As I’m typing out a response to Nina, Verga starts barking like a madman and I look up slowly from my screen.
“Hi.”
I don’t blink. Because if I blink I know that she’ll be gone—the daydream I must be having will scatter in the wind. Her eyes are greener than I remember, which seems impossible because I look at them every day in the photographs I refuse to delete. Her cheeks are the perfect shade of red, and I’m momentarily struck mute when her mouth stretches into a smile and her eyebrows lift. Verga has both paws on her chest as if he intends to lead her in a tango.
“Mind if I join you on that bench?” she asks, and she somehow escapes the dog’s clutches and scooches into the space beside me.
“Your editor told me where to find you,” she tells me as she sits. There’s about an inch between us, and I’ve never hated that unit of measurement so much in my life. I want to make it disappear and feel the warmth of her body pressed against my side. I want to put my head in her lap like Verga is.
“What are you doing here?” Good, James. Words.
She looks over her shoulder and narrows her eyes at a pair of swans that are waddling dangerously close.
“I was just in the neighborhood,” she says. “I don’t trust these buggers.”
“Buggers?”
She looks back at me and shrugs, “Gotta learn to talk like the locals if I’m going to live here, right? That was one of the first things you taught me.”
I shake my head. She’s not making any sense. None of this is real.
“This isn’t real,” I murmur.
She slides closer and her body fits perfectly along my flank.
“I never should have left, James. I thought that I had to—that the plans I made were the only way because of the time I spent—because of how I needed them to get through after my mom.” She pauses, her eyes flitting between my mouth and my gaze. “But I don’t have to follow those plans. Things can change and not fall apart.”
It isn’t until I reach out and brush a tear from the corner of her mouth that I realize I’m not imagining this entire scene. She’s actually here. On this bench. In Hyde Park. And I can touch her.
“How are you here?” I ask softly.
She lets out a little laugh.
“Try to keep up, please,” she says. “I’m living with Tammy in Belgravia. She got a job at the embassy.”
“For how long?” I ask.
“Indefinitely.”
“And your job in the States—”
“Resigned. It wasn’t for me,” she says. “I mean the money was nice, but the time. It wasn’t worth it. And I don’t actually need all that money, thanks to my mother …”
Her voice trails away in the wind and she looks down at her hands. She’s wearing the gloves I gave her that day in the market.
“I’m taking some time to figure out what I love. I never got a chance to do that in college. Luckily, I know someone at King’s College, so I can take a few courses there while I figure my shit out.”
Of course Nina and Leo would be a part of this.
Ava lifts her butt from the bench and digs into her jeans pockets, then holds out her hand to me. There’s a plastic card lying flat on her palm.
“This is for you,” she says, pushing it into my hand.
“A calling card?”
Just like her ex gave to her when she left for Italy. I turn it over in my hand.
“It’s not just a calling card,” she says quickly, reaching up and turning my face with her hand so I’m forced to see how beautiful she is as she explains. “It’s anunlimitedcalling card. Infinite minutes. Bottomless. Without limits.”
