Man and dog burst through the door seconds after I had repositioned myself at the kitchen table beside my second cup of coffee.
Fletcher was looking up at Josh with an expression of total devotion. Screw Josh and the way he kept trying to claim things that were rightfully Adam’s, I thought angrily.
‘Fletcher, come here,’ I said, my tone a little sharper than he was used to hearing. Obediently, he padded across the quarry-tiled floor, leaving a trail of wet footprints in his wake.
‘I would have taken him out,’ I led with. ‘You didn’t have to go to the trouble of walking him.’
Josh’s eyebrows rose at my tone. ‘It was no trouble.’
He was looking at me steadily, and even though I knew I was being churlish it was hard to rein in my anger.
‘Good morning, by the way,’ Josh said, crossing the room to lift the coffee pot from the hot plate. ‘Interesting to note that you’re still not an a.m. person.’ He felt the weight of the pot and gave a knowing nod. ‘Well, not until you’ve had at least three coffees, that is.’
How was it that he remembered so many intimate details about a person he claimed he never wanted to see again? I would have thought he’d have done a better job of erasing every last memory of me.
But he was right about one thing: I could have started with a polite greeting before laying into him. ‘Good morning,’ I added. It sounded exactly like the afterthought that it was.
He finished pouring his own coffee, adding neither milk nor sugar. Strong, bitter and hot. Josh took his morning beverage the way most people would describe him. I almost made myself smile with that thought.
‘Did you manage to get any sleep?’
I was surprised he cared, or perhaps he thought it was something you were supposed to ask a guest – even an unwelcome one. I’d actually slept well, which was unusual in a strange bed, but for some reason I was reluctant to admit it. I hadn’t come here with the intention of scoring points, but I could feel normal, Reasonable Lily disappearing behind a prickly armour. He really was bringingout the worst in me, which was odd, because Adam had always had the exact opposite effect.
Even so, I hadn’t tracked Josh down to fight with him. We’d done enough of that the last time. But when someone you’d once loved and trusted was also the person who’d betrayed you, deeply buried resentments couldn’t help but resurface.
‘Can we talk, Josh?’
He looked at me for a long moment before replying. ‘Can we at least have breakfast first? No one should embark on a row before they’ve had their Weetabix.’
‘I never said I wanted to row.’
Josh’s lips twisted into an almost smile. ‘You didn’t have to. You’re doing that thing with your eyebrows,’ he said, his finger pointing at the furrows on my forehead. ‘And your left eye is twitching, which was always a red flag.’
I wanted to ask if my eye had been doing that during our argument six years ago, and if it had, why the hell hadn’t he walked away before we both ended up saying things that were impossible to take back?
‘So, what’s the plan for today?’ I asked, reluctantly backing down as he reached for cereal bowls and milk.
‘Myplan is to work. What you do today is entirely up to you.’
‘Surely you need power for that?’ I asked. It felt like our conversation was a game of chess, and I’d just taken his knight.
‘No, because much of my work is hand-carved.’ The glint in his eye said,Checkmate.
My presence in Josh’s home might have been an unwelcome intrusion, but it didn’t seem to have affected his appetite. While I pushed a solitary Weetabix around a bowl until it resembled something you might use to stick wallpaper up, Josh silently munched his way through two bowls of cereal as though I wasn’t even in the room. And yet there wasn’t a spare inch of flesh on his taut,muscular frame, which this morning was all too visible in a pale blue t-shirt that bore the tour dates of a band he’d introduced me to years before. It had been the first concert I’d ever attended, and my parents had only let me go if I promised to stay right beside Josh, an instruction I’d happily followed to the letter. Lyrics from the band’s songs that we’d sung together were filling my head, and I clamped my lips shut, afraid I’d start singing them right here in his kitchen.
It was scary how easily I could remember the heavy beat of the bass thrumming through our bodies, and the reassuring security of having his arm around my shoulders in the heaving crowd. I really thought I’d forgotten the minutiae of us, but over the last twenty-four hours things had been floating back into my head that had no business being there.
I waited until the dirty bowls had been rinsed in cold water before picking up the threads of the conversation I knew he didn’t want to unravel.
‘I never wanted to come here, Josh.’
A casual observer might have thought him indifferent to my words. But I’d lost the ability to be casual around Josh, so I noticed the way his jaw tightened beneath its camouflage of stubble. The hair on his face was thicker and darker than it had been in his twenties, and a whole world away from the first fluff-like appearance of facial hair that I’d laughingly teased him about until he’d rolled me on to my back on the grass beneath the sycamore tree and tickled me until I cried out for mercy. I shook my head. Where the hell had that one come from?
‘And I never wanted you here. So, there you go, wecanagree on something after all. Who knew?’
I wasn’t about to let him turn this into a joke, not when it had meant so much to my husband that I made this journey.
‘I came because you have answers to questions that no one else can give me.’
