Amelia smiled vaguely and looked back at the unit. She raised her right hand, but her fingers didn’t make contact with the control panel, they simply hovered in the air beside it.
An unexpected frisson of fear ran down the length of my spine.
It was no big deal. She probably hadn’t had to tweak the settings in ages; it was hardly surprising that she couldn’t immediately remember how to do it.
‘Here. Let me,’ I said, nudging her gently aside as my fingers went to the panel and punched the correct sequence of keys.
It wasn’t the fact that I’d had to show my sister how to operate the boiler in her own home that bothered me, it was more the look of relief on her face as she turned towards the bathroom. That was the thing I couldn’t quite shake off.
*
It was nine o’clock, not late by any standard, but the cottage was dimly lit and in silence. It was three hours since we’d eaten, and two since Mum had returned home and Amelia had gone to bed. It left me with more free time than I really wanted to run through all the reasons why I hadn’t heard back from Nick all day. I’d gone through every imaginable scenario – including a few frankly ridiculous ones – but my thoughts kept circling back to the one glaringly obvious answer: Nick felt so uncomfortable about what had happened the previous night, he’d probably never get in touch again.
I switched off the television, plunging the room even further into the shadows. I’d tried and failed to get into three different programmes this evening, before finally acknowledging the problem wasn’t the TV at all, it was me.
This is ridiculous, I murmured. Why the hell was I staring at my phone like a heartsick teenager? I was a twenty-first-century independent woman and if I wanted to speak to a man this much, I should get my shit together and call him myself.
At almost the exact moment I’d made up my mind to do precisely that, my phone buzzed on the settee cushions beside me and Nick’s name flashed up on the screen.
‘Hello, Lexi. Is this a good time to talk? I’m not interrupting your dinner or anything, am I?’
I laughed. ‘Amelia’s body clock is unfortunately still set to hospital hours. She insisted we eat hours ago. Actually, I was just about to callyou.’
‘Were you?’ he asked, and I could just tell by his voice that he was smiling. ‘I’m sorry, I know I should have called you earlier, but it was totally manic at the surgery today.’
‘That’s okay. I’ve been pretty busy here with Amelia and probably couldn’t have talked until now,’ I said, rolling my eyes at the lie.
‘Of course. How’s she doing?’
‘She’s okay, I guess, or at least I hope she will be. She’s so much weaker than I was expecting her to be and she’s still not quite… herself.’ I could explain it no better than that.
‘That’s hardly surprising, though. She’s been through a huge ordeal, and it’s bound to be hard for her readjusting to being home again after so long.’
His words were reassuring, and I clung to them like a life raft. Hewasa medical professional, after all, albeit one more used to dealing with hardpad and distemper than human cardiac issues.
‘Is she there right now? In the room with you, I mean.’
I frowned. ‘No. Not right now. She’s gone to bed. She went out like a light. Why do you ask?’
‘Because I’d really like to see you. I think we need to talk about last night.’
I swallowed loudly. We’d been on the phone for a minute or two, and neither of us had yet mentioned the large grey elephant that was sharing the line with us.
‘Mum’s gone back home now. I can’t go out and leave Amelia. Not on her first night back.’
‘Of course not,’ Nick said, sounding genuinely shocked at my reply. ‘I wouldn’t ask you to. But I was hoping that ten feet or so from your front door might be okay.’
His meaning clicked into place like a puzzle piece, and I immediately leapt to my feet and went to the window. It was a journey of only seven steps, but it was long enough for me to be glad I’d put on make-up that morning and sorry that the jumper I was wearing wasn’t my most flattering.
I pulled back the curtains and waited for my eyes to adjust to the dark. Initially, I could see nothing but a blanket of black, but gradually shapes began to form out of the darkness. In the distance, a shimmer of white sharpened into the roll of an incoming wave. Dunes materialised on the sand and beside one, a short distance from the footpath, I saw the glow of a phone.
‘Can you meet me outside?’ Nick asked. I still couldn’t see him, but the clouds obscuring the moon were on the move, and gradually a tall shape morphed from the shadows. Backlit by the table lamps in the front room, I was far more visible to him than he was to me.
I glanced in his direction and then up towards the staircase and the bedroom where my sister lay sleeping. ‘You can’t come in,’ I said, sounding genuinely panicked at the thought. How would Amelia react if she walked down the stairs and found her missing ‘husband’ in the lounge, in the arms of her own sister? Because let’s not kid ourselves here, that was what was going to happen if I invited him inside.
‘I get that, and I totally understand. It’s the reason I didn’t knock on your door when I got here.’
In reality, I was staring at Nick through the window, still separated from him by the thick stone walls of the cottage and about ten metres of sandy beach. But in my head I was already running barefoot through the sand and into his arms.
