I could have left it there; should have left it there. But I didn’t.
‘Well, you can only let the cat out of the bag once, can’t you? It’s kind of a done deal after that.’
He looked confused. ‘What cat? What bag?’
I knew then, with stomach-lurching certainty, that he didn’t know what had happened during Claire’s visit. I cast an eye around, almost in apology to our fellow diners. I had a feeling this was all about to go very badly.
Josh leant across the table and snared my hand in his. ‘What are you talking about, Lily?’
Over his shoulder I could see the waitress had almost reached us. I caught her eye and shook my head, telegraphing a ‘not now’ plea. Either this happened a lot, or she could sense the tension that was swirling around our table like a twister. She turned on her heel and returned to the kitchen with our food.
‘Lily, tell me.’ There was an extra beat between each word, as though he needed to keep them on a tight rein.
I wriggled my fingers free from his. I needed my hands for work, and I don’t think he realised just how hard he’d been gripping them.
‘She told me, Josh. She told me everything about your conversation with Adam.’
Almost on cue, the party at the adjacent table broke out into peals of laughter. At least someone was having fun tonight, I thought sadly, watching our evening slowly disintegrate in the way I’d feared it might.
Josh looked across at the noisy revellers and then back to me.
‘Do you want to get out of here?’
I nodded.
He swept up my jacket from a chair and dropped a handful of twenty-pound notes on to the table.
An evening breeze ruffled my hair as we left the pub. I shivered, but it wasn’t from the cold.
‘Josh, I ...’ My voice faded away. I had no idea what to say or ask.
‘Did you drive here tonight?’ His pragmatic question threw me for a moment. I shook my head. ‘Then let’s take my car and find somewhere quiet to talk,’ he suggested, already guiding me by the elbow through the busy parking area.
I settled into the passenger seat, breathing in the unmistakable aroma of ‘new car’.
‘Yours?
Josh turned on the ignition. ‘No, it’s a hire. Mine’s in the repair shop with Cameron – one of the guys you met in Scotland. Once I’d made up my mind to come, I didn’t want to wait. If you spend too long thinking about things, that’s when bad decisions get made.’
I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what any of those previous decisions had been.
We journeyed in silence for several miles before Josh once again took his eyes from the highway.
‘I need to know where we’re going, Lily.’
Ignoring the very obvious double meaning to that statement, I twisted in the passenger seat and peered out of the window, trying to drop myself like a pin on a map.
‘If you keep driving, there’s a turn-off a couple of miles up ahead that leads to a small boating lake. It’s got a decent-size car park that looks out over the water. It should be empty at this time of night.’
‘Perfect,’ Josh said, his attention returning to the road.
I hadn’t been to the lake in years, and when I thought of it at all, my memories were all of Adam and me on summertime dog walks, or picnics on the grass, watching small children gleefully chasing the ducks and geese, and imagining ourselves as those laughing parents one day, playing with our kids and pushing apram. Perhaps, in hindsight, this wasn’t the best location to have chosen.
Josh parked directly in front of the lake, filling the windscreen with a view of water which glistened like jewels beneath the moonlight. I turned to face him and all at once the car seemed to shrink, making it suddenly feel way too small and intimate for two grown adults.
‘Shall we take a walk?’ he asked.
The night was cooler now, but he didn’t reach for the jacket that was lying across the back seat. I recognised it as the one he’d worn in Scotland, and it came with its own flashback memory. I could see him shrugging out of it in a silent wood and slipping it around my shoulders on our middle-of-the-night walk back from the treehouse to his cabin. How long had my perfume lingered on the fabric? Had it faded away like the memory of that night seemed to have done?
