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My heart sings like an opera singer belting out the long, high note that leaves the audience awestruck, because the sight of him, here, now, waiting for me with a smile that could melt titanium, makes me want to breathe in the humid air and savour every moment of it.

But then Taylor’s words come back to me, and I break a little and falter in my step because this might not be what he thinks it is, what I think it is.

“Hey. Good day?” He reaches for me. Instinctively, I hold my hand out, and he takes it, pulls me into him, and wraps me in a hug.

This doesn’t feel like grief. Doesn’t feel like loneliness. So why can’t I get that doubt out of my head?

“Why does the shortest shift always feel like the longest?” I say, my head buried in the crook of his neck, inhaling the spicy smell that reminds me of what it felt like to wake up with him this morning.

“I always feel the same when I work on a Sunday.”

Owen loosens his grip, and I lean back, staring into his eyes to see if I can see into the future, our future, and whether there is one at all. But it’s too soon, too early to be having that conversation. Owen is grieving still, which is possibly the only reason I’m standing in his arms.

And I get it now, why he chose to give up on love, of finding someone to be with, because of this feeling in the pit of your stomach that you may have found something that won’t last. That you might have found the one person you can’t be without, yet they don’t want to share in your future is the worst feeling in the world.

“Hey, everything okay?” Owen pushes a strand of my hair from my face just like he did this morning in this very spot.

I force a smile. “I’ve just missed you.”

“Well, I’m here now.” He kisses me gently, softly, like I might break if he applies too much pressure.

I try to gulp down all the doubts, all the worries, because I have to enjoy this, enjoy him, soak up the feeling. After all, if grief has its claws in Owen and he wakes up one day and realises that’s all it was, then this could end sooner than it began.

“Come on.” He opens the passenger door for me. “Looks like rain.” He nods at the sky, and I stare at the cloud that’s settled above us before sliding into my seat.

Owen hotfoots it around the front of the car, and just as he climbs in next to me, the first blob of rain lands on the windscreen.

He fires up the engine as I twist to pull on my seat belt, and that’s when I spot her—the woman with the baby who was acting so strange not half an hour ago when I asked her if she was okay in the Haycroft kitchen. She’s standing by a black car, no baby strapped to her, but she’s just staring at us, at me, as if she’s trying to talk to me, tell me something.

I almost point her out, get Owen to look, but before I can muster the words, we’ve pulled out of the car park and left her behind.

59

Owen

“She’s certainly brought out the best in you,” Smithy says as we sit at the kitchen table, which is still strewn with plastic cups of half-drunk juice, bobbles, and hair bands.

Romana and Alice are upstairs with the girls, their excitement too much to contain when Alice walked through the door with me tonight. Their songs of Auntie Alice having arrived just did something to me that I can’t explain, like it should’ve always been this way; it should’ve always been her.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask, looping my hands around the mug of tea.

“Come on, you know what I mean. You’ve been down for the last three years. Understandably so.”

He holds his hand up before I have a chance to fight my corner, a corner Smithy has been in with me.

He saw me at my lowest when my future looked nothing but grim and lonely, darkness and solitude. He was the one who put me in touch with a support group for men who had been told the same thing as me: You’ll never biologically father a child. And even though I never dared to go, to sit and talk to these men, it was nice to know Smithy was there for me, that he was trying to help.

He was trying to make me realise I wasn’t alone.

He never told me everything would be okay or that things would get better because he’s not a bullshitter or a fortune-teller. At that moment, he was just my best friend who could see the dark place I was in and wanted to try to lead me back out of it.

It wasn’t false hope or guessing games that were going to steer me out of that wretched place, but rather just trying to live the best way I could and letting time heal the wounds Pippa and the fertility clinic had inflicted.

“I knew when you brought her round here two weeks ago that you liked her,” Smithy says with a congratulatory grin on his face.

“I didn’t think it was that obvious.”

“Come on, you’ve never brought anyone round here. In fact, I knew when you said you’d agreed to the fake-dating thing because it just wasn’t you. It was something you’d never have agreed to in a million years, so I knew she had to be worth it. I love it when I’m right.” He shakes his head, his grin catching.