“Here,” he said. “Drink it before it gets cold too.”
Jude sipped her coffee; her head buzzed mildly.
“You haven’t asked me why I got back in touch with you.”
“It’s a shock. I’m still processing it all. Okay, so why have you got back in touch with me?”
Liam grinned and suddenly he looked just like when he was a teenager, when she was in love with him, and she could feel it right in her chest.
“I want you to do me a favor,” he said. His eyes were black as sloes.
“A favor?”
“Yes.”
In this twisty new stand-alone novel from internationally bestselling author Nicci French, a young woman agrees to do a favor for her first love—but when things go horribly wrong, one small task turns into a murder investigation that completely upends her life, ensnaring her in a deadly web of secrets and lies.
It’s a simple enough favor.
Jude hasn’t seen Liam in years, but when he shows up at her work asking for a favor, she finds she can’t refuse. All Jude has to do is pick Liam up at a country train station—without telling anyone. So what if she has to lie to her fiancé? Jude is still committed to him and their imminent wedding, even if she and Liam were in love once.
She owes him.
After the car crash that changed everything years ago, bright, ambitious Jude went to medical school, back on the path she had planned before meeting moody, artistic Liam. Meanwhile, he never fully recovered from the dark stain the accident left on his record.
Now he’s gone.
When the police show up at the station instead of Liam, Jude realizes that she knows nothing about the man he’s become. Now she’s tangled up in his life, the last person to have seen him, and maybe the only one who can uncover the truth about what went wrong—even if she destroys her own life in the process.
Thriller Psychological [William Morrow Paperbacks, On Sale: October 18, 2022, Paperback, ISBN: 9780063243620 / ]
Nicci French is the pseudonym for the internationally bestselling husband-and-wife writing team of journalists Nicci Gerrard and Sean French. They are the authors of bestselling novels. They live in Suffolk, England.
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