‘I was just going to say this is really weird. Me and you here ... eating dinner like this. It’s not anything I imagined we’d do again. How about you? What were you going to say?’
‘I was just going to say you make good stew.’
My laughter sounded more canned than our dinner. Five days of this walking-on-eggshells atmosphere would be excruciating. ‘I think Heinz did most of the hard work.’
‘I guess it’s very different from the things you make at Cupcakes and Rainbows.’
I was so completely taken aback that he knew the name of my company, that I didn’t know how to respond. I reached for the beer I’d claimed not to want and took a large swig. Did Josh have any idea, I wondered, thathe’dbeen the one responsible for the name of my business? That I’d chosen it from a throwaway remark he’d made a million years ago? Curiously, it was something I’d never told anyone, not even Adam. And it was only now, all these years later, that I stopped to wonder why.
I told myself all evidence of my teenage crush on my next-door neighbour had long since been erased, but there he was, sign-written in cursive script on the side of my company van and at the top of every invoice I sent out. Some threads run so deep in your tapestry, perhaps it’s impossible to ever unpick them all.
‘Your business, it’s doing well?’ Josh asked, as though we were strangers making polite conversation.
‘Really well, thank you. How about you? I never knew you wanted to make furniture.’
He stared at me for a long moment, and it became a silent contest of who would look away first. ‘I guess there’s a lot about me you didn’t know,’ he said eventually.
It was a thrown-down gauntlet that I ought to simply ignore, but I couldn’t.
‘Ditto.’
He nodded slowly in agreement. When I felt sure the topic had run its course, Josh unexpectedly returned to it. ‘I’ve always enjoyed tinkering around with wood, and when I was travelling throughScandinavia I spent some time working with a guy who had his own furniture workshop. I enjoyed the creativity, didn’t exactly suck at it, so thought I’d give it a try.’
He paused for a moment and then gave a small, humourless laugh. ‘That’s the answer I always give ... but there’s more to it than that.’ There was something in his eyes that held me and dragged me with him as he looked into his past. ‘Maybe growing up in a place where crockery was smashed, chairs were broken, and doors got slammed so often they never properly closed made me want to cancel out the past bycreatingrather than destroying.’ He shook off the memory and seemed to regret lifting the curtain on a childhood he’d rarely spoken of. ‘Or maybe I just like playing around with power tools.’
‘Well, whatever the reason, you’re very good at it. I’ve seen one of your pieces in real life.’
It was totally the wrong thing to say, and destroyed the moment of surprising honesty, because my words flagged up the route I’d taken to get here today, and the members of his family I’d involved in my pursuit of answers.
Josh’s lips tightened, so I already knew I wasn’t going to like what came out of them. ‘You shouldn’t have gone to see Gordon. Claire was furious about that.’
‘Claire’s always furious about something,’ I mumbled, unfortunately not quietly enough for it to escape him.
‘She says it upsets him, talking about the past,’ Josh said, not altogether unreasonably.
‘I’m sorry. That certainly hadn’t been my intention. But for what it’s worth, he didn’t seem distressed, just a little confused.’
I found it strange how Claire referred to their foster parent as her father, but Josh still called him by his first name. It prompted my next question.
‘Do you see much of Gordon these days?’
Guilt spasmed across Josh’s face in the candlelight.
‘Not as much as I should. Every couple of months or so, whenever I leave the forest to make deliveries, I check in on him.’
‘Oh, so youdoget away from here sometimes?’
His eyebrows rose as though my question amused him.
‘Did you think I’d become some sort of hermit who’d shut himself off from the outside world?’
I flushed uncomfortably because that was exactly what Ihadfeared, but the last thing I wanted was for him to realise that.
‘To be honest, Josh, I’ve scarcely thought of you at all in the last six years.’ It was the biggest lie I’d told in a very long time.
‘Ditto,’ he said, parroting my own earlier response.
The heat in my cheeks went from a flame to an inferno. I felt suddenly wrong-footed and fought back for solid ground the only way I could.
