“Someone had to stay behind, wash the cups and tidy up,” he says, coming level with me. And damn him, he’s not even breathing hard.
“Trust you to be practical,” I try, half-joking, half-pretending, but both halves hurt.
We walk on in silence, following the path towards the lights. As we reach the steps, he touches my arm lightly.
“Evie, can we please talk?” He sounds… I can’t describe how he sounds, but it’s not a voice I can ignore.
“Of course.” I aim for casual and probably miss it by a mile.
We climb the steps but more slowly now. When we’re nearly at the doors, he takes my wrist as if to delay me. I stop to give him time to find the words.
The light above the doors shines in a circle and makes the blond hairs on his temples gleam. Did I really think to touch him earlier? It feels like another universe.
“I’m sorry, so, so sorry.” He gives me a desperate look. “This was all my mistake.”
What mistake? That he told me about her? That he trusted me?
Say something, Evie, tell him something to make it seem okay, to save face. But no words come to me. My dependable autopilot has let me down at the worst possible time.
“Evie,” he says. “Do you know, your name. I looked it up. It means the angel of good news. And that’s what you’ve been to me from that first morning I met you. Even if at times it must have seemed…” He grimaces then, realising he has hold of my wrist in his hand, he lets go suddenly and folds his arms over his chest. “You can have no idea what you mean to me. You really have been my Evangeline…”
He looks down at his feet. “I never meant to lead you on. I’ve been so careful around you. At least, I tried to be,” he amends. “Every time I caught myself getting too close, I made myself pull back. The last thing I want is to sour things between us. Because…” He pauses, seeming to struggle a little with himself.
We stand there in the pool of weak light from the lamp over the door. The floor slates glisten from the recent rain. All around us, the smell of wet soil.
“The thing is”—he sighs long as if giving up hope—“I know myself. I can’t do relationships. Not since she died. Never again.”
Never again? He’s thirty-three. There are no words to answer this, no words that wouldn’t betray my own feelings for him. Then, finally, my verbal autopilot comes to my rescue with a joke. “Are you going to be a monk?”
“No, of course not!” His answer is quick. Then he stares at his feet and says more carefully: “I have had sex. I do have… But only casual. I never see the same person twice.”
My mind focuses on the logistics of this. “How? Surely you must see them a few times before it gets to the bedroom.”
“What I mean is casual one-offs. I never –never,” he repeats with emphasis, “see the same person afterwards. I make that clear from the start. And on Tinder it’s easy.”
It sounds so cold, so lonely. “How is that enough?”
He shrugs. “Sex is sex.” Then he meets my gaze and his expression turns so sad. “It is all I can give; all I have. Because my heart will always belong to Kirsten.”
And here it is. The second slap I wanted to avoid.
Chapter Twenty-nine
There’s no way I’m going out on our balcony for coffee. Not the day after the night before. The night he called me his Evangeline before he called me a mistake.
So I take myself to Leonie’s café and sit inside, at a table already occupied by three of the Squad. All dressed well, as if for an outing, except they wear warm woolly slippers. They welcome me cheerfully and introduce themselves. The old man is called Bill; he’s apparently the professor’s father and therefore Leonie’s grandfather. The best-dressed is Vanessa, a handsome lady with silver hair in a smooth chignon. Shirley is the lady with red curly hair pinned up in a messy bun.
They’re chatting over tea and croissants. Leonie must have expanded her breakfast menu again, this time into French pastries. So I order a croissant for me and a large coffee for the ache in my heart.
“Let me digress,” Vanessa is saying. “The eighties weren’t as wonderful as all that. Not for women.”
“Better than the fifties and sixties,” Bill answers with a laugh. “But you’re too young to remember them.”
She gives him a withering look. “I think you mean I’m toooldto remember.”
“Vanessa, you have the best memory out of all of us.” Shirley laughs. “Mind like a razor.”
“So what was bad for women in the eighties?” Bill wipes his hands of pastry flakes. “Because it was a golden age for feminism, wasn’t it? We had a female Prime Minister—”
