‘He’s great company, confident and funny… And he’s a great dancer.’
Good for sodding Jeremy,Brody wanted to say, but he kept his mouth firmly closed. She’d turned him down, after all. There must besomethingwrong with the guy.
‘But…’
‘But what?’ he asked casually.
‘He’s not Spencer,’ she finally said with both weariness and conviction. ‘He’s just not Spencer.’
And neither are you,Brody told himself.Don’t go all stupid. You’ve been starved of good conversation for too long. Of course you’re going to get attached. It’s just a fact of human psychology.
‘Brody?’
She pulled him out of his thoughts and into the present. ‘Mm-hmm?’
‘Do you think we could FaceTime or Skype sometime? I’d really like to talk to you face to face.’
Brody sat there, stunned. He hadn’t been expecting her to ask that, which was probably strange, seeing as it was a fairly normal way to communicate these days. ‘Um… I don’t have those apps on my phone.’
‘But you could download them, right?’ She paused for a moment and then added, ‘If you wanted to.’
‘I don’t know,’ he replied, answering both questions at once, even if he was the only one aware of that. ‘My phone is pretty basic. And the signal here isn’t very good.’ He was making excuses now. Why?
‘Oh, okay,’ Anna replied. ‘It was just a thought. We can chat about it another time. Anyway… I’d better go now. It’s almost one, and I’ve got to be up at seven. Until next time, Brody. Thanks for the chat – as always.’
‘Night, Anna. And, as always, no problem. You don’t have to thank me. I enjoy talking to you.’
He could hear her smiling before she responded. ‘I enjoy talking to you too.’
And then she was gone, leaving him feeling warm inside but also pondering why his initial reaction to video calling with Anna had been to resist the idea.He stood up, collected his glass and laid his mobile phone back in its place on the desk. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to see her face, that was for certain, so what was it?
Lewis, who, only moments before, had looked as if you could drive an articulated lorry past him and he wouldn’t have stirred, leaped to his feet, looking hopeful. He blinked at Brody.
‘Come on, young man,’ Brody said, as he headed out the study, turning the light out behind him. ‘One last run down the garden for you.’
As he waited at the back door, Brody stared into the night sky. His and Anna’s relationship had started off as voices only and that was what he was comfortable with, he realized, so why shouldn’t it continue that way? It was probably sensible too, given the boundaries they’d put on not knowing more about each other than first names and general locations.
Yes, sensible,he told himself as Lewis trotted back up the lawn and ran past his legs into the warm house.Very sensible. Not cowardly at all.
ANNA STARED AT her phone as the screen went dark. The thought that she might be able to FaceTime with Brody at some point buoyed her up. He always made her feel better about things and it would be nice to see his smile one day and not just hear it.
She sighed, playing back their conversation as she stuffed her feet back into the slippers that were sitting on the carpet in front of the sofa.
She hadn’t realized it, but up until now, she’d been feeling guilty about turning Jeremy down. However, after talking to Brody, she felt much better about her decision. She wasn’t being selfish. She was doing the right thing. For Jeremy, too.
She yawned and covered her mouth with her hand, closing her eyes tight, and when she’d finished, she stretched, easing the kinks from her shoulders and back, from where she’d been curled up in the corner of her large squishy sofa. As she’d said to Brody, it was late, and she did feel tired, but now that she thought about it, she wasn’t sure she was sleepy. She always felt very peaceful, very relaxed, after talking to Brody, but she often felt energized too.
She picked up her phone again to check that her alarm for the morning was set and spotted the Facebook icon on her home screen. She avoided social media these days, but now and again she’d hop on to put little blue ‘thumbs up’ signs on posts from people she knew, who she hadn’t talked to in a while, and hadn’t seen for even longer. She opened the app and scrolled down her feed, slowing for pet pictures and caustic cartoons, but easing past smiling couples and pictures of babies a little faster.
That’s why she didn’t do this more often. Because what did she have to put up there? A lovely house, to be sure, but where were the people? Where were the smiles? She couldn’t imagine Gayle posing for a selfie with her after a Sunday lunch.
She was about to zip past a photo of a newborn baby, wrapped tight in a cream blanket, face pink and scrunched, when something made her pause, possibly the flicker of recognition of the name at the top of the post,even though she hadn’t consciously read it.
Oh, my goodness! It couldn’t be… She clicked on the photograph to enlarge it.
It certainly was. The picture had been uploaded by Scott Barry, and the caption underneath read:Taking our little man home from the hospital. It had been posted earlier in the week. But that was almost two weeks early! She’d only seen Scott and Teresa for May’s family lunch the Sunday before and there’d been no sign that Teresa was about to go into labour the next day, not that Anna really knew what the signs were.
Anna let the phone drop into her lap. And four days ago? Why hadn’t anyone called her? Why hadn’t anyone let her know?
