“I’ll just fetch my wine. And it looks like you need a top-up.”
Catherine glanced at her empty glass; in the midst of her bookshelf crisis, she’d gulped her wine too quickly. When Jules reappeared, Juniper wove between her elegant bare feet as she crossed the room.
“Wow, this looks incredible. Thank you.”
Jules beamed. “I love to cook, so it’s my pleasure.” She filled Catherine’s glass and topped up her own before setting the wine down between them. “Besides, I owe you.”
Catherine batted away the words and mirrored Jules asshe unravelled the cutlery from the napkin and laid it out on her lap.
“Bon profit.” Jules’s smile accentuated the crinkles at the corners of her warm eyes.
“Mmm,” Catherine moaned. “This is delicious.”
The rich, meaty mushroom paired perfectly with the creamy risotto. It looked and tasted like fancy restaurant-quality food, and not something Catherine would ever be capable of producing herself. Not that she’d tried — going to all this effort for one carried little appeal, so over the years she’d slumped into an easy routine of simple dishes and microwave meals.
Silence stretched awkwardly between them as they ate. Catherine grappled for something to say before landing on, “It’s been quite the transformation in here since my last visit. I thought I’d taken a wrong turn when I walked into the room.”
“Hmm.” Jules finished her mouthful. “Yeah, it was a big help to have Will here for a couple of days. He has a flair for interior design! Although he wouldn’t know how to build flatpack, even if the instructions slapped him around the face.”
Catherine laughed.
“Thank goodness you showed yourself to be more than capable; otherwise, my books would still be in boxes.” Jules picked up her glass and tipped it Catherine’s way before taking a long sip.
“I was looking at your books, actually. Your travel guides, are they all places you’ve been, or…?”
“And with one brief look around, she uncovers anotherof my guilty pleasures — buying travel guides!” Jules laughed. “No, outside of the airports, I haven’t been to even half of those places. But I always made a point of picking up a guide for the cities I liked the sound of, I guess as a prompt to go back one day and explore.”
“Sounds like a lovely idea. And I suppose even more appealing now that you’re not flying here, there, and everywhere for work.”
Jules licked her tongue around her teeth. “Exactly.”
“And that makes me feel alittleless unworldly, too.”
“I’m sure you’re worldly in other ways.” A small grin lifted Jules’s red lips, and Catherine had to look away as it would be indecent to stare at her mouth for much longer than she already had. It was a very lovely mouth.
“So… I have a confession to make.” Jules left the intriguing statement hanging as she chased another forkful of food with a sip of wine.
Catherine swallowed, taking the bait. “Go on.”
“I knew who you were.”
“Sorry?”
“I thought it was you when I saw you at the tapas place. Then when I checked, I realised I was right; it wasyou.”Jules took a breath and continued. “It’s why I was a bit tongue-tied when I bumped into you at Snoots. I wanted to say something, but I realised I didn’t really know how to explain myself without sounding like a complete weirdo.”
Catherine’s mouth settled into an unsure half-smile as she tried, and failed, to gather the pieces. Jules sat back and wiped her mouth with her napkin.
“Even when we weren’t on the best terms, I still called my mum every week. She talked about youa lot.”
“Me?”
“Yeah, assuming you’re the nice youngwoman from downstairs?” Jules affected a high-pitched trill, which was a near-perfect impression of Bridie. “Lovely wee lass. Her name’s Catherine. She’s a doctor, you know.”
Catherine puffed out a laugh, but her brain was still struggling to pick up the thread.
“At first, I thought, ah, here we go, she’s trying to guilt me again for leaving. She’s rubbing it in that someone else is popping by to spend time with her, when her only child has wedged whole countries’ worth of distance in the way.” Jules rolled her eyes.
“She was a lovely lady. We spent many an evening together during the lockdowns; I figured we counted as one household and we both needed the company.” Catherine stared into the middle distance as the pandemic came back to her like a weird dream she’d just remembered. “What a strange time that was.”
