Seriously what was wrong with her?
“Shall we get back?” She turned and climbed back up away from him.
The sooner they left this place, the better – the crime scene where her eyes roamed all over him like he belonged to her.
Never before, not even at the height of her dating days, did she ever come on so obviously.
“There’s a faster route up the hill,” Adam said, and led her the other way.
Laura tried not to read too much into his choosing a faster route home. In fact, she would walk faster to show him she wasn’t trying to prolong their time together.
“Careful, the footing is tricky here.” Adam grasped her arm to help her over the last of the big rocks and onto the cliff path. “You wouldn’t thank me if I let you break something.”
Like her heart.
No, she wouldn’t thank him for that at all.
In her dating days, she didn’t usually mix with the likes of Adam Mortimer; a man five hundred miles out of her league. The insecure girl inside her had instinctively avoided men who drew women to them like greedy shoppers to a Black Friday sale. His earlier comment about the hundreds of phone calls asking how he was, those were probably women, and here she was doing the same.
She took out her phone and started taking pictures of everything they passed. If she played this right, she might, just might, salvage a tiny sliver of pride. If she pretended to think about something else.
Long ago, in her grandmother house, she’d learnt to pretend not to notice rejection.Here’s your Christmas present from all of us.Her aunt would hold out a disappointingly small package and Laura would open it and pretend to be delighted with another scarf.
Because even as a little girl, she had discovered that pretending not to see the insult made it easier to sit at the same table with her family and pretend that she was loved and welcome.
Pride.
She used it like a shield.
So, as she reached the top of the hill and turned left towards Du Montfort Hall, she kept her eyes on the landscape and snapped endless photographs of the bushes, the bare trees, the stream.
“Laura?” His call came from quite a distance away.
When she turned, she found him some twenty yards behind facing the other direction.
“I think we need to go over that bridge,” he explained when she didn’t follow him.
There was a steam across their path, but it was shallow. White pebbles and stones were clearly visible a few inches below the water. She pointed. “I’m sure we can cross it on foot.”
“Yes, but the other one is much deeper.” He called back
What other one?
She walked back and followed what looked like an unnecessary detour to the arched stone bridge. It wasn’t until she reached it that she saw what he meant.
Up ahead, the stream separated into two and the second was deep and fast-flowing. “Oh, I didn’t realize there was a fork.”
Looking over the low stone wall into the running water below them, he didn’t seem in a hurry to get home. “Not a fork” he said. “It’s the opposite.”
“A spoon?”
It surprised a chuckle out of him. “A confluence, actually.”
When she didn’t understand he pointed at the place where the river separated. “Come and look.”
She had no choice but to stand next to him.
“A fork is when one body of water separates into two. A confluence is when two separate bodies of water join and become one.”
