She bent down to retrieve the phone from under her chair and unwrapped it and passed it to Millie. “Go on, read his messages.”
Millie hesitated.
“I don’t want you to read them out loud, just scan through.”
Millie took the phone, her face grave, and started to read. “He sounds very…” She hesitated.
“Any mention of being in love with me?”
Millie shook her head. “He says lots of wonderful things though.”
“Wonderful things?”
“That you being in his life makes the sun shine brighter,” Millie said, reading through the messages. “That you are one in a million and finding you was like the need—”
“The needle in a thousand haystacks?” Pierre finished the line.
Millie glanced up with a look of sympathy. “He’s said this before, has he?”
“No,” Pierre said bitterly. “I did. They’re my lines. I used to write them for greeting cards, you know, Valentine, Christmas, birthday cards. All kinds of romantic messages so that men” — The word ‘pigs’ jumped up to her mouth wanting to be spoken out loud, but Pierre resisted — “Other men could seduce women like me who should have known better.”
The two women looked at each other for a long moment.
“It’s not really seven hours and fifteen days –more like seven hours and two years. And If I’m brutally honest, I couldn’t say that nothing compares to him. Actually, thousands of men compare to him, commitment-phobic, emotionally unavailable men who are so faithfully, deeply, madly in love with themselves that you don’t stand a chance.”
Finally, Millie said, “And I’m guessing you keep trying to leave him, but he makes it hard?”
“No, he makes it easy because …” She swallowed. “Excuse my French, but he’s a pig!Ihave to remember our anniversaries because he claims he doesn’t have the kind of mind to remember dates. Then he spent half the night dancing with another woman he only just met. So yes, he makes it easy to leave him but…” Pierre paused because she didn’t want to cry again, “Then, he apologises so sweetly that he makes it even easier to come back.”
She picked up her tea and drank it all down to give herself time to calm down.
“And would you believe it, I’m the one having to work so hard to not go back to him.”
Millie reached over and placed a gentle hand over hers.
“Doing the right thing is sometimes so much harder than doing the wrong thing,” Millie said. Her eyelashes were still wet with her own tears. “My grandmother used to say that doing the easy makes your life difficult. But doing the difficult makes your life easy.”
Wasn’t that the truth? Last year, on that harbour wall, she’d been too afraid to take a risk with a stranger called Gabriel. Instead, she had chosen the easy way back to what was familiar.
“I like your grandmother’s line.” Pierre glanced around at the waves breaking on the white sands and the gulls swooping over the sea all along the pretty beach. “You know, I can start my own card company and write honest messages instead of all that romantic flannel. Things like:If you want a hard life, choose the easy option now. OrBaby, I ‘m sexy but I will never remember to put the toilet seat down.Or even:I know you’re not Mr Right, I’m just with you till I find the courage to leave.”
Both women were laughing as they wiped their tears.
“I’ll tell you something.” Pierre spoke with conviction. “I’ll never again get into a relationship with a man who isn’t 100% available.”
Four
Two years later. Present day.
The reflection of the bathroom clock in the mirror showed a quarter-to-five, and the long, thin second hand moved backwards. Pierre turned around and read it properly. Quarter-past-seven. Good, she hadn’t missed breakfast.
She checked the back of her head to make sure the rest of the hair was saturated.
The trick with ombre hair colouring was to braid the hair before applying the dye. Fifteen or twenty braids made sure the dye reached some strands faster than others and that created a natural variation instead of the uniform block that screamedcoloured at home.
La Canette was too small to have its own hairdresser, unless you counted Mr Digby, the barber who doubled as chiropodist and bicycle mender. There was, of course, a perfectly good Vidal Sassoon in Guernsey, but since Pierre changed her hair colour several times a year, she could hardly keep taking days off to sail over. Her boss was very understanding, but it would be wrong to take advantage.
Instead, over the last two years, she’d watched endless YouTube videos until she’d perfected her own technique. No balayage was beyond her now.
