“That,” he says, “is a very good question.”
“You don’t have to answer it.”
“No, I want to.” He pauses, looking down at his coffee like the answer might be floating in it. “The honest answer is I don’t know. I’ve spent a long time defining myself by what I don’t want to do. I’m not sure I’ve ever worked out what I actually want.”
I take the opening. “What does your family expectyou to do? You said they’ve been here a long time. There must be pressure.”
The openness leaves his face. It doesn’t happen gradually. One moment he’s present, unguarded, closer to honest than I’ve seen him. The next, the shutters drop and the easy smile slides back into place like armour, and I can physically feel the distance open between us even though neither of us has moved.
“Family stuff. Boring.” He picks up his coffee. “Tell me about London. What made you leave?”
The redirect is smooth enough that most people wouldn’t notice. But I spent five years in a practice with a partner who changed the subject every time I asked about our future, and I know what evasion looks like when it’s wearing a pleasant expression.
I let him change the subject. But I note it. Third time now. Three questions, three walls.
The admission sits between us, weightier than the casual setting warrants. I recognise the shape of it because I’ve carried something similar. The difference between running from something and running towards something, and the uncomfortable moment when you realise you’re not sure which one you’re doing.
“I understand that,” I say. “More than you’d think.”
He looks up. The café falls away. The coffee, the village outside the window, all of it. Just his eyes on mine with that same unsettling intensity I felt at thecottage. Something starts in my chest, spreads outward. The disorienting sense of standing somewhere I’ve been before without knowing when.
Then June appears at our table with a plate of cinnamon rolls the size of my fist, and the moment dissolves into sugar and small talk.
We stay for over an hour. The conversation moves through easier territory: places we’ve travelled, books we’ve read, the particular nightmare of trying to weigh an uncooperative cat. He tells a story about a farmer’s collie that got loose during a village fête and herded all the children into a pen. I laugh so hard my coffee goes up my nose, which is mortifying and somehow makes everything easier.
He listens when I talk. Not the performative listening I got used to with James, the nodding and “mm-hmm” that meant he was waiting for his turn to speak. Roan asks follow-up questions. He remembers details. When I mention in passing that I miss having a garden, he files it away with a small nod that tells me he’ll come back to it later.
It’s disarming. It’s also, I’m beginning to suspect, deliberate. Not manipulative, exactly. More like a man who knows the value of attention and deploys it with precision. I wonder who taught him that.
When we finally leave, the morning has tipped into early afternoon. The high street is busy with themodest Mistwood version of a lunch rush. Roan holds the café door open for me, and as I pass through, his hand settles briefly on the small of my back. Light. Barely there. Lasting no more than a second. The touch is light, but the heat of it slides through me like a spark finding dry kindling. I busy myself adjusting my bag strap because the flush climbing my neck isn’t embarrassment. It’s want. Sudden, specific, entirely disproportionate to a hand on my back.
He walks me as far as the lane that leads to Ivy Cottage, hands back in his pockets, matching his stride to mine.
“This was good,” he says. Simply, without embellishment.
“It was.” I stop at the turning, the cottage visible at the end of the lane, and face him. The sensible thing to do is say goodbye, go inside, and process the fact that I’ve just spent ninety minutes with a man who makes me feel slightly off-balance in a way I can’t account for. “Thank you for the coffee.”
“Any time.” He holds my gaze. Something tightens. I think he might lean in. I think I might let him. Then he smiles, slow and warm, and takes a step back. “See you around, Phoebe.”
He says my name like it means something. I watch him walk back towards the high street and tell myself the low pull in my stomach is caffeine. It’s a lie.I know it’s a lie. I go inside, close the door, and stand in my hallway with my body staying shamefully aware of him long after he is gone.
Roan Mistwood, it turns out, is everywhere.
Not in an alarming way. Not in a way I could point to and say, that man is following me. More in the way that a small village compresses everyone into the same spaces at the same times, so that running into someone three days in a row is statistically unremarkable even if it feels like something else entirely.
* * *
The morning after the café, I walk to the post office for stamps, and he’s coming out of the hardware shop next door with a bag of something heavy slung over one shoulder. He greets me with that easy smile and asks how I’m settling in, and we stand on the pavement talking for ten minutes about nothing in particular while the postmistress watches us through the window with undisguised interest.
That afternoon, I’m on a house call to a farm on the edge of the village, a ewe with a limp that turns out to be an abscess, and Roan is in the neighbouring field helping repair a dry stone wall. He raises a hand in greeting, and I raise one back, and I’m still thinking about the way his shirt pulled across his shoulderswhen he lifted the stones as I drive home. Which is not a professional observation.
The day after that, I take an outside breather from the work to find Maggie in her front garden and Roan on a ladder propped against Maggie’s house, clearing leaves from the guttering. Maggie waves me over with the cheerful authority of someone who considers a fence between properties a suggestion rather than a boundary.
“Roan’s been helping me with a few jobs,” she says, in a tone that implies she personally invented the concept of a man doing manual labour. “Isn’t that kind of him?”
Roan looks down from the ladder with an expression that manages to be both innocent and deeply amused. “Maggie’s gutters were blocked.”
“They’ve been blocked since September,” Maggie says. “But it’s nice to have someone tall around.”
