8.

We do, as it happens, implement the formula, just as planned. I go to my house, wash and change. Buzz has booked us a table at the restaurant where we had our first date. I don’t know if there’s meant to be some kind of significance in that but, if there is, I cooperate by wearing the outfit I wore then. Dark blue dress, silver and jet bead necklace, nice shoes.

I drive there. Make a hash of parking, which isn’t like me, and get a bit lost in Pontcanna before finding my way to the right side of Cathedral Road, where I’m meant to be.

I realize I’m nervous. I don’t know why.

I’m first to arrive. Sit all ladylike at the table, while a waiter brings me a menu, a glass tumbler holding breadsticks, and a glass of fizzy water. He lights a candle with a cigarette lighter.

I watch with professional interest. I wasn’t a particularly good waitress, but I wasn’t working in the candle-’n’-breadstick sort of place. Mine was a Tex-Mex joint that sold beer by the pitcher and had a big Friday night trade in after-work parties. I took orders, carried plates, fetched drinks, didn’t mess anything up too much or too often, and occasionally remembered to smile. I did OK.

I sit there, waiting for Buzz, counting my breaths and trying to feel my feet.

A year and four months since I was last here.

Then all of a sudden, Buzz is here, in front of me. Disconcertingly strange and overwhelmingly familiar at the same time. He crushes me into a hug and smells completely of him.

‘You look smashing, love,’ he says, and I feel giddy.

We slowly settle, or I do. Buzz tells me about how he’s been. I say little bits about the course, though I’m not meant to say too much. Something happens with food. I think I’m probably a bit wooden to start with, but Buzz knows not to take too much notice. I warm up.

And by the time we’re eating our main course – steak for him, trout for me – Buzz says, ‘OK. Holiday.’

He says it in a way that makes me realize this isn’t just a welcome-back-Fi evening, it’s something more than that, I’m not quite sure what.

I give him a big smile and say, ‘Holiday! Tell me more.’

‘OK, we wanted sunny, we wanted beaches, we wanted hot.’

I nod. ‘Yes.’ Another big smile, unloaded for free.

‘Turkey, Greece, Morocco. All lovely, but they’d probably have been better last month than next month, so’ – pause for dramatic effect – ‘I’m thinking the Caribbean. Either Florida, Mexico, or one of the islands.’

I’m all ready and primed to give him the response he wants, but I’m not sure what that is. Delight, I assume, and I give out plenty of that, but I have a feeling I’m missing something. Buzz spreads brochures over the table. Colored pictures, blue seas, white sands. Men in red shorts chasing balls. Lots of women, with legs much longer than mine, wearing bikinis and smiling like Moonies.

I say, ‘Oh Buzz, this looks amazing.’ Turn some pages, say it again, or some variant of the same thing.

I still think I’m missing something, but I’m not sure what. Buzz doesn’t give any clues or, if he does, I can’t read them.

‘So,’ he says, once the plates have been cleared and someone has asked us about puddings, and we’ve said no, just coffee, except that I’ll have peppermint tea instead of coffee, and can we have the bill at the same time, please. ‘So?’

‘It looks amazing.’

‘But which one?’ He sorts out the brochures. Shows me the best Florida option, the best Yucatan one, the best island one, which is apparently a resort hotel in Saint Lucia.

He wants me to choose.

I interrogate his face, trying to figure out which one he likes. He sees me doing that and says, ‘No, Fi. I want you to choose. Whichever one you like. Let’s make it special.’

That last phrase, I’ve learned, is code for doesn’t-matter-if-it’s-expensive, but that is itself, I think, code for doesn’t-matter-if-it’s-expensive-but-let’s-not-go-crazy-now.

The Saint Lucia place is the most expensive, the Yucatan place is the cheapest, so I put my hands down on Florida and say, ‘I love this.’

He does that Buzz thing of looking into my eyes and saying, ‘Are you sure now? It’s what you want?’

I say yes, say it emphatically. And in saying it, it becomes true, or true enough. I’m lucky to have this man, who does these things for me. Who is this patient.

I say, ‘Do you remember when we first came here? What a pain I was?’

‘Not a pain, exactly …’ Buzz’s gallantry kicks automatically into gear, then hits the Hill of Truth and loses momentum fast. ‘But not easy, no.’

‘I was wearing this.’ I touch the base of my neck at the join of my collarbones. My gesture includes both necklace and dress.

‘I know. I remember.’

I’ve realized what it is I’m meant to say. The thing I was missing before.

‘I missed you,’ I said. ‘Four weeks. It felt like a long time.’

Buzz’s eyes melt and he says, ‘Me too.’

When we get home, we do have sex. First once, fast and energetically, because we both need it. Then we chat a bit, and Buzz makes tea and brings it back to bed, and then we have sex again, but slowly and properly, and I no longer feel weird at all, or no more than always.

And when he’s done, and his eyes are drooping, and I think I’ve done everything that a supergreat and perfect girlfriend is meant to do on evenings like these, I sit across his thighs, bouncing gently up and down.

‘You haven’t told me what happened to the Hayley Morgan thing.’

‘Bloody hell, Fi. Really? Nothing’s happened with the Hayley Morgan thing.’

I consider that response, but think it deserves another bounce. ‘Something must have happened.’

‘Fraud Squad stuff, isn’t it? They’ve interviewed everyone at the superstore, checked if anyone is driving a Jag when they ought to be driving a Fiesta, that sort of thing.’

‘What about SOCA?’

SOCA: the Serious and Organized Crime Agency, which handles major league fraud, among other things.

‘SOCA? It’s not big enough for them. You know that.’

I give an annoyed grunt, which coincides with another bounce, which hurts Buzz enough that he lifts me off him, making a noise in the back of his throat which tells me I need to behave.

‘Sorry, love.’

‘Do you ever sleep?’

‘When I was at YCS, my work day started at four a.m. I had to set the alarm for two forty.’

‘What’s YCS?’

He doesn’t want an answer to that question, though. He wants to be allowed to get some rest without me annoying him. I turn the lights off and give him a kiss. ‘Sleep well, old man. I missed you.’

‘I missed you too.’

It feels like the truth, both ways round.

I think about wearing a bikini on white Floridian sands. Buzz in red shorts chasing a ball, like a golden retriever after a stick.

I do love Buzz. Love him the best way I am able, which might not be a very good best. And I wonder, not for the first time, if he is simply mistaken about me. If he would not be happier with someone else.

His snores deflect the question. I snuggle down beside him and go to sleep.