‘It really is very good of you to do this, Nick,’ I said gratefully. He shook his head, batting away my words.
‘If I stop thanking you for finding my lost daughter – which was avery big deal, by the way – how about you stop thanking me for posing for some photos on my day off, which is a very small one.’
‘Deal,’ I said, holding out my hand for us to shake, as though we’d just signed some sort of treaty.
His hand was warm and strong as it took and enfolded mine. I’m not sure if it was him or me who hung on a little longer than a conventional handshake says that you should. I only knew that my hand felt oddly cold when it eventually separated from his. I thrust it deep into the pocket of my sister’s sheepskin jacket, as though I couldn’t trust it not to reach out for his again.
‘Shall we head to the carousel?’ I suggested, taking back the map and noting it was the nearest ride on my ‘to-do’ list for the day.
He fell into step beside me. ‘It’s been a long time since I’ve been anywhere like this,’ he said, looking around him with interest.
‘Have you never brought Holly here?’ I asked, my head still full of memories of much-loved days out here with my family when I was his daughter’s age.
‘Not for a long time. It’s not been the most… amicable… of divorces. It’s taken us a while to get past the anger and recriminations to agree on a proper visitation schedule.’
His answer ignited a great many questions that I had no right to ask, so I didn’t. But my biggest takeaway was that he was no longer married. Again, nothing whatsoever to do with me.
‘You should have brought her with you today,’ I suggested, thinking that a pint-size chaperone might have been quite handy to stop my thoughts going off on wholly inappropriate tangents.
‘I’m not sure her school would count this as a valid reason for skipping class,’ he replied with an easy grin.
‘Of course. I wasn’t thinking. Well, maybe another time?’ I said, realising too late this wasn’t an outing we were likely to repeat. We weren’t on an actual date. Today was just as much a fabrication as Amelia and Sam’s own visit here had been.
We heard the carousel long before we saw it. The music grew increasingly loud until we rounded a corner and found ourselves standing before the ride, which looked strangely smaller than I remembered. The horses appeared more like ponies now, rather than the stallions I recalled. But everything else was the same: the rows of coloured bulbs around the canopy were just as bright, and the painted horses as vibrant as they’d ever been. The strains of the ‘Carousel Waltz’ blaring from the ride’s speakers whisked me back into the past more effectively than a time machine.
‘So how is this going to work, exactly?’ Nick asked, jolting me back to the present.
‘Well, you sit on one of the horses and you bob up and down as it goes around for about five minutes and then you get off.’
His lips were twitching, and it was a real struggle not to stare at them. ‘I know how carousels work,’ he grinned, and there was something in his crooked smile that I swear I recognised from Amelia’s sketches. How had she managed to capture every little detail of his features so well from just a distant glimpse?
‘What I meant was, how are we going to get a photograph of us on the ride? Are we doing a selfie?’
Therewasa collapsible selfie stick in the bottom of my bag for just this purpose, but I had a better idea. I looked around for a suitable candidate and immediately spotted one.
‘Hang on,’ I told him, crossing to a woman a few years older than me who was sitting on a wooden bench to one side of the ride.
‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘I know this is a bit of a cheek, but would you mind taking a photo of my…’ – I faltered for a moment – ‘… of my friend and me on the ride?’ I asked, pulling my phone from my pocket.
She glanced beyond me, and I swear I saw a tiny flicker of approval in the look she gave Nick. I bet he got that a lot.
‘I’d be happy to,’ she said, taking my mobile from me.
‘Thanks,’ I said, turning and running back to where Nick was waiting.
‘Do you think you’ll ever see your phone again?’ he teased, offering me his hand to climb up on to the carousel’s platform.
‘Probably not,’ I said, suddenly feeling so light-hearted, I didn’t even care.
‘I need to find a golden horse with a brilliant white mane,’ I said, glancing around at the vacant horses around us.
‘That’ll be a palomino, then,’ Nick said knowledgeably, leading me to a horse that perfectly matched the one Amelia had told me she’d ridden.
‘Do you need a bunk-up?’ he asked, his face dissolving into creases of amusement at my raised eyebrows. It was a corny double entendre, but it was just what we needed to keep the mood light.
‘Do you think anyone hasevermanaged to ask that question without cracking up?’ I said, hoisting myself up on to the back of the wooden horse.
‘Probably not,’ Nick said, dropping his jacket to the floor and turning towards a gleaming ebony-coloured mount beside mine.
