His eyes clouded over again, and Grace wished she could take the words back. There was a fine line between nosiness and genuine interest, and she’d been known to fall off the balance beam a few times.
‘Not really.’
‘OK, sorry to bring it up.’
Will sighed.
‘No, you’ve been honest with me. We have a difficult relationship. His mother blamed me for us splitting up, and she poured all her anger and frustration into Jack. It’s got better as time’s gone on, once he understood that there’s more than one side to every story. My wife got together with a guy from the village after we split, and they went on to have two little girls. I stayed out of the picture completely. I thought it was best to let them get on with it at the time.’
‘That’s so sad, for you and for Jack.’
Grace couldn’t imagine Phil not having been involved with the girls on a day-to-day basis as they grew up. With both of them being teachers, they’d spent the long summer holidays travelling across Europe in a battered Volkswagen camper van, stopping wherever the fancy took them, swimming in rivers and lakes, before eventually making it to the coast of whatever Mediterranean country they’d chosen and parking right on the beach. She was grateful for those memories now. There wouldn’t be any more.
‘Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying I was blameless. I did make mistakes, but letting my ex-wife effectively isolate me from my son is probably my biggest. We’re working on it, but we’ve still got a way to go.’
‘I really hope you work it out.’
Will shrugged.
‘So do I. But at our age, we’ve all got a bit of baggage, haven’t we?’
She’d opened the wound, so she might as well ask one more question before she tried to stitch it closed it again.
‘And did you never meet anyone else?’
Will raised his eyebrows.
‘Well, I’m not pretending I’ve been a monk since my divorce. That would make me a little odd.’
The look in his eyes could have melted snow.
She wasn’t asking for a list of his sexual conquests, if that’s what he was thinking.
‘I’ve had my moments, and one or two long-term relationships. But I’ve not met anyone I could live with, or even fall properly in love with, since. I’m probably too used to being on my own.’
‘Yes, probably.’
Grace got up from the sun lounger and stretched her legs.
‘Lovely as this has been, I really do need to go.’
‘Understood.’
‘Thank you again.’
‘No problem. It got a bit deep there, didn’t it?’
She wasn’t quite sure which bit of the conversation he was referring to, but she’d opened up to Will more than to any of her new colleagues. It helped that they were a similar age and had shared memories of world events. She often wondered what Sofia and her toyboys talked about, but talking was probably at the bottom of the list.
Just as she got to the path, she heard him shout something.
‘Sorry?’
Grace retraced her steps.
‘Do you like films?’
Was that why he’d stopped her from leaving? Who didn’t like films?
