I look down at the woman asleep on me, with her fist closed in my shirt even now, even unconscious, in case I go anywhere.
"We're not waiting," I tell them.
The house doesn't answer. It never does.
But the shutter knocks twice against the stone, the way it always does, and I choose to take it personally.
31
IRIS
My fiancée is up to something.
I've had eleven days to get used to that word —fiancée— and I have deployed it, out loud, at every conceivable opportunity, including twice to a man delivering fence posts who did not ask.
And for at least six of those eleven days, my fiancée has been lying to me.
Badly. That's the insulting part. Cat Aldridge can hold a kitchen together through a Saturday service two staff down and never break a sweat, and she cannot get off the phone when I walk into a room without physically dropping it.
There have been packages. Small ones. She spirits them away somewhere I'm clearly not meant to look. She believes I haven't noticed, which is frankly offensive, because I noticed on day one and I have been keeping a record.
"Should I be worried?" I ask Sophie, when I run into her at the market.
Sophie's grin is far too wide. "Absolutely not."
"You know something."
"I know many things. I'm a doctor."
"Sophie."
"You're going to be very pleased," she says, and buys a melon, and refuses to say another word.
On Saturday morning Cat appears in the kitchen doorway while I'm having my coffee and says, "Get dressed."
"Good morning to you too."
"We're going out."
"Where?"
"It's a surprise."
"I loathe surprises."
"You'll like this one." She's smiling, but there's something white and strained at the edges of it, and one of her hands is jammed into her pocket in a manner that is not remotely casual.
I look at the pocket.
I look at her face.
Oh.
"Something comfortable to walk in," Cat says, far too quickly, and leaves the room.
So I put on a sundress and flat sandals and follow my fiancée out into the fields with my heart going like a rabbit, and I do not say a single word about it, because I am a woman of extraordinary restraint.
I last about four minutes.
