I get up around seven, hoping he might join me for a cup of tea and we can have a chance to reconnect after only seeing each other face to face a handful of times in the last month or so. But Simon snores on until almost ten, and then insists we all go out for brunch at the open-air café near the jetty. I won’t lie: sausage sandwiches taste amazing with a side order of salty river air, but I feel restless, knowing the minutes are ticking away until he leaves again.
Just as Simon is paying the bill, a call comes through on my mobile. I get up to take it, wandering through the café and stopping on the narrow road outside.
‘Hello, is that Erin?’
‘Yes.’
‘This is Sandra from the Royal Marina Hotel. Sorry to call at the weekend, but I had a feeling you wouldn’t want to wait until Monday to hear this news … We’ve had a cancellation.’
‘You have?’
‘Yes. The call came through just half an hour ago. We have an opening on the sixteenth of November and it’s yours if you want it.’
I blink. ‘I … I don’t know what to say.’
Sandra laughs, clearly delighted to be delivering this news. ‘We need to know if you want to book it fairly quickly, of course, otherwise we’ll offer it to someone else.’
‘How long have we got?’ I say, my pulse trotting a little. It’s not just the venue, is it? There are other things to organize too, and we need to make sure we can get all our ducks in a row for the same day.
‘Normally, we’d say forty-eight hours, but you can have until Saturday morning.’
‘Thank you,’ I say, and I genuinely mean it. The hotel has been so understanding and I think they may have bumped us up the queue a little bit because they’ve felt so sorry for us.
‘No problem! Have a nice Sunday,’ and Sandra rings off, leaving me to break the news to my fiancé.
I wait until we get back to Heron’s Quay, needing the familiarity of the surroundings to ground me. When Simon heads towards my little suite of rooms, I hurry after him.
‘That call …’
He picks up his overnight bag from the armchair and pops it on the bed. ‘Uh-huh?’
‘It was the Royal Marina. We’ve got our cancellation.’
Simon unzips his bag, then raises his head to look at me.
‘We can be married by the end of the year if we want.’ I feel a quiver of butterflies in my stomach as I say this. Why am I nervous? We should be laughing and hugging and jumping around the room together.
‘That’s great,’ he says.
‘Yes.’
Still, neither of us moves. Neither of us smiles.
‘I’m worried, though …’ I begin as Simon opens the wardrobe, takes a shirt out, and folds it haphazardly before stuffing it in his bag. Suddenly I’m gripped by all the fears he voiced a few months ago: that I’m not ready, that’ll it’ll be too much. I’m only planning on getting married once in my life and I really don’t want to limp through the day, too wiped out to enjoy it. ‘Can we take some time to go through it all? I really need to process it out loud.’
Simon comes around the bed and kisses the wrinkled skin between my brows.‘Of course.’ And then he gathers his toiletries and stuffs them into his bag.
I glance towards the little living room. ‘I can make us a cup of tea—’
‘You mean now?’
‘Well, when else?’
Simon walks over to me and plants a kiss on my forehead. ‘I was hoping to get away in the next thirty minutes. Try to beat the traffic, you know? If I don’t hit the M25 before three, it’s going to be manic.’
‘Oh.’
‘I’ll call you … we can thrash it out over the phone. Video call if you like, as long as the Wi-Fi’s good enough?’
