What mattered was that they gave him their confidence. And they had.
As the last of them left, Oliver stood on the hotel steps and surveyed the road with quiet satisfaction. The meeting had gone even better than he’d hoped. Weekend homeowners and newcomers were always easier to win over. Still, results were results. A few well-placed carrots had tipped the balance neatly in his favour.
His phone buzzed. Simon.
‘We’re over the line,’ his assistant said. ‘Scanned signatures are already at sixty percent of the minimum. And council’s confirmed the new timeline.’
‘And public meetings?’
‘Sorted.’
Oliver ended the call and sat back. He should be feeling smug. The Maori consultation had gone just as smoothly. The elders had been pragmatic, even enthusiastic, about the economic opportunities. Cultural education for guests. Funding for local projects. A clean transaction.
Win-win. Then why didn’t it feel like it?
He glanced across the road at her café. It was closed now. Only the dairy was open, a knot of boys on bikes loitering outside, rocking on their wheels, shouting insults, drinking from cans.
Oliver smiled faintly. He remembered boys like that from the Wellington suburbs he’d been driven through as a youngster, but never allowed to walk through. He’d been kept carefully apart from the ‘rough boys’, as his stepmother had called them.
He turned away sharply. Pity for his younger self was pointless.
Inside, the old lounge bar looked better without people in it. Stripped bare, it showed what it might once have been. Retro, someone might say. He didn’t.
Lucy’s name came unbidden into his head again. With it came that feeling he refused to examine. The dreams didn’t help — especially the ones that weren’t about sex. The ones where her presence alone filled him with a strange sense of calm. A peace he always woke from with irritation.
He had his back to the open door when the sensation hit him. That prickle. That awareness. He froze.
Dust drifted in the late afternoon sunlight, turning the air gold. Somewhere a car slowed for the railway tracks. Then he saw something move out of the corner of his eye.
‘Lucy.’
She stood framed in the doorway, back-lit by sunshine, dressed in her usual white. For half a second she didn’t look real. Then she moved again, and he released his breath.
She stepped into the shadows and looked around, taking in the stripped bar, the bare floors, the rolled-up carpet. Her gaze lingered on the open doors to the back.
‘Busy day?’ she asked lightly, as if she didn’t care about the answer.
‘Just showing a few people the place,’ he said. ‘Consultation, remember?’
Her mouth tightened almost imperceptibly. ‘Of course.’
She gave him time to steady himself, then met his gaze.
‘Oliver,’ she said coolly.
‘I… I wasn’t expecting to see you,’ he admitted. He hated the stutter.
‘I wasn’t expecting to be here. But I’ve been asked to pass on an invitation to you.’
That caught him completely off guard.
‘An invitation?’
She laughed. ‘Don’t look so shocked. I guess you don’t often receive them. Not the kind I’m about to deliver anyway.’
She walked towards him and his heart hammered in his chest. He swore to himself. She was running rings around him.
‘And what kind is that? An invitation to leave this place and never return?’
