He nodded, rubbing his fingers over his eyes. ‘Accidentally. That was awful too.’
‘Oh, Gabri,’ she said, her voice full of censure. ‘What mess have you made?’
‘Better to ask what mess they made ofme!’ he grumbled. ‘He looks like her. It’s the chin.’
Rosa was silent again. She’d been doing a lot of that. ‘Youlikedhim?’
‘A lot more than I thought I would,’ he mumbled.
‘What’s the problem then?’
The answer to her question seemed self-explanatory to him, but forming it as words seemed to render his fears absurd. ‘I liked him so much, I hate that he didn’t get to see the baby turtles. He ran away to watch them and scared me to death when we couldn’t find him.’
‘So you’re happy they’ve gone?’
‘Of course not!’ His throat was thick, his mind too quick to miss the point she was making.
Giving his wrist a squeeze, she said, ‘I remember a time when you were entirely focused on fixing all the problems in the world. You did find a clever solution to quite a few, before the chaos of reality got to you.’
‘Your point?’ he asked, mostly to cover the leap in his chest.
Leaning close to him, she said softly, ‘Maybe one day, you’ll take on the world again.’
As though confirming her radical statement, his phone lit up a second time and he glanced down to see a second message from Toni:
And he says goodbye. He wanted to tell you in person, but we didn’t have time.
Gabri had to admit that there was a lot he’d change if it might make Toni and Cillian happy.
33
Life swallowed Toni up as soon as she set foot back on British soil. Between taking Cilli to his football camp, arriving at work on time and the many summer day trips she was coordinating on the Dorset coast for Great Heart Adventures, there was no time to process the past two weeks. Only the occasional, panicked twinge hinted at the turmoil that was waiting for her when she slowed down again.
All her free moments were full of memories. In the shower, the minutes flew by as she lost herself in thoughts of the isola, from the forest to the wild coves – and Gabri’s house.
She was dreading the debrief with Sophie. Medical appointments kept her colleague in Bath most of the week after the wedding, which Toni was thankful for. Andreas, too, was busy driving between Weymouth and Bath, leading cliff-climbing tours one day and rushing back from the hospital the next for an afternoon potholing group.
Toni was starting to believe she might be left to recover from her ground-shaking holiday fling in her own time when Ginny Weller, the perky wedding planner from I Do with a subtlepiercing below her lips, arrived for her weekly climbing lesson on Thursday evening.
Kira, Great Heart’s blue-haired climbing instructor and Ginny had bonded over a disastrous winter wedding at New Year’s and it usually made Toni smile to see the growing friendship between the two polar opposites. But when they approached the reception desk together, Kira silently questioning and Ginny bubbling with eagerness, Toni suspected she might not be left alone after all.
‘Please tell me you can come for a drink with us. It feels like ages since we caught up and I want to hear allllll about Elba,’ Ginny gushed.
Toni pictured how they’d react if she told them allllll about her relationship with Gabri and almost laughed. She considered fudging an excuse, but her parents had already collected Cilli from football and would have stayed for a few hours anyway and it would probably be suspicious if she refused all of these requests for the rest of her life.
‘Sure. I’ll meet you at the Admiral when I’ve closed up?’
She was surprised to find Sophie with Kira and Ginny when she stepped through the mullioned door of their local an hour later. Sophie still wasn’t showing – she mustn’t be as far along as Gabri’s ex-wife, was the thought that surfaced first. Toni kind of understood why Gabri was wary of children. They brought out so much emotion that no one knew how to adequately deal with.
Ginny and Kira had already got started on a bottle of wine. Ginny held it in Toni’s direction, eyebrows up. ‘I decided to crash at Kira’s tonight, rather than drive home. We need wine for this discussion.’
‘Which discussion?’ Toni asked, trying to swallow her panic. Six months ago, they’d gathered around this exact table and performed an intervention to get Kira to see that she’d fallen in love. The similarities made Toni’s hair stand on end. She wouldnotmeet the same fate – or at least, she couldn’t afford to admit it.
‘Sophie’s wedding!’ Ginny announced, and Toni blew out a relieved breath.
‘What’s this? I thought you’d convinced Andreas to wait so you can celebrate properly when…’ She made a vague pregnant-belly gesture.
Sophie looked neither like a glowing mother-to-be nor a blushing bride. ‘Apparently “illegitimate” children are a legal problem in Italy,’ she said flatly. ‘If we’re not married, then Andreas has no parental rights unless we get a lawyer to sort things out.’
