“I’ve got a good feeling about this one,” Tash said warmly. “I mean, he wrote down his number on the only thing he could find and slipped it into your coat. I think that’s so romantic.”
I smiled. I suspected there was another reason why Tash was so keen on Caleb: because she was even more keen for me to forget about Max Gardner. I could tell it had been playing on her mind ever since I told her I’d run into him outside The Smugglers; she’d even idly asked me a couple of times if I’d heard from him since.
But I haven’t, and I’m increasingly thinking about that moment outside the pub as nothing more than a brief flashback in time. That maybe the person I was meant to meet that night was Caleb, who I can already tell is so different to Max. I’m excited to see where it goes, and determined to keep anything to do with Max Gardner firmly in the past.
—
On Friday morning, Caleb messages to ask what I fancy doing later. I suggest making the most of the warm evening with a walk on the beach and fish and chips, which we can eat on the wall of the promenade overlooking the sea.
It’s sort of a Shoreley tradition, to get chips from Dave at the Shoreley Fryer and then eat them on the wall, legs swinging, watching thewaves sneak up to kiss the shingle. We all did it as kids with our families, then as teenagers with our friends, and now we’re doing it as adults with our dates.
We share a can of Fanta, and a large cod and chips between us, because Dave’s portions are famously grotesque. We sit on the wall, our feet dangling above the beach. Caleb’s height means that, side by side, my feet only reach halfway down his calves.
“Do you mind if I ask why you split up with your wife?” I ask, once we’ve talked about school, and our childhood homes, and the best place to get good coffee in town. In front of us on the beach, couples are walking arm in arm, kids and dogs careering across the pebbles, grasping kites and footballs and strings of seaweed. The hue of the evening sky is slowly softening from blue to lilac, the clotted-cream clouds gradually blushing pink.
Caleb prongs a chip from the tray we’ve balanced on the wall between us. “Not sure I can really boil it down.”
“Did you marry young?”
He waits for a couple of moments, then nods. “She was my second-ever girlfriend. We met when I was twenty-one, married two years later. But by last year, we were fundamentally just... different people.”
I nod, take a swig from the Fanta can.
“Actually, you know, I’m making it sound a lot simpler than it was. When we met, we had this five-year plan to move back here, to Shoreley.”
“Is Helen from Shoreley too?” I say without thinking, before feeling myself swiftly turn purple with embarrassment.
Caleb enjoys the moment, which I can’t really blame him for. “Well stalked,” he says, laughing.
I dab a chip fiercely into ketchup. “Okay, okay. Imighthave had a quick look for you online.”
“Just teasing. I’d definitely have stalked you if I’d known your surname.” He pauses. “Which is?”
“Lambert,” I say, coyly.
“Okay, Lucy Lambert. No, Helen’s not from round here, but she is a country girl. She’s from Dorset. Anyway, we had this plan to spend a couple of years traveling, then move back to Shoreley, buy a cottage, and... I don’t know, grow our own potatoes, or something. Get a goat and some chickens. After ‘finding ourselves’ halfway up Machu Picchu, obviously.”
“Obviously.”
He smiles, but it cracks a little, and I suddenly wonder if it’s a bit insensitive of me, asking him to rake over all this a mere six months after it ended.
We stare out at the view. The tide is low now, the shingle a pale flurry of pebbles hemmed by a shimmering stripe of sea. As the sun sinks through ribbons of cloud and sky, long shadows spring from beneath the feet of the beachgoers, and for a few minutes, everything appears dipped in liquid gold.
Caleb starts talking again. “Anyway, I guess... just as I was starting to feel uncomfortable in London, Helen was settling in. She’d made lots of friends, she had this big high-powered magazine job, and she was getting a bit obsessed with... you know, status and stuff like that.”
“Which you’re not?”
Caleb laughs and rubs a hand through his hair. “Do I look like I worry about status? Please say no.”
“You’re doing well for yourself.”
“I get by. I don’t drive a Mercedes, I can tell you that much.”
Unexpectedly, an image of Max in his crisp suit jetting off to the Seychelles floats into my mind. And—not for the first time since spending time with Caleb—I feel sure I’m enjoying myself more with him than I might have done seeing Max again.
“We were just different people, in the end,” Caleb concludes.
“Was it amicable? When you separated.”
