‘If that knobhead hadn’t come to town, I’d like to think we might have.’
Bel looked at Dean across the table. ‘I know Emma was trying to play matchmaker,’ she said.
‘I made a dick of myself trying to work up the courage to ask you out.’
‘To think, I had no idea that was what you were after.’
‘Do you really think I needed to come into the store as often as I used to just to buy a bag of chips?’ he asked dryly.
Well, now that he mentioned it … she supposed that had been odd. She still coudn’t believe she’d never suspected he’d been trying to ask her out. Then again, why would she have noticed? Her head had always been buried in a book.
‘I sort of did ask you out, in a roundabout way. To the movie night. We were going to meet up there. But you met that Tate bloke.’
A trickle of discomfort ran through her. ‘I didn’t realise that’s what you were thinking … I mean, I was going to be there with Em and the kids.’ She winced a little, thinking how he must have felt when she’d left to go off with Tate.
‘It was my fault. I should have told you I liked you. I guess I figured I had all the time in the world. It wasn’t like there was much chance of any other competition moving to Wessex,’ he said. ‘But then that bloody wedding brought in all those Barbie and Ken lookalikes.’
Bel smiled slightly. ‘If it makes you feel any better, he turned out to be a big mistake.’
‘It doesn’t make me feel better that you were hurt.’
‘I think … he was supposed to enter my life when he did for a reason.’
‘I’m not sure I believe in any of that destiny stuff.’
Before she’d left town, his easy dismissal of something she believed in would have made her more than a little defensive. Now, though, all she felt was kind of … sad. Her manifesting list hadn’t exactly played out the way she’d thought it would, yet ithadworked. Sort of. ‘Really?’
‘Nah. I think you make choices and those choices give you consequences. Good or bad, you either learn from them or you don’t.’
‘But you don’t think that maybe something put those choices or whatever in your path for a reason?’
‘Not really. It’s the results of those choices that have a roll-on effect to other people.’
‘Like how?’
‘Take this whole thing with Craig. He made the call to get up on the tractor that day and as a result of that decision, he hurt himself. That decision, in some way, then changedyourtrajectory, bringing you back here, which then put you and me back on track. And it was all because of a wrong choice on Craig’s part that had a wider effect on other people.’
‘I guess you could look at it like that,’ she conceded.
‘As opposed to some higher power having all this mapped out ahead of time. If that was the case, then Craig got a pretty sucky part in this whole lesson.’
‘Craig’s lesson might have been something different,’ Bel countered. ‘Maybe he’s going through this whole experience so he can use it somehow in the future?’
‘I think I prefer to think of it as, I’m making my own decisions in life, not just being a pawn in some greater power’s game of chess.’
Bel had never been particularly religious, but she liked to think that there were guardian angels and that some kind of universal karma system was watching over everyone, sending little signs to help guide the way now and then. Maybe she was too naïve.
Dean was right about one thing—Craig didn’t deserve anything he was going through. He was a good guy and a great dad and husband. If the universe was supposed to be watching over them, why would something this horrible happen to Craig? And what lesson could be worth so much heartache and pain?
‘How many more interviews do you have left to do?’ Dean asked, interrupting her troubled thoughts.
‘None. That was the last one yesterday. I think we’ve gone as far as we’re going to go.’
‘It’s about time. I still don’t get this whole social media hype thing.’
‘That’s because you aren’t on it.’
‘Yeah, I am. I just don’t use it.’
